India after the elections: A narrow mandate for Modi and more sacrifices for the working class

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India's parliamentary elections (Lok Sabha) were held from April to June this year. The proletariat, as elsewhere, had nothing to expect from these elections, whose outcome merely determines which fraction of the bourgeoisie will ensure its domination over society and the workers it exploits. These elections took place against a backdrop in which declining capitalism is plunging humanity further and further into chaos as its social decomposition accelerates, generating multiple crises (war, economic, social, ecological, climatic, etc.) which combine and reinforce each other, fuelling an ever more destructive vortex. In India, as elsewhere, "the ruling class is more and more divided into cliques and clans, each putting their own interests above the needs of the national capital; and this situation is making it increasingly difficult for the bourgeoisie to act as a unified class and maintain overall control of its political apparatus. The rise of populism in the last decade is the clearest product of this tendency: the populist parties are an embodiment of the irrationality and “no future” of capitalism, with their promulgation of the most absurd conspiracy theories and their increasingly violent rhetoric against the established parties. The more “responsible” factions of the ruling class are concerned about the rise of populism because its attitudes and policies are directly at odds with what’s left of the traditional consensus of bourgeois politics."[1]

Weakening of the Indian state

India's elections reflect and confirm these growing difficulties for the ruling class. Indeed, from the outset, Prime Minister Modi’s faction's various mandates reflected the confusion between the interests of the Indian state and those of a handful of oligarchs, mainly from the same region, the state of Gujarat (in the west of the subcontinent). A pusher of Hindu nationalist ideology, Narendra Modi's rhetoric is both martial and messianic, and he remains the bearer of an old tradition that was already fighting against the unitary and territorial vision of the "Indian nation" embodied by Gandhi (who was assassinated in 1948 by a member of this radicalised political and religious Hindu movement). Like Trump, part of Modi's campaign was based on the promise to "restore India's greatness"[2], referring to the supposedly glorious history of Hindu culture before it was colonised and destroyed by Muslim and Christian invaders. According to this narrative, even after India's independence in 1947, the Hindu population had been held back by the "corrupt elites" of the Indian National Congress (INC).

Modi claims that Hindu civilisation is superior to any other civilisation and should have a status more in line with its ambitions in the world. Modi accompanies his political delusions with a real cronyism, and many of those who had an interest in supporting his ideology and his party have lined their pockets, such as the billionaires Akshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani or Gautam Adani, who finds himself, for example, at the head of a conglomerate valued on the stock exchange at nearly $240 billion, and whose personal fortune has increased by 230% since Modi came to power in 2014! Naturally, the elections only served to confirm this situation, to the detriment of the interests of the Indian state as a whole.

The results of the parliamentary elections, far from marking a stabilisation of the political apparatus, confirm the growing difficulties and fragility of the government, which is being increasingly discredited. Exit polls predicted a big victory for Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But the opposite happened: the BJP lost 63 seats. However, the BJP-led NDA alliance still won an absolute majority (293 out of 543 seats). As a result, for the first time, Modi will have to govern with a coalition that is proving very complex to implement, as the BJP will now be dependent on its allies, including the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Janata Dal (United) (JDU).[3] The growing weight of every-man-for-himself, ambitious leaders and centrifugal forces will mean that negotiations for future government posts in the coalition are likely to be long and very difficult. Many of the highly controversial measures that the BJP wanted to take, such as the redistribution of parliamentary seats by state, also now look set to be very difficult, with the risk of explosive tensions. Any attempt at conciliation within the coalition will necessarily be to the detriment of another component. Thus, there is a great risk of seeing the affirmation of greater autonomy among the components, particularly on the right, with the paramilitary Hindu nationalist RSS organisation inspired by the violent and radical groupings of the extreme right in Europe.[4]

Thus weakened, at the age of 73, Prime Minister Modi is likely to be exposed to many problems, despite the myth of "invincibility" he had tried to construct and his overweening ambitions. India, like other major countries around the world, is becoming increasingly unstable and difficult to govern.

