Translated from GegenStandpunkt 3-2007

Another up-and-coming global player

India wants to become an economic and world power

I. A people’s rule that creates its own people – with elections and genuine Indian state power

“India is the largest democracy in the world.” This isn’t just the self-image of the Indian nation that longs for respect. The politicians and opinion makers of the Western world are also happy to acknowledge that the state there has been committed to freedom-based principles of rule since its independence – in stark contrast to the other rising Asian power, China, which has remained a “communist dictatorship” despite having changed its system to capitalism. It is reported with satisfaction that in India state power is based on the voluntary consent of the masses. This is supposed to be a compliment, and means that this rule is going well. At least in principle. And when experts from the mother countries of democracy take a look at the squalor that is rampant in this country, their praise by no means sticks in their throats. Rather, in keeping with their pre-given positive verdict, they resort to the dialectic of “although” statements which quickly turn any possible objection into an asset – for the political system we like so much: although all the poor, untouchable, hungry and illiterate people in India lead a miserable existence, they vote diligently – in other words, they are staunch supporters of their democratic rule. If that doesn’t speak for this state! And for how difficult it must be for the government to eliminate the misery which democratic India has been growing and prospering with for six decades now. Quite differently than China, where peasant poverty and migrant worker marches clearly speak against the system of rule that they are part of. The obedience of the people there can only be enforced by the lash of communist despots, because the victims of state rule cannot possibly vote voluntarily for the ruling party. Of course, the whims of political judgment are systemic; praise for the “largest democracy in the world” has the same source as reservations about the People’s Republic of China, which is ruled by “hardliners”: The assessment of the usability and controllability of a foreign state power defines whether it is good or evil. India’s democracy bonus means that the main capitalist powers are banking on their interests being successfully pursued there and that the regulatory “integration” of this emerging world power can be achieved without regime change.[1]

But this is not the role that the world’s largest democracy intends to play.

a) A new state power organizes its people and forms its will

Modern India is a creation of the independence movement against the British Empire; its leading force was the Indian National Congress.[2] It was organized by the leading elements of Indian society that had emerged under British colonial rule, which had cultivated an army of lawyers and bureaucrats, but also teachers, engineers and doctors, to handle the administration of the crown colony; and it also fostered the growth of a native capitalist class of traders, moneylenders and entrepreneurs who participated in and profited from the colonial development and exploitation of the subcontinent. The National Congress, founded and dominated by the political and economic elite, claimed to be the legitimate representative of all social castes and classes, religious communities, peoples and tribes as an alliance of all the anti-colonial forces – in principle, all those populations that the British colonial power conquered on the subcontinent and forcibly incorporated into its empire.

Having reached the levers of power, the Congress under its leader Jawaharlal Nehru set about the task of creating an “economically prosperous and democratic nation” and – according to the anti-colonial ethos – redeeming Indians from widespread misery and outdated power relations. The new leadership promised to put itself entirely at the service of its people. And at the same time, with a warning finger, it made clear the condition that must be fulfilled in order for it to be able to do this properly: that the Indians, for their part, must commit themselves to working for the new state. They should leave behind their traditional, merely disruptive differences, their ethnic and religious disputes with one another, and join forces to build up the greatness of the one and unique nation. This claim was in fact the meaning of the equality that the new Indian masters bestowed on them, regardless of their tangible social differences:

“At this sacred moment, we pledge to dedicate ourselves to the service of India and her people and to the greater cause of humanity... To the people of India, of whom we are representatives, we appeal to join with faith and confidence in this great adventure to join. This is no time for faint-hearted and destructive criticism, nor is it a time for malice or accusations. We have to build the noble house of free India in which all its children will live... We are all citizens of a great country at the beginning of a courageous departure, and we must live up to this high standard. All of us, whatever our religion, are equally children of India with equal rights, privileges and responsibilities. We must not promote narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are small in thought and action.” (Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence Speech on August 14, 1947)

For all the pathos of independence and the founding of a state – “with the stroke of midnight, when the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom and the long-suppressed soul of a nation finds its expression” – the leader of the new India naturally assumed that there could be no question of a nation in this sense, but that its creation was rather a violent business of the highest caliber. Even the constitutional founding act, which united the conglomerate of ex-British provinces and (semi-)independent principalities on the subcontinent into a federal union of states under a central state, included the division of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan, which was imposed by the colonial power and demanded by the Muslim League – and thus initiated one of the largest cases of “population transfer” in history: 12 million of the approximately 400 million former subjects of the British crown were sorted into the new state realities through expulsion and flight, with half a million losing their lives in the process. The implemented two-state solution divided the population politically into Hindus and Muslims, whereby India – in contrast to Pakistan’s religious formation as an Islamic nation – saw itself as a state with a secular ethos and therefore many of its leaders did not really ‘understand’ the secession of Pakistan, but condemned it as an unnecessary weakening of the great power India aspired to be. The battle-line against its neighbor was thus pre-programmed. In addition, India’s new political leadership faced a major internal challenge: The mixture of peoples inherited from British colonial rule, reorganized and stirred up by partition, still had to be forged into a single nation. For the task of “nation building,” Gandhi, Nehru and their companions found the political instruments that they had come to know and appreciate in the system of government of the world power England to be useful: the democratic exercise of power. They were happy to provide their Indian people with political rule modeled on the British colonial power, which had recently been fought as an oppressor.[3] Their main criticism of that form of rule was that it was withheld from the Indians, i.e. that the British colonialists denied them self-determination by means of an actually “un-British” regime. The fact that democratic techniques of rule are first and foremost democratic techniques of rule is precisely what mattered to the new rulers of the country when they gave their Indians the basic democratic rights of free and equal citizens, including the most sacred cow of democracy, the right to vote. The ruling Congress Party was convinced that it had the right political tools to successfully run the state – also and especially to forge a useful people.

The nationwide elections organized by the Congress soon after independence were a tried and tested instrument for confronting the 350 million Indians with the fact that there was now a new authority and for rallying the people to its side. To this end, the new rulers divided the entire subcontinent into constituencies, went out into the countryside, gathered the people together, appeared before them as power holders who were now sitting where until recently the British colonial rulers and the Great Mughals used to sit, and asked them to vote for them. They presented themselves to the people as a team of politicians who had liberated them from centuries of oppression by foreign warriors and powers and thus were quite naturally qualified to be the people’s own rulers, who – for this very reason – deserved support. For the first time, every Indian, whether man or woman, untouchable or Brahmin, Hindu or Muslim, Kashmiri or Tamil, was allowed to use his or her vote to decide who will run the state in their name. With his vote, he was also supposed to declare that from now on his fate would no longer be decided by his religious or caste brothers, his semi-feudal landowner, village headman or tribal leader, but by his elected member of parliament. For the political leaders of independent India, elections were something like a nationwide agitation campaign. Their aim was to “liberate” the Indians who are sorted into classes and castes, the members of the countless ethnic groups and former principalities as well as various tribal and religious communities, from their old loyalties and to commit them to loyalty to a new central authority that represents them, the Congress Party. The fact that the latter now had power and decided on the living conditions of the Indian masses, who had been elevated to free and equal citizens, was undoubtedly the most convincing election argument, which it demonstrated not least with the well, the rice bowl, or similar useful things that it promised the miserable figures of its population at election rallys on the village square. Even illiterate people could and were now supposed to draw a cross in the right place and from now on regard the distant member of parliament as a man on whom they were now dependent and to whom they therefore owed allegiance, even if they hardly knew where New Delhi even was. With the elections, the Congress aimed to create a unified people and the voluntary subordination of the masses, now ruled by the Congress instead of the British, to the new state power.

The fact that the people flocked to the polls en masse when called upon satisfied the masters of independent India and proved to them how democratically “mature” they already were in principle. On the other hand, they also knew of enough cases in which the people voted the wrong way, gave their votes to communists or separatists and misused the act of voting as a prelude or accompaniment to an uprising. Then the holders of state power proved that for them democratic elections were one instrument of power in their nation building and the other – and, in case of doubt, decisive – was their command of the police and military. With the armed forces of state power, they enforced practical submission when and where entire sections of the people did not understand that a new political identity now applied to them too and that they had to be a united people of Indians, that is, they could not handle the required unity with the state.[4] The new center, which had big plans, wanted to base its power on the entire territory and the entire living inventory, and violent lessons were necessary to clarify this will.

Especially for sorting political parties and movements that – encouraged by the new freedom – were speaking out and running for election. For their part, they were presented with a choice by means of calculated offers: Either they allowed themselves to be domesticated and prepared to work in partnership with the Congress party, which was appointed to lead them; or they would be fought with every means at the disposal of the rule of law and, if necessary, violently crushed. Because with the democratic (electoral) offensive, which was to help tranform the disparate peoples into a unified state people, the Congress combined – nicely complementary – the goal of establishing itself as the state party in the long term, thus keeping competing parties and programs away from state power. This is not how democracy was intended by the Nehrus and Gandhis: that with the constitutional permission for free political activity, a lively competition between all possible parties for government power in the new India would now begin and the Congress would ultimately even have to take a seat on the opposition bench. Elections in particular were viewed and treated as a tried and true instrument for settling all questions of power, as a contribution to disempowering traditional regional rulers and ethnic or religious authorities, as well as for excluding the political competition, the Hindu nationalists, regional parties and communists.[5] That is why the Congress elite did not rely on the good reputation it enjoyed among the masses and on the fact that they thanked it for their liberation from the colonial rulers with their votes. As the established political force in the struggle for independence, it had the power, the influence, the party apparatus and, not least, the money to give its own parliamentary candidate a decisive advantage in every constituency on the subcontinent – and to guarantee the right result with vote-buying and electoral fraud, should an election defeat nevertheless be imminent. This successfully ensured that no political alternative would emerge any time soon and that the dream of every democratic politician in the world would become reality for a while: Elections as a technique of empowerment – mobilizing a vote on the ruling personnel in order to create consent to the exercise of power free from all considerations – without the risk of being voted out of office in the process. Congress had a monopoly on government power and could rule undisturbed for the first 30 years.

That is the banal meaning as well as one of the special features of the “largest democracy in the world.” The general wit and advantage of democratic governance becomes all the more strikingly clear. In India’s case, too, elections are not a substitute for violence vis-à-vis one’s own people, but rather a confirmation of it – a seal of approval for the reason of state as well as for all measures that the ruling group of politicians implement by referring to the majority of the people. In relation to foreign countries, they give the state the credentials which, as a worthy representative of its people, as its master and servant, earn the respect of the world of states. Endowed with so much legitimacy, the Congress put its motto of “unity in diversity” into practice and carried the will of the state, which it defined in often bitter disputes between its political wings and interest groups, into society. As the unity party of the new India, it pointed the nation in the right direction and defined the essentials of Greater Indian nationalism.

b) The caste system: its disruptive and its useful side for the progress of the capitalist nation

Redeeming the people from their backwardness, mobilizing all Indians indiscriminately as a useful people – in constitutional terms: “ensuring equality of status and opportunity and promoting brotherhood among all” – and thus making them a resource for India’s aspired rise to the circle of leading capitalist democracies, is the core of the new raison d'état. On the one hand, the traditional stratification of the vast majority of the people, the caste system, does not fit into this program. This is because it sorts every Hindu from birth into separate classes, which irrevocably fixes their status and service in the social hierarchy.[6] The caste system that characterizes Indian society is the traditional way that people are assigned the social activities to be carried out, from latrine cleaners to farmers or spinners to village administrators or civil servants: it makes social chores hereditary, prescribes the indissoluble bond between individuals and functions in the work hierarchy as a social law and ascribes this caste classification to the person assigned to it as his most intrinsic moral duty – as his natural “dharma.”[7]

The founders of the state, Gandhi and Nehru, regarded the caste system as an inherited burden for their national emancipation program. As one of their first acts of government, they decreed the abolition of castes, including the “Dalits” (untouchables). However, the founders of the state also knew that castes, as the dominant principle of social organization and determinant of social coercion, would not disappear if the state declared them abolished in its constitution.[8] However, they did not become social revolutionaries who would overturn production and property relations, particularly in rural areas, and thus remove the economic basis of the caste system. There is a reason for this. The castes only disturbed the new Indian ruling elite insofar as they acted as a barrier to the political centralization of power and the capitalist development of the productive forces. Thus, by legally annulling the castes, the Congress government was above all making it clear that the modern state would not accept traditional caste loyalties as an objection to its ruling needs. And it otherwise left it to the unprejudiced capitalist calculation with human labor power – with appropriate cynicism – to eliminate dysfunctional caste structures.

It is therefore not so much due to state legislation that the role of the castes, which used to dominate all production and reproduction relations, is being eroded. Capitalist progress has a truly disintegrating effect. It is constantly revolutionizing the social division of labor and the living conditions based on it. It abolishes outdated occupations and creates new ones that no caste has ever heard of, destroying the hierarchy of traditional sub-labors fossilized in castes in order to replace it with an occupational hierarchy adapted to the requirements of modern capitalist work processes. Suitability for the requirements of modern factories and offices, not caste, is the main selection criterion that Indian entrepreneurs use for their workforce. Allowing oneself to be exploited for the profit of capital becomes an offer to all propertyless citizens – and increasingly the main source of income for them all. It is expanding capitalism, with the equalizing effect of its relations of use – as a “radical leveller” – that practically ensures that caste affiliation loses its economic significance in the capitalist (urban) centers. As a result, the social barriers between the castes (such as food and strict marriage rules) are increasingly relativized, so that the traditional varna and jati identity often only plays a prominent role in religious rituals. Conversely, neither the state nor the entrepreneurs, who apply the criterion of maximum profitable work performance and nothing else, have anything against it when castes that have become functionless open up new fields of activity that contribute to increasing profit and reducing labor costs. In this way, they live on as informal networks and, for example, emerge as a special service caste of “cart men” who bring lunch to the wage-earning masses in a city so that the employers can save on company canteens.

In the countryside, where two thirds of the population still eke out a more or less miserable existence, the caste system is not a dying relic but is still very much alive. It is precisely there that its advantageous side proves its worth. The de facto lack of rights for dependent peasant and artisan livelihoods can be used to generate a great deal of income – regardless of the system. One only has to allow “the economy,” which the state authorizes and obliges to exploit productively, to operate freely. Efficient exploitation does not require civil and social rights, and landowners and capitalists alike are not unhappy when they can draw on millions and millions of people who have enjoyed the status of servants and untouchable filth for centuries as human work animals. While this erodes caste relations in the industrial centers, the “natural” caste order remains the dominant way of organizing the production and reproduction of village communities in large parts of the hinterland, despite all the property rights modifications and agro-capitalist modernizations of the rural mode of production. Which property a person is entitled to, which jobs they are allowed to do and which are forbidden, which services they are obliged to perform and which are owed to them, which wells in the village a family is allowed or forbidden to use, with whom they and their family are (not) allowed to sit at the table at the village feast – every aspect of life, right up to the existentially decisive question of marriage, is still largely determined by the caste system. There is – for the state – primarily one catch: the fact that this traditional sorting is ‘only’ an ossified social hierarchy with a built-in moral code which contradicts the constitutional rights of all caste members – in their capacity as Indians with equal rights – becomes the source of many an escalation of the already militant conflicts between the dispossessed and the better-off or propertied classes. There are also political movements that invoke the “disadvantaged” lower castes or Dalits and instrumentalize the injustice done to them to gain political power in the state. This does bother the state, at least if it becomes an uprising that endangers public order. Otherwise, however, the political advocate and organizer of economic growth, constitution or no constitution, adds a thoroughly positive side to the traditional organizational principle of its rural society: as long as people fit into their castes and manage their survival in their solidarity within conditions marked by misery, hunger and naked violence, the caste system makes a thoroughly useful contribution to the stability of the social order.

In addition to the economic benefits that the unrestricted availability of service personnel from the lower castes brings to “employers” and thus also to the nation’s balance sheet, there is also a very special political benefit. The modern rulers in New Delhi, who are actually responsible for deciding where they want to destroy old authorities and existing conditions of use and where they want to profit from their functionalization, can at the same time place themselves above the actually forbidden ‘old grievances’ and present themselves as tireless fighters against them. It is not only in election campaigns that they have been complaining for decades that they have unfortunately still not succeeded in eliminating the lack of freedom and social backwardness in the countryside. And they promise all the more vehemently each time that they will continue the mission of liberatng the disenfranchised with the utmost determination.