Democratic mystification and nationalist divisions

While the growing weaknesses of the Indian bourgeoisie are affecting its political game and making it more fragile, this does not mean that the proletariat stands to benefit in any way. In fact, the opposite is true, given the reinforcement of democratic mystifications. The spring 2024 elections were presented by Congress Party president Mallikarjun Kharge as "a victory for the public and a victory for democracy", by Prime Minister Modi as "the victory of the world's largest democracy", by Rahul Gandhi as an extraordinary effort in which "you have all come out to vote in defence of democracy and the constitution", and by the Deccan Chronicle [5] as "a testimony to the resilience of Indian democracy". The entire bourgeoisie is only too happy to promote this democratic mystification against the working class, which is based on the idea that democracy is progressive, that it is a remedy for all misfortunes, claiming that the very poor living conditions of the majority of the Indian population can be improved by electing another government. What's more, this ideology is accompanied by strong nationalist propaganda. Of course, all bourgeois parties promise that things will get better if they are elected, but this is totally impossible under the present historical conditions of capitalism. All promises of prosperity and democratic freedoms are lies designed to conceal the dictatorship of capital and its bankruptcy.

Moreover, despite an average annual economic growth rate of 8%, workers are still suffering from years of exploitation and appalling poverty. Yet the government demands that workers grit their teeth even harder and accept yet more attacks. Modi asks BJP workers to "make sacrifices for the country too". He is also waging a religious crusade, dividing workers and fostering an ethnic divide between Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and Muslims. The latter are portrayed as India's fifth column. Kashmir and Jammu, where mostly Muslims live, are under a kind of martial law. In the rest of the country, Muslims, who make up 15% of the population, are hunted down by Hindu supremacists. From the point of view of the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole, such a policy is completely irrational, because instead of strengthening the cohesion of the nation, one of the main functions of the state, it weakens it by fuelling murderous disorder.

Unlike someone like Indira Gandhi, who never advanced the project of making India a "Hindu nation", Modi relies on numerous militias to spread terror everywhere. So, not only does his government fail to bring the prosperity and development it promised, it also brings more instability: his policies widen fissures and increase tensions in society. In 2023, 428 incidents were recorded in 23 states, including communal intimidation, violence in defence of sacred cows, and lynchings.[6] The Indian Supreme Court rightly pointed out that violence by Hindu fundamentalists was becoming "the new normal". India is becoming an increasingly dangerous social powder keg, as the Statistical Risk Assessment 2023-24 has affirmed, revealing that India ranks as the fifth most at-risk country for massacres out of 166 listed.

The proletariat: the only real alternative

Faced with this catastrophic situation and the threats posed by growing instability, only workers, who are part of the international working class, are capable of putting forward an alternative. Over the past five years, workers in various sectors have waged a struggle on their own terrain: in the health sector, in transport, in the car industry, in the various agricultural sectors, among public bank employees, as well as textile workers. There have even been three India-wide strikes where Hindu and Muslim workers fought side by side. But the working class in India is isolated and lacks the class consciousness and experience of the working class in Western Europe or the United States. The poison of the ongoing bourgeois ideological campaign hammering home the slogan "Hindus first" (and everyone else afterwards) and the democratic propaganda that accompanies it are an obstacle to the reconquest of its class identity. Nevertheless, Indian workers have shown that they are capable, despite the nauseating bourgeois campaigns, of fighting against the lowering of their incomes, not in terms of religion, caste or ethnicity, but as a class whose interests are everywhere the same: the opposite of those of the exploiting class, and which possesses the capacity to develop its struggles on a global scale for the destruction of the capitalist system.

 

D/WH 21 July 2024

 

[1] Read the article on our website: The capitalist left can't save a dying system

[2] Modi may not have formally uttered this slogan, but it is widespread in his party, the BJP.

[3] Respectively: the parties of the new Chief Minister of the federal state of Andhra Pradesh, N. Chandrababu Naidu, and that of the Chief Minister of the federal state of Bihar, Nitish Kumar.

[4] This is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ("National Patriotic Organisation"), an organisation with a rich record of bloody and murderous riots

[5] Indian English-language daily newspaper.

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Democratic trap