Part of the Congress Party’s calculated approach to the outdated caste system was to launch one equality program after another. These reforms practice the contradiction of starting from the de facto validity of the caste system in order to soften it by setting quotas for members of the lower castes – who are to be admitted to the education system and the civil service.[9] The government is not concerned with eliminating an acute educational shortage – there is no shortage of people from the better castes willing to study. By positively discriminating against its “disadvantaged” sections of the population, the state affirms the fundamental social right of all citizens to enter the competition for education and jobs and to prove themselves in it. After all, it wants to make all parts of its people available for the development of the productive forces of capital and the functional requirements of modern rule and mobilize them in this sense. That is its offer. Belonging to one of the “backward classes” should not and must not be a fundamental obstacle to advancement in the modern professional world, even if members of the lower castes, the untouchables and the indigenous peoples are often unable to exercise their right to the study quotas in practice because the family funds and the schools available to them are not sufficient for the required entry requirements. This “problem” shows – once again – just how difficult it is for the state to allow justice to triumph over the caste system. On the other hand, progress cannot be overlooked. The fact that the quota system has even enabled an untouchable to rise to the highest state office is considered a success in the fight against caste structures. One of their own as President – that must make the millions of Dalits happy! The man finally proves that they are getting their due; as a caste, or “outcasts,” they are now also represented in the state. Not only in India is this seen as a great social achievement, without the slightest change to the economic and social misery and its caste-based differentiation.

c) Realizing the unity of people and state: unconditional suppression and calculated recognition of separatism

The new rulers, who saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of the British colonial power, had of course also inherited all its ‘questions of violence’ – open or temporarily suspended. After all, the crown colony was not a unified state territory with a unified state people, but rather a variety of regional feudal and tribal rulers formally subjugated by a superior colonial power and a mixture of peoples – including the tendencies toward “self-determination” and hostile antagonisms inherent in such a mixture. Since independence, the central power based in Delhi has been fighting for the territorial unity of the subcontinent, just like the former British colonial rule. The new state wanted to put an end to the more than 500 semi-autonomous principalities with their maharajas, which were tolerated and used by the British as vassals of their rule over India, and also to the hierarchy of regions and “races” established by the colonial rulers according to the motto “divide et impera.”[10] With its program of creating a real national unity for the first time, the new central power threatened all established power structures and political vested interests. It provoked the local and regional rulers, together with their foot soldiers, into a ‘response’ that clarified how they wished to participate in the nation in the future: The provincial authorities had to decide whether they saw the Congress’s rule as an opportunity to put their inherited power on a new footing and possibly even increase it, or as a threat to their established rights; whether they wanted to integrate themselves into the new central state or pursue resistance to their inclusion and subordination in the Union. The colonial legacy gained quite a politically explosive force precisely because of the concern to ‘consolidate’ it, and the ruling Congress waged a bitter war against the equally bitterly opposed independence ambitions of entire individual states and against the separatist movements within them, entirely in the spirit of its popular founding program.[11]

“Securing the unity and integrity of the nation” (Preamble of the Constitution) is a program of permanent violence. The Congress Party, with its reliable parliamentary majority, authorized whatever state terror was necessary for this and supplemented the constitutional guarantee of civil liberties with its equally constitutional suspension for the fight against domestic enemies. This in itself is nothing out of the ordinary – after all, emergency laws are one of the natural techniques of rule in exemplary democracies such as Germany. What distinguishes Indian democracy from those, however, is the fact that the government has not created its enabling laws for a possible future state of emergency, but is making current and permanent use of them. In order to pacify domestic unrest between religious and ethnic groups, to crush worker strikes and peasant protests, but above all for the belligerent suppression of separatist popular movements, it repeatedly places entire districts and union states under emergency law. There, the armed organs of state power, which are among the largest in the world in terms of numbers, are deployed against internal enemies. The central government in Delhi commands an army of law and order forces, the size and equipment of which is adapted to the scale of the law and order tasks at hand: in addition to the usual police forces, there are over 1.7 million paramilitary troops available; if necessary, these are reinforced by soldiers from the regular army whose explicit tasks include the maintenance of law and order and the suppression of separatist uprisings in addition to national defense. At the height of the civil war in Punjab in the 1980s, up to 40 percent of the army was deployed against Sikh separatists.

In response to the experience that there is no alternative to using the military against internal unrest and rampant separatism, but that it is often unable to bring about internal peace, the central state responds with a combination of uncompromising repression and calculated recognition of the independence movements, which are to be steered away from radicalism by means of concessions. At times, it has carried out an exemplary and deterrent massacre, at other times it carves out new union states from the old ones or gives the rebellious peoples a largely autonomous territory with its own traditional laws. Whether the limited autonomy granted then creates peace or gives separatism even more impetus, however, is very much an open question. The civil wars in Jammu and Kashmir (Muslims), Punjab (Sikhs), Tamil Nadu (Tamils) and throughout the north-east of the country have not only cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indians, but have also led to the assassination of an incumbent and a former prime minister: Indira Gandhi by her insurgent Sikh bodyguard and her son Rajiv Gandhi by a Tamil female suicide bomber.

d) Democratic progress: The Congress Party’s monopoly on power turns into competition between state-supporting parties

For three decades, the Congress ruled the nation uninterruptedly. It is India’s de facto unity party in two senses: it embodies the unity of the nation and it has a monopoly on the power to govern. The Congress Party fights the political organizations and movements outside and beside itself with all its might if they cannot be bought in and rendered harmless in this way. Democratic elections proved to be an instrument for keeping competing parties away from state power or, if necessary, for incorporating them into the Congress Party’s governments as useful majority procurers. The continuous exercise of power by the National Congress justifies its claim to a monopoly – it is the state – as well as its practice of policy clashes themselves over the correct reason of state. The battle of wings within Congress – not the party disputes in parliament – decides the nation’s path forward.

In a sense, Congress’s rule itself ensures that this does not remain the case. The program of reconstruction that it imposed on the nation also set the unresolved conflicts between the regions and the center, between the castes, between the religions and between the religious and secular authorities in motion and created new conflicts. The policy of ‘modernization’ destroys much of the established survival conditions of the masses. The constantly growing wealth functions as foreign property, which on the one hand they are supposed to serve, but on the other hand cannot, because the growing supply of a surplus, i.e. unemployed, working population exceeds commercial demand many times over. The combination of state-monopolistically organized capitalization, socio-politically flanked impoverishment, promises of improvement and violent repression escalates the dissatisfaction with the – clearly localizable – political authors of the misery. The – self-generated – contradictions and crises confronting the Indian state are also causing an escalating dispute within the country’s political elite about appropriate strategies for overcoming the national tribulations. Alternatives to the reason of state and (emergency) programs become the subject of a fierce competition for power. Questions like these: whether free market or planned economy ‘elements’ are more likely to promote or slow down the economic upswing; which foreign policy orientation (more to the East, West or independent) is good for India; how to deal with the communist opposition (also and especially with regard to foreign relations); what significance religion has for the moral consolidation of the state – these determine the political agenda. The unity of the Congress Party is being shattered. The dissident wings and splinter groups set themselves up as independent parties or join the Hindu nationalist opposition party, which in turn escalates the power question about the right way to save the nation by inciting the dissatisfied people to mobilize them for a change in power.

The Hindu nationalist movement, which is now leading the opposition Janata Party electoral alliance, has long been seen as a haven for ‘fresh leaders’ to replace the “corrupt family dynasty of the Nehrus and Gandhis.” Together with the ruling Congress Party, it also attacks the current state constitution. It denounces the reciprocal service employment contracts between the political rule and the business world it promotes as corruption and stirs up the people’s hatred of the ruling “clan,” which “unscrupulously enriches itself and plunges the people into misery.” The Hindu politicians’ diagnosis of the root cause of all the ills afflicting India is clear: socialist Congress policies betray the Hindu foundation of the state. They want to correct this. Practically, this outfit has qualified for the salvation of the nation through its decades of militant posturing as the spearhead of righteous (Hindu) popular anger. Its supporters are always ready to out and hunt down the enemies of the precious Hindu people (i.e. Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities, which are quite large in India), even without government permission.[12]

The secular constitution of Congress’s rule, which bases the state indiscriminately on all Indians, has been opposed by the upstanding Hindu nationalists from the very beginning as a disintegration of the nation. For them, the unity and strength of the nation can only be secured through the religious identity of the people. Such an identity is, soberly considered, not very far from the truth, and a specific program of rule certainly does not follow from it: Hinduism is anything but a uniform dogmatic religious edifice, but rather a wild jumble of deities that differ in name, myth and temperament just as much as the faithful people, who are divided into countless religious communities and sects with their gurus and their own rituals and spiritual customs. The propagated “Hindutva” (Hinduism) is a modern ideological construct that declares the political claim to a completely separate state, not controlled by foreign powers, to be the execution of the religiously defined nature of the people. The Hindu nationalists want to found the nation exclusively on the ethnic state basis of the Hindu majority; the Muslim minority is not only regarded as a rather inferior section of the population, but also as the 5th column of the Islamic arch-enemy Pakistan, which undermines the security and advancement of the nation.

Effectively, “the voter” empowers the Hindu party to govern. After two major famines, never-ending misery for the majority, a split in the Congress Party and two years of emergency dictatorship by Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, the majority of Indians put their check marks behind the candidates of the national opposition alliance and the various regional parties that oppose the Congress headquarters in New Delhi. The equation of Indian nation, freedom of Indians and the Congress Party, which was not only propagated by the latter after independence but also repeatedly confirmed by the voting public, is thus practically being revoked. And the former state party allows the change of power and goes into opposition.

After winning elections and coming to power in the mid-1990s, the BJP demonstrated that it had matured from the political arm of “Hindutva” into a “responsible ruling party” – as the Western media described the renunciation of the pogroms it had organized. It has allowed itself to be convinced by the “realities” of non-religious nation building established during the – only briefly interrupted – five decades of Congress rule that, in the interests of a stable social power base, it too would do well to treat the Muslim minority as an unwanted but nevertheless accepted part of the state’s population. The slaughter of Muslims by staunch Hindu nationalists, which the BJP itself was inciting until the early 1990s, is now also undermining internal peace for the BJP in the majority of cases and jeopardizing its emergence as an economic and world power. This party is just as determined to open up to a world market offensive and nuclear weapons as the Congress Party was before it. With its “Agenda for a Proud, Prosperous India,” the BJP has long been of the opinion that the source of a prosperous nation is capital, and that with the growth of private wealth and the state power based on it, the pride of the nation and its citizens in it also comes into its own. The BJP is now presenting voters with an alternative that is almost completely in line with the Congress party’s program – with one decisive modification. It too agitates for a greater India nationalism, but one in the spirit of Hinduism and committed to it. This puts into perspective – to the chagrin of its militant base – the earlier struggle against the Muslim section of the population and for “Hindutva,” which the BJP, as far as it is in office, pursues as a national-moralistic cultivation of attitudes and culture.[13] The millions of mature voters are now free to decide where they feel better off: with a party that upholds the traditional values of Hinduism, including its sacred cows, in the face of the progressive capitalization and rapid “westernization” of the country that it is driving forward, or with the traditional party of progress with its promise that the capitalist modernization of the nation that it is pursuing is ultimately the redemption of its old ideal of independence, to build the noble house of free India for all its children.

Since the mid-1990s, India has also seen the competition for power between two major “people’s parties” which is familiar from the capitalist mother countries of democracy, around which countless parties of the most diverse ideological tendencies and interests are grouped – and can generally be functionalized to form a majority = government. The escalating power struggle in India has thus added a further element of democratic rule to the “world’s largest democracy”: a modern party competition with a reasonably peaceful interplay between government and opposition. This was not necessarily intended by the founding unity party, but is now the case and is developing its own productive power for the continuity and stability of sovereign rule. The Congress and the BJP are competing to see who in the government can take responsibility for the new raison d'état of accelerated capitalization and imperialization – and the defeated opposition is ready to act as an outlet for the people’s dissatisfaction. It has the achievement of directing the anger of the masses about the state necessities imposed by the government to its party mills, entirely out of its own competitive interest, thus giving it the constructive turn of a call for more decisive leadership – and thus removing the state and its program of mass exploitation and impoverishment from the line of fire.

It hasn’t become more pleasant as a result.

e) The current violent fronts of Indian democracy: socially motivated popular uprisings and new separatisms

The democratic progress of the state power by no means guarantees the pacification of the country. In addition to the successfully integrated splinter and regional parties, there is a whole series of resistance movements at work whose militancy cannot or could not be settled by representation in parliament. The enormous successes in the rise to economic power, which are ruining the livelihoods of entire regions, multiply the reasons for the survival struggle and political rebellion – and thus for the deployment of the armed organs of the state within the country.[14]

Across the country, the state power is confronted with socially motivated uprisings by the impoverished rural and tribal populations. They are led by the so-called “Naxalites,”[15] originally Maoist-inspired splinter groups of the Communist Party, who are waging an armed struggle against the local representatives of business and violence. The state is mobilizing all the superior terror of its armed special forces against Naxalite “terrorism,” which according to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is currently “the greatest threat to India.” Social programs to combat poverty in the countryside in order to dry up the breeding ground for the insurgency are intended to flank the military offensive against the rural guerrillas, who for their part control more and more areas and have now created a contiguous “revolutionary corridor” (called “disturbed areas” by the government) from the north-east through the center to the south-east of India. The ruthless use of state power has so far failed to force the “terrorists” to submit to the imperative of “internal peace”; around 40 percent of the Union Territory is now the operational area of armed underground movements.

The cohesion of the Indian nation is also threatened from another side: The traditional federal organization of the Indian central state, with its 28 states and 7 union territories, does not possess the stability of a form of nationwide governance that is recognized by the local political class as effective and at the same time conducive to its progress. Since its foundation, the Indian Union has seen fierce disputes between the federal states and the central government over the distribution of powers and national wealth, which were often enough decided by the central power with the dictatorial powers of the “President’s Rule.”[16] The policy of opening up the world market and liberalization since the 1990s (see the following chapter) has exacerbated this dispute since a few federal states have established themselves as successful capital locations and concentrated the influx of foreign wealth on themselves, while a number of others simply remain what they have always been: Starving states that are rotting away. The dispute between the Union states is therefore of a somewhat different caliber than that between the German federal states over fair financial equalization, because the “rich” states want to reserve and expand the world market success that is ultimately generated by and for them, against and at the expense of the “poor” states whose very existence is threatened by the opening up to the world market. This is a new source of separatism for both winners and losers of the opening of the world market – and a reason for the central state to implement the old constitutional requirement to safeguard “the integrity of the nation” with renewed determination and all the means of force at its disposal.

The nation’s political class knows this very well: the successful assertion of internal unity will not only determine its rise to the circle of established capitalist economic powers, which relies on the disposable and usable mass of the people, but also its rise to become a world military power.

II. A “developing country” that creates its own capitalism – with a lot of political violence and a huge mass of people

For the founders of modern India, liberation from British colonial rule was the prelude to a powerful rise of the nation:

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance...At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and grandeur of her success and failures. Through good and ill fortune alike, she has never lost sight of that quest, forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of misfortunes and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.” (Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence Speech on August 14, 1947)

This is how pathetically one can blissfully formulate the brutal state program of becoming a compelling subject in the world of powerful states. This is the political ambition of a national elite that inherits and emulates a world power! Despite his phrases about the eternal aspirations of the Indian soul and the power of its ideals, the first head of government of independent India knows very well that his ambitious project stands and falls with the material sources of wealth that it can mobilize. On the one hand, the political economy he has already found on the subcontinent is not small: the Indian Republic has inherited the entire colonial inventory from the British Empire, the size of the territory including the country’s comprehensive administrative, fiscal and infrastructure institutions, a flourishing capitalist monetary and business system – and, above all, a huge population. On the other hand, this is far too little for the world power ambitions of the new state: the national bourgeoisie is alive and kicking, but too small, while the population is enormous, but the vast majority of them – far from being used as capitalist labor power – live in abject poverty in the countryside. Consequently, the liberated nation lacks the national wealth to make the “greater triumphs that await us” a reality.

With independence on the stroke of midnight, the economic reason of the new rulers stood fast. They set out to take the British capitalist heritage and make the masses of land and people into national wealth for themselves – as a basis for the development of state power. They got rid of the old colonial masters and wanted to keep the money and business relationships they created. They didn’t see them as a legacy, but by and large as an inheritance they wanted to build on and that had to be developed further. The new state placed the production relations and productive forces established by the British Raj at the service of national development. In order for them to function as sources of wealth for independent India, they were to be “modernized” – by a political power that, if necessary, also overturned some traditional production relations through a land and tenancy reform in the countryside or the creation of a state industry which it placed alongside free enterprise in order to ensure the national benefit of capitalism through planning.

To the Indian people, whose labor had to ultimately create the national wealth for the great power ambitions, Nehru made the social revolutionary promise in his Declaration of Independence “to bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty, ignorance and epidemics; to create social, economic and political institutions that guarantee justice and fulfillment of life for every man and woman.” Of course, the first head of government promised the people liberation from misery and the realization of social justice – it would be surprising if he were to announce blood, sweat and tears to his Indians immediately after national independence. The state’s promise to do everything for the people was, in plain language, an announcement that it would do everything for its basis: It wanted to set (survival) conditions for the people that aim to make them (more) productive – as a source of wealth for the state. The new rulers saw this, namely their work made useful by capitalism, as the only permitted and required way for the “common man” to “free” himself from misery and hunger. For 60 years, the state has been working to open up these “opportunities” to its billion-strong population, the huge army of peasants in the countryside as well as the armies of workers in the megacities, or to oblige them to take advantage of them. And it has come a long way.

1. Agriculture: the project of making a huge rural population useful by means of the money economy

a) Land reform: feeding the people on a wretched basis

Two-thirds of the enormous population that independent India had as its national people lived in the countryside; and this rural population now amounts to around 700 million people. Even the British colonial rulers put the use of the masses in the countryside on a modern footing. With the introduction of private ownership of land, the transformation of independent farmers into tenants and the establishment of an intermediate class of independent landowners and tax collectors (zamindars), they were able to squeeze enormous amounts of money out of millions and millions of wretched people for the treasury of the Empire. And they enabled a whole class of parasites to shamelessly enrich themselves from the misery of the peasant masses: Landlords who financed their luxurious lifestyles from the rents of their impoverished tenants; traders who extracted their profits from the farmers who they ruined by buying up their crops at ridiculously low prices and overpricing the means of living and production they needed; last but not least, an army of moneylenders who sucked every last rupee out of the famine-stricken with their usurious interest rates. The fact that millions of small farmers simply perished as a result was included in the “civilizing achievements” of the colonial power.[17]

The new state was faced with this huge rural population – the source of wealth and maneuverable mass of rulers since time immemorial – after achieving independence. As one of their first official acts, Gandhi and Nehru fulfilled the promise they had made to win over the miserable and starving peasants for the anti-colonial liberation struggle: They “liberated” the masses in the countryside – not from the rule of private property and money, but from being plundered by the hated parasites.[18] The state dictated a reform of land, tax, tenancy and credit relations. It expropriated the large landowners, imposed a maximum limit on land ownership, redistributed land to a greater or (usually) lesser extent and reorganized tenancy relations. It abolished the class of parasitic tax collectors established by the British, immediately took over the determination of tax levies, which were drastically reduced, and by expanding its banking system across the country, relativized the power of the private money-suckers. With all this, it wanted to give the farmers the prospect of earning money for themselves for the first time – however modestly – with the land they owned or cultivated as tenants and their own livestock, and to free themselves from misery. At the same time, by selling their produce, they were to contribute to the advancement of the nation’s economy and provide the urban population and industrial workforce with sufficient and cheap food and the textile, leather and other industries with the agricultural raw materials they needed to grow.

At the same time, the new state was thinking strictly in terms of the market economy. The aim was to use money, not planning, to boost production in the countryside and eliminate the omnipresent hunger. Production for the market was supposed to provide both an incentive and a compulsion to produce more food and agricultural raw materials: for the first time, the millions of farmers should be able to earn enough money to live on; consequently, however, they would also have to generate a sufficient monetary yield from their land and cattle to ensure their survival. The new state was thus establishing a whole new social dichotomy between the direct producers and consumers of agricultural products. Higher prices, which were to provide farmers with sufficient income, increased the cost of living for the urban population and thus the cost of wages as well as the costs for entrepreneurs who process agricultural raw materials industrially; the reduction in agricultural prices, which came at the expense of farmers’ incomes, was intended to promote the industrialization of the country and thus capital growth. The state wanted both in equal measure. And also for the rural population, which now earned a cash income by producing more food to feed the entire nation, to be able to increasingly earn money from others: old and new landlords, producers of seeds, fertilizers and agricultural machinery, retailers and whatever other resourceful businessmen there were, but also the private money lenders that were still active. The state reacted to these self-produced contradictions by intervening: The state itself largely determined prices in agriculture. For example, it guaranteed higher purchase prices for farmers producing wheat and rice, while lowering the selling prices for these staple foods through subsidies from the state budget; with subsidies, it made it easier for farmers to purchase the necessary means of production at lower prices and at the same time ensured that companies could produce agricultural machinery, seed and fertilizer at a profit. With its agricultural policy, the state therefore always counteracted the tendency for the market-based increase in agricultural productivity to progressively ruin the basis of farmers’ livelihoods.

What the state set in motion with its reorganization of production relations on the land was a poverty made useful in its own way. Freed from the oppressive burden of the colonial regime, but also far from being equipped by the new state with the necessary resources for a more fruitful production or even guided toward a collective organization of agricultural work, hundreds of millions of peasants were making a living for national progress on their traditional or newly allocated, mostly small plots of land. Their existence was still absolutely impoverished, the yield of their labor extremely modest, but in their sheer mass they certainly brought about an increase in food production. Their meagre monetary income was no longer consumed unproductively by a parasitic class, and it now formed the purchasing power for productive enrichment – for the growth of national wealth in the form of industrial, commercial and monetary capital. A major effect of the state-spurred competition was the re-sorting of the rural population into a middle class of farmers, who benefited from the land reform, and the huge mass of small farmers with their still miserable working and living conditions.[19] This in turn resulted in a growing exodus from the countryside to the cities.

The problems that millions of Indians continued to have with survival was first and foremost seen by the political power as a problem for itself: if ordinary hunger, which the masses tended to endure with Hindu equanimity, periodically escalated into famine and even a hunger riot, then this jeopardized the stability of the political order and, above all, the newly won independence of the nation. It was intolerable for the global political ambitions of the leaders of the new India if they were unable to secure food for their people independently – after all, this is the elementary prerequisite for a functioning nation. To be dependent on food supplies from abroad, i.e. to be susceptible to blackmail by foreign powers on the very fundamental issue of feeding the people – that is the annoyance that an ambitious power has with the hunger of its population. “Nothing is more humiliating for a nation than having to import food. Therefore, everything else can wait, except agriculture.” (Nehru on the first economic plan 1951-1956)[20] From the beginning, for the state, the fight against poverty and hunger was the same as increasing the yields of labor on the land to guarantee its independence from foreign interference. The success of its reforms was also measured by this.

b) The “Green Revolution”: The state develops the productive forces in the countryside and thereby revolutionizes production relations

With land reform, the state had increased the number of self-employed small farmers and also increased the amount of arable land cultivated on the subcontinent. The increase in food production resulting from the extensification of agricultural production was considerable, but still not enough to feed the rapidly growing population. Due to a lack of sufficient irrigation for the (expanded) arable land, harvests varied greatly depending on the timing, duration and intensity of the monsoon rains. After several failed harvests, famines broke out in the mid-1960s, triggering nationwide unrest,[21] forcing the state to import food and making the country dependent on foreign countries, which the leaders of independent and non-aligned India had always tried to avoid. In the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, the USA and other NATO states imposed military and economic sanctions and also cut off their grain supplies, thereby forcing an end to the fighting and preventing a clear victory for the Indian state over its “arch-enemy.” The obvious susceptibility to extortion by foreign powers on an issue of the highest imperialist order was a national disgrace and unbearable defeat for India, which must not be allowed to ever happen again.

This is what spurred the state on to another major round in the “fight against hunger.” In doing so, it would not give up the policy it was pursuing of making the rural population productive by means of a market economy. Certainly, the famines had practically refuted what the political rulers wanted to regulate through the monetary economy. But they saw it the other way around, namely that their market economy and political system was the real victim of the nationwide famine. So the newly elected head of government, Indira Gandhi, proclaimed a “Green Revolution” in order to give a boost to the monetary economy in the country and finally realize the nation’s “self-reliance” by drastically increasing food production.

The state made itself the organizer of the necessary intensification of agricultural production. It provided the technological and infrastructural means to increase productivity in the countryside, invested in science and research, and had resistant and high yielding seeds developed at newly founded agricultural technology institutes; it set up agrochemical factories for the production of fertilizers and an entire agricultural machinery industry, and also allowed imports of foreign capital in the form of “direct investment”; it expanded irrigation systems to make agriculture independent of the vagaries of the monsoon; and it organized the storage of the surpluses of food and agricultural raw materials that it expected. It pursued all these agricultural “revolutions” with the aim of making its state planned market economy more productive. In this way, the state was continuing the logic of its project of making the rural population useful with the instrument of money. That is why it did not provide farmers with seeds and fertilizer, machines and water, but with loans. With the expansion of its nationalized banking system into every corner of the vast country, it ensured that millions of farmers could buy the improved productive forces they needed – at the price of their indebtedness. The higher yields that they should, but now must, generate from their land were intended by the state to provide several useful services at once: they were intended to make the nation self-sufficient in terms of feeding the people, create profitable demand for the producers of seeds, fertilizers and machinery, generate decent profits for the credit institutions and enable the farmers themselves to overcome poverty and hunger by earning money.

What the “Green Revolution” brought about was indeed a huge increase in productive forces. The great hunger epidemics caused by drought are a thing of the past. Since the 1970s, the nation has been able to guarantee the nutritional needs of its people independently of foreign wheat imports. This required an equally enormous upheaval in production relations because the increase in the productivity of labor in the countryside was in the service of the nation and business. It produced a further sorting of the huge rural population on an unprecedented scale. The credit necessary for the intensification of land cultivation determined the existence or non-existence of peasant livelihoods. The ability to obtain and service loans divided the masses into millions of better off farmers, who have larger areas, more fertile soils and more productive methods, and millions and millions of poor small farmers and tenant farmers with their scraps of land and meagre cattle. They were now even more desperately poor because even more heavily in debt and forced, along with their families, to perform lifelong bonded labor for their creditors.[22] For many, the only option was to commit suicide or flee to the slums of the megacities where an army of those made redundant by the “green revolution” gathered. This surplus population desperately tried to make itself useful somehow. The urban business world then had a use for them – as a huge reserve army for their exploitative need for the cheapest labor that industrialization generates in the subcontinent’s metropolises. The irony of Indian progress is that those stranded in the slums make twice as much money knocking stones, collecting garbage or doing other day labor for the equivalent of 2 euros a day as they did with their former breadwinning farm work.

This also included the fact that the “revolutionary” increase in food production did not eliminate the omnipresent hunger, but only changed its character. In India, too, the “Green Revolution” enabled the state to get a grip on the vagaries of nature, increase the abundance of food enormously and free the people’s diet from the cyclical nature of the monsoon and drought by means of stockpiling. Since then, there has been no more famine as a result of natural disasters, only widespread hunger due to unaffordable food. A fifth of the billion-strong population is absolutely poor and undernourished because they simply cannot afford to buy food despite overflowing granaries – a fine example of the coexistence of need and abundance produced by violence and business.[23] And the state has an appropriate use for the surplus food.

c) “Globalized” agriculture: from autonomously securing nation’s food needs to enriching the nation on the world market

The state had now secured the nation’s food supply – including chronic malnutrition – autonomously, had huge food reserves and had gotten rid of its tiresome vulnerability to extortion from abroad. Since the “Green Revolution,” the nation has had a productive agricultural sector alongside millions of unprofitable, poor and hopelessly indebted small farmers. The revolutionization of the productive forces in the countryside has created a modern food industry. But that is not enough now. The government has a much better task for “agribusiness” than the comparatively limited goal of feeding the people or even feeding the hungry: agriculture should earn money on the world market and thus become a source of accelerated growth in national wealth.[24]

In order for this to happen, the state must once again be active on the front line – as we know, the global market is not a marketplace that is simply open to everyone. The negotiating power of the political authorities is required to negotiate satisfactory conditions for opening up the market with the other authorities. Access to the global markets for food and other agricultural products is not possible without a “reciprocal” opening of one’s own market. The Indian state had previously closed this market to overseas competitors for good reasons of “self reliance.” With the decision to enter the global market, it left its earlier reservations behind. Since then, India has been a “global player,” opening up the world market to its agribusiness, but also preparing and offering its own huge country as an investment and business sphere for international agricultural companies.

The Indian state’s right to use its rural producers is boundless in a double sense. Opening up to the world market for the purpose of exploiting the world market produces a new, higher level of use and non-use of the rural masses. In the case of a number of agricultural products, the makority of independent farmers form the reliable and cheap suppliers for a high-tech food industry which, in addition to the traditional agricultural export products of tea and cotton, opens up new markets worldwide and enriches itself. Take the example of milk: a modern dairy industry uses the miserable existence of millions of small farmers who own just one meagre cow – by accumulating their mini-yields – to produce a huge lake of milk and supposedly supply the whole of Southeast Asia with milk, butter and yogurt.[25] At the same time, the opening of the world market is the starting signal for a new round of land evictions. Cheaper competition from the USA or China is ruining the livelihoods of millions of wheat and cotton farmers. The suicides of those who are over-indebted numbers in the tens of thousands; the land refugees in the millions. Violent land grabbing and gigantic irrigation projects for the needs of “agribusiness,” supplemented by the ruination of the soil through pesticides and herbicides, over-fertilization and salinization, destroy the natural living conditions of the rural population on an unprecedented scale.

The impoverished and dispossessed masses respond with hunger riots and social unrest. For the state, this is no reason to doubt the course taken to open up to the world market – after all, the nation is making money in the global struggle for wealth. For the state, the human victims of forced “globalization” are first and foremost an escalating problem of law and order, which it is combating with the familiar mixture of military repression and socio-political support. The government launches a “New Deal for Rural India” in order to dry up the breeding ground for the growing social revolutionary movements with programs to look after the poor.[26]

The “fight against poverty and hunger” thus enters its final round with the opening of the world market. The state establishes the survival of the masses as a dependent variable of world market success. This depends first and foremost on the business conditions that it can enforce and secure against its competitors, i.e. on the power that it is able to bring to bear in the WTO and other rounds of negotiations. In this way, independent India makes the work and income of its billion-strong population a question of its imperialist credentials.

2. Industry: From state capitalist development program to global market viability

a) “Self-reliance”: The political construction of a capitalist industry that can satisfy the state's claim to power

India, freed from colonial domination, intended to create a potent capitalism from the political and economic resources it had inherited. Its inheritance included a business life that was, however, far removed from a functioning national capital circuit, not to mention an accumulation of capital on a scale even remotely commensurate with the mass of the country and its people and the ambitions of the national government – not least thanks to the colonial power’s restrictive economic policy tailored to the promotion of the British export industry. The wealth of the propertied classes, the entrepreneurs, merchants, moneylenders, landowners, etc., was sufficient for all sorts of private luxuries, but far too poor to provide a remedy. The state power itself therefore took action as a political total capitalist. With the credit that it created and the tax revenues that it extorted from its people, it promoted existing private enterprises,[27] created capitalist companies itself and thus provided the foundations for a “modern” national economy: for the development of heavy industry, means of production, an energy industry and, last but not least, a weapons industry; the nuclear sector, which is considered indispensable, advantageously serves both civilian and military needs. The obvious premise here is that an independent accumulation of wealth must be set in motion and any dependency that could lead to the country being handed over to foreign imperialists once again must be avoided. The country’s political and economic elite are in complete agreement on the protectionist viewpoint that the domestic economy must be protected against the intrusion of superior competition. The representatives of the Indian industrial and trading companies that emerged during the rule of the Raj had enough bad experiences with the protected English competition for them to advocate a leading economic role for the state and isolation from foreign competitors.[28] As the economically responsible subjects of the Indian “awakening,” they wanted to do their starving people the favor of taking them into service and enriching themselves![29] Only in exceptional cases, especially to accelerate the “green revolution,” did the government allow in foreign capital – such as the US chemical plant in Bhopal, whose toxic clouds injured and killed thousands of residents – ; it also set tight limits on commodity imports.[30] Of course, this should not be confused with a general rejection of international capitalist business life. Not least with its export goods – tea, cotton, textiles etc. – the country participated in this to the best of its ability. However, India refused to accept the role of an inferior object of foreign profit making, a dependent debtor and the resulting political extortion. It did not want to face up to the global comparison of exploitative productivity as long as it was not up to it.

The result was a “mixed economy”: a kind of state-monopoly capitalism that has been maintained for decades. The state acts as a kind of real total capitalist: It manages the companies that it sets up; it supervises banks and insurance companies; it draws up economic plans and controls state and private companies, among other things, by means of licenses and product quotas, i.e. in such a way that it binds the production of numerous goods to the allocation of appropriate authorizations; in doing so, it balances its conflicting interests in a reliable supply of its national economy at fixed prices, in the accumulation of capitalist wealth and in the survival of a financially weak small business sector which uses its backward exploitation techniques to usefully store out of the way a good part of the country’s overpopulation of rural refugess. Of course, it also takes care of the general conditions for business growth, transportation and communication.

And in this context, the national authorities also take care of their people – in a remarkably selective way. They are not concerned with the large mass of their growing urban population. As long as they somehow make a living in the vastly expanding “informal sector,”[31] they see no need to do so; as long as money is also increased in this sector, the misery is fine; and when a lot of paupers go abroad as “guest workers” in the wake of the coolies whom the British colonial power once recruited from Indian villages to replace Negro slaves as labor material for other colonies, then the foreign currency earned there and transferred home is highly welcome as a kind of complimentary gift of poverty. The state authorities take a somewhat different view of the considerable minority who are employed as a regular proletariat in the “formal sector,” in state and publicly funded industry: Here, it adopts labor protection laws and rules for trade union activities based on the model of the British “mother country,” whose capitalism has obviously done well by them. However, their most prominent and now much-praised commitment is to the development of a large-scale university system for research and training an elite of scientists, engineers and technicians. In this area, the politicians of this huge ‘developing country’ are so lavish with their budgetary resources that they are producing a considerable surplus of academics: a small minority compared to the capitalistically useless overpopulation of the subcontinent, but in absolute terms an enormous number of university graduates that is completely oversized compared to current demand. A large proportion of them, equipped with English language skills and a traditional network of good relations with the politically obsolete British Commonwealth, are forced to try to make their fortune in the wide world of Anglo-American capitalism.[32] Nevertheless, there is no planning error here. The state’s efforts to add a large number of highly educated specialists to its own illiterate masses reflect the unconditional will to advance the development of the national productive forces to world standards and the high standard of success to which the leadership commits itself and its society: India’s economy should be able to compete with the nations that have come furthest in developing their civilian and military means of power! The country’s own resource of “human capital” cannot be large enough for this.

In just over four decades of “self-reliance,” this has resulted in a great deal of national industrial wealth[33] – and a great deal of misery, which is also and especially concentrated in the cities. India has huge private corporations in the steel industry, in vehicle and mechanical engineering, in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.[34] State-owned companies operate the railroads throughout the country, the communications system that spans the subcontinent, the financial sector since its nationalization in the 1970s, a large basic materials and energy industry, and a military-industrial complex with aviation and space technology as well as nuclear weapons production. However, the immense growth of the population, itself a product of rampant poverty,[35] consistently exceeds the growth of the nation’s wealth in monetary terms – and confirms to the ruling and opposing representatives of the people in New Delhi time and again how great the discrepancy is between aspiration and reality: between the potential and actual transformation of the rule over a huge country and people into state-serving wealth. This cannot be allowed to continue.

b) The global economic test of Indian capitalism: Attracting foreign capital to unleash the production of national monetary wealth

Despite continuous growth rates, the Indian state is becoming increasingly dissatisfied. A comparative look at the successful capitalist nations in general, the rapid upswing of its big neighbor China and the Southeast Asian “tiger” states in particular, makes two things clear to the government in New Delhi: Firstly, that Indian capitalism is simply extracting far too little of a monetary surplus from the ‘natural wealth’ of the people; and secondly, that the closure of the Indian market to investment-seeking international capital is increasingly becoming a barrier preventing the growth of the domestic economy into a competitive enrichment machine for Indian state power. The example of the rival China, which has converted to capitalism and is achieving accelerated growth in wealth and power with its motto “riding the tiger” – in other words, turning the enrichment interests of foreign countries into leverage for a Chinese capital base – has shown Indian state leaders that the use of global capital can above all be a huge opportunity for a national “leap forward.” And that the associated risks must be kept under control. Compared to China’s roughly double-digit growth rates, the “Hindu rate of growth” seems downright pathetic. The government is becoming self-critical of its own work. It recognizes that the state’s development efforts and costs are not paying off enough; even the academic elite, in which so much is invested, does not guarantee high-tech business – except for foreign companies and nations. From this point of view, the fact that the emigrated scientists, as well as the traders and coolies who live all over the world, transfer foreign currency to their homeland is just a testimony to poverty.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union exacerbated the situation and the state’s dissatisfaction with its economic base. Energy and arms cooperation with the Soviet Union and trade with the Warsaw Pact countries collapsed, leaving huge gaps in the supply of the state and the economy. India had to buy replacements elsewhere at world market prices, which tore gaps in the nation’s foreign currency reserves. The payments crisis in 1991 and the rising oil prices in the wake of the first Iraq war convinced the government in New Delhi that self-reliance is definitely over. It decided that it too had to “liberalize” its economy and “open up” to the world market in order to profit from it.[36] International capital was to be imported and accumulation in the country was to be programmed for progressive growth.

Capital imports turn superfluous university graduates into a useful academic proletariat

The state is courting foreign capital. Following the Chinese model, it has set up a special economic zone (SEZ) in Bangalore. The foreign trade regime which only allows limited imports of modern technology and almost no foreign direct investment in the form of factories does not apply there. The SEZ is a unique special offer for capitalists from the nations with global economies. The government draws on the masses of ready labor power: it has parts of it work to create a perfect infrastructure for smooth business. It allows the duty-free import of means of production and the free export of manufactured goods to the world market. It waives all taxes on profits for investors for five years. This is one half of the offer that the state makes to the “global players.”

The other half consists in making all kinds of living labor power available for free use. On paper, the general labor laws apply, but in practice the owners have a high degree of latitude, especially since it is a union-free zone. The ‘scientific and technical intelligence’ department in particular is offered at unbeatably cheap prices. This is how graduates of the state education system, which was originally designed to produce engineers and technicians for the needs of domestic companies and the military ambitions of the government, have the honor of acting as a locational advantage that IBM, Microsoft, Siemens, SAP and others cannot possibly turn down. Nor do they. They can use these people and thereby turn surplus academics into a genuine proletariat: brain workers who function as a means of increasing advanced capital. The fact that this transformation works and that Bangalore becomes a smash hit for IT capital is due entirely to the business calculations of these multinational corporations. In the 1990s, they found themselves in a boom[37] that made computer scientists, programmers and system developers increasingly scarce and expensive in their traditional locations. Expanding production and moving it to a location where the required workforce is available in abundance, highly qualified and incomparably flexible, costs a fraction of the money that it does in the capitalist centers, and also speaks English as a second “mother tongue,” is so attractive that the leading information technology companies invest here, on Indian soil, and “create a lot of jobs.”[38] These are increasingly being joined by domestic software companies which have gone from “start-ups” to global corporations within a decade.[39]

The Indian government’s calculation of using special economic zones and technology parks not only to attract foreign capital, but also to create a genuinely national high-tech industry is working. To this end, the migrant workers scattered throughout the Commonwealth and the USA are suddenly proving useful, many of whom have made it to the top of international institutions, global companies and scientific institutions as initiators and guarantors of business relationships. And many of the Indian university graduates who learned their programming trade in Silicon Valley are proving to be valuable patriots of the location by returning home and founding companies that compete with foreign global corporations in the export of software and services. In this respect, the state’s investment in their training pays off after all.

The Indian location survived the great crash of the “New Economy” at the turn of the millennium unscathed.[40] In the interest of saving costs, the leading companies in the industry shed employees who were “too expensive” in the capitalist metropolises and relocated entire company departments to the high-tech and low-wage location India. The business calculations of the multinationals even ensured the generalized use of India’s special offers in terms of investment conditions and human resources: not only is software “hammered out,” but the entire range of “services” is produced on which global capitalism with its gigantic marketing system, its research and development departments and its comprehensive legal system is dependent. These include the “telemarketing” and “call centers” to which Western companies outsource their customer service, as well as the booming business of “business process outsourcing,” where banks and insurance companies have their accounting done by Indian accountants and global industrial companies have their latest products designed by Indian engineers. Recently, resourceful Indian entrepreneurs have also discovered that there is considerable profit to be made from taking over research and documentation for large Anglo-American corporate and legal consultancies.

For the state, the rapid growth of software capital confirmed that it was on the right track in opening up to the world market. It sees the success of IT exploitation “Made in India” as a considerable positive item in its balance of trade and payments, as an influx of world money that increases the nation’s wealth. And it recognizes this as a signpost for its further economic race to catch up: it does not want to make a career primarily as an “extended workbench” of the capitalist centers, with an army of millions of unqualified cheap workers, but as a “laboratory of the world” with an unbeatably cheap academic potential that produces the most modern high-tech products and services – and with extremely generous legal regulations and safety requirements that make it possible, for example, for not just American and European companies to work in India. For example, this not only makes it attractive for American and European pharmaceutical companies to relocate the research, development and testing of new drugs to India, but also allows domestic drug manufacturers to flourish.[41]

India’s capitalism is being made suitable for the world market

At the beginning of the 1990s, the government reacted to its national payment difficulties, deficits in the country’s capital growth, and the collapse of its comparatively comfortable trade relations with the former “state trading countries” of the East, with “structural reforms” under pressure from the corresponding requirements of the IMF: “opening” and “liberalization” were of course not limited to the IT sector and the Bangalore special economic zone. Overall, the state gradually withdrew the instruments of its previous economic planning from circulation. It abandoned the system of licensing and quotas which allocated production orders to companies in most industries and ensured sales at fixed prices. Instead, it empowered and obliged companies to compete and thus set in motion a huge wave of rationalization in the “organized” sector of its national economy, which over the course of the years led to the loss of up to half of the workforce in the most efficient large companies. The Tatas, Birlas and Co. in particular, i.e. the private corporations that achieved a considerable amount of capital on the subcontinent, not least thanks to state-sponsored solvency, used the power of their property for a “modernization offensive.” At the same time, the government granted foreign companies the right to invest in hitherto protected business sectors without much difficulty and acquired stakes of more than 50%.[42] This set standards for the effectiveness with which domestic capitalists are now also required to exploit their workforces, which has been transformed from surplus paupers into regular proletarians. A number of “strategic” sectors, such as the nuclear and other weapons and energy industries, remain of course closed to foreign capitalists or entirely in state hands; for the time being, parts of the transportation, communications, banking and insurance sectors also remain in state hands. The retail sector has not yet been “liberalized” for foreign direct investment either – much to the annoyance of the global supermarket capitals which have long had their sights on profitably serving the growing purchasing power of an Indian “middle class” of 100 to 300 million consumers and which, in their bold business projections, are already planning on an entire billion-strong population with its young average age as a gigantic future market – because then a huge sector of the economy, in which millions of families earn their living, would be doomed in one fell swoop. After all, some American retail chains have already succeeded in establishing themselves in the “cash & carry” wholesale market.

Complementing the authorization of foreign companies to earn money in and from India, the state has granted domestic companies the license to do business abroad according to their own calculations. First, import licenses granted by the state in return for successful exports can be freely traded between export-import companies; then exporters can keep and freely use earned foreign exchange, and later also borrow abroad; finally, the state made its rupee convertible to the extent that it guarantees its business community access to foreign exchange for foreign transactions. This in turn increases the nation’s need for the supply of monetary capital; not just for investments to promote selected industries, but for financial resources in general, which strengthens the financial power of the nation as a whole and helps it make a powerful appearance as an important ‘player’ in world business. This is why special economic zones are being designated on a large scale – reportedly around a hundred new ones at the moment – which are intended to attract foreign capital, primarily by waiving taxes and largely dispensing with the enforcement of labor protection laws. In addition, the nation’s financial markets are gradually being opened up to foreign investors. Of course, India’s ruling nationalists are aware of the danger that their national economy could become an object of speculation and possibly a pawn in ruinous financial bets, and are taking precautions: Short-term financial investments from abroad, which are predictably only calculated to make a quick buck from the nation’s current global monetary needs and requirements without sustainably strengthening its potential to generate global money, remain prohibited for the time being; especially after the financial crisis, which hit the East Asian “little tigers” toward the end of the 1990s and only didn’t affect India because the state had not yet realized the already planned full convertibility of the rupee, i.e. had not yet freed its credit money for speculation.[43] However, the import of capital, which the state permits and promotes,[44] as well as the growth rates that foreign and domestic capital in the “organized sector” achieves under the conditions of competition at a world market level, ensure over the years that the nation’s global monetary needs are matched by a sizeable foreign currency treasury and its capital requirements by an internationally respectable national capital power.[45] Large Indian companies accumulate sufficient wealth in their own country and in exports – they are also happy to make extensive and successful use of the special conditions provided by their state in the special economic zones – not exactly to shake up the world markets for important industrial products (steel, for example) and for credit, but at least to impress with their business offensives. The industrial giants Mittal and Tata, with their spectacular acquisitions in the realm of the old world economic powers, are being followed by India’s second largest bank with regular branches in the EU’s internet lending system; Latin American ore deposits are being developed by Indian investors, etc.[46] Conversely, India is becoming increasingly interesting for foreign multinationals as an “export hub,” but then also as a location for investments to supply the domestic markets for goods of all kinds, from cell phones to refrigerators, from “financial products” to savings accounts and life insurance – in other words, to conquer the emerging national solvency. The fact that India has only just overtaken South Korea in terms of economic power according to the accounts of the capitalist international is not a shortcoming or a weakness for the business world involved here – and certainly not a sign of the mass poverty that persists alongside a minority with purchasing power – but a promising start.[47] This gives rise to hopes as equally high as those in the People’s Republic of China, where the combination of an inexhaustible supply of dirt-cheap labor and a minority of “consumers” with an enormous purchasing power in absolute terms has already progressed further.

Such successes inspire confidence among India’s economic imperialists and currency guardians. In their ‘five-year plan’, which began at the end of 2007, they envisaged the – almost – complete liberalization of capital movements and the – almost – complete convertibility of their rupee. And they wanted this to be understood and appreciated by the Internationale of big finance as a political-economic announcement: They now trust themselves to succeed in becoming a global economic power, participating in global business life with their credit power and their money, by their own efforts and to that extent on their terms, and thus also profiting from an ever more liberalized speculation on their capital location.

Global competition sets new standards for rule and exploitation

Of course, India’s global capitalist success has its price; on the one hand, for the state. As progress is made, the list of shortcomings that the business world reproaches those in charge politically with grows. First and foremost, there is the infrastructure, which is not suitable for the desired turnover rate of the capital committed and therefore jeopardizes profits. The dilapidated railroad system, the outdated ports, the lack of airport capacity, the lack of freeways, an electricity supply that is constantly breaking down: all of this needs to be “modernized,” i.e. adapted to the growing needs of business. This costs money; more than the state can collect in taxes and create through national debt: around 300 billion dollars over the next five years, its experts have calculated. International capital is ready to take on the corresponding government contracts and provide the necessary financial resources at interest; always and more than ever in search of profitable commitments for its amassed credit, it has long been emphatically presenting corresponding offers. This creates a certain compulsion for Indian politicians to further accelerate the chosen path of privatization and internationalization of the location and also to open up general conditions of competition, which the state had wanted to control itself, to the enrichment interests of the multinationals – and to thus hand them over to them.[48] In this way, the state, which has always insisted on its independence and sovereign power of disposal over the country’s economic resources, is making more and more elementary components of national economic life dependent on the profit and loss accounts of foreign capital investors. It itself is the best judge of the risk this entails for the nation, and of course there is a dispute about ‘red lines’ for foreign takeovers. The new position, however, is that the government must now above all ensure that India is an attractive location for capital in order to minimize the risk that the free investment decisions of international corporations will turn against India.

For their part, they are becoming more and more demanding, the more they sense the urgent need of the national location watchdogs for their capital and credit. Their demands are not only directed at infrastructure, the removal of the last restrictions on shareholdings and investments, including and especially in the financial sector, tax advantages, etc. etc. They are also increasingly targeting the regulations for dealing with the ‘labor factor’. The fact that this is available to them in massive numbers, at every qualification, willing to work hard and extremely cheaply, is not enough for them. They are bothered by the formal continuation of “draconian labor laws” which scandalously impose certain conditions on the use, hiring and dismissal of labor power. Such intolerable social considerations must be “liberalized” if India – as the unmistakable message goes – wants to “catch up with China”! And the “populist social programs” with which the current Congress government wants to “end India’s poverty” – namely, as experienced democrats immediately see, “to sharpen its image as an advocate for the poor” – are something it would be better to give up. If it “grants one member of each family the right to work 100 days a year at a minimum wage of around 1 euro a day,” then India can never become a flourishing international center of capital! (See Handelsblatt, December 6, 2005) And anyway: “Too little courage for tough reforms” and too many “communists in government” cannot be in the long-term interests of the country! These diagnoses show how much international capital is already at home in India.

At the same time, there is at least a small, subtle indication of the price that the maneuverable masses of Indian state power have to pay for their nation’s global capitalist career. Wherever the rulers in New Delhi and the state governments set up popular comfort zones for capital in competition with each other, whole swathes of land are “repurposed” – at the expense of the miserable reproduction of the local rural population. The army of capitalistically superfluous people is swelling inexorably anyway. And the privileged minority that provides proletarian labor services in the “organized sector” is increasingly experiencing that the growth rates of capital which please its owners and the authorities are, according to the strict logic of the market economy, accompanied by existential insecurity, unpleasant working conditions, wage suppression and layoffs. This new working “middle class” is allowed to ensure that the engaged multinationals are flourishing, that the domestic employers of the “organized sector” are passing the imperialist test of the efficiency of their exploitation methods – and that their nation is making progress. Accompanied by the applause and congratulations of Western observers, its members are finally working on an equal footing with their colleagues in the centers of capital. As a dependent variable of the profits quoted on the world’s stock exchanges, the share prices, the international speculation of the financial vultures and their economic cycles, they are equally affected by the laws of the globalized profit system. For this much is clear: Indian capitalism must continue as part of world business or it will not continue.

To this end, the democratic government explains to its electorate that there is only one permissible remedy for mass misery: More of the beautiful growth – which is based on the poverty of the masses.[49] In addition, there is a very modern consolation for the masses, and it is enjoyed en masse: They can binge on practically unattainable luxuries virtually. India has a business sector that has an unbeatable locational advantage in the poverty of its billion-plus population and, through its consistent exploitation, has become a real global achievement, indeed a true “empire”: “Bollywood!” The need to forget real misery for a few “pleasant hours” in the movies or on TV is flourishing in the midst of the greatest hardship. It is satisfied by an entertainment industry for which the few rupees that it extracts from individual, desperately poor Indians for the works of its dream factory add up to a colossal solvency. India has become the world’s second largest location for film capital – after Hollywood, of course. In the meantime, Bollywood flicks with their own mixture of a glamorous world, love story, song and dance have even become a sought-after export item, bringing fame and foreign currency – another part of the success story of modern India.

III. From object of colonial plunder to major nuclear power

The first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had no intention of mobilizing his Indians for liberation from imperialism. Rather, his aim was to remove them from the role of objects of foreign imperialism in order to use them as human maneuverable masses and means for the development of his own nation’s power. This is how the Indian state wants to put itself in a position to make a proper impression on all countries so that they can no longer avoid paying India the respect it desires. The founder of the state made this known on the night the state was founded, using all the literary techniques of Far Eastern poetry:

“It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the east, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed!”

a) Liberated into a genuine Indian state power that wages only its own wars

For the nation’s political elite, liberation from colonial rule was from the outset identical to the prospect and mission of conquering India’s place at the top of the hierarchy of state powers. The territorial framework imposed by the British, which established two independent states on the subcontinent, ensured that the realization of the ambitious project of developing power autonomously would include a war against neighbouring Pakistan from the outset. The ‘question’ of who owned the province of Kashmir has been disputed by the two subproducts of British colonialism from the outset, hence it is one of annexation by force. The UN’s officially registered “ceasefire line” that was drawn through this province after the first war over Kashmir is still not recognized as a state border by India or Pakistan: Both sides claim their right to the whole of Kashmir – the Islamic Republic of Pakistan citing the Muslim majority population, India the “rightful historical decision” of the then provincial prince, a Hindu, who preferred to be part of India.

The elementary Indian program – and the first imperialist goal – was to put the neighbouring Muslim state in its place from a position of military superiority and thus condemn Pakistan’s need for territorial revision to failure. In this way, and only in this way, could India assert itself as the undisputed “natural super power” in and over South Asia. Even in 1965, during the second war against Pakistan, India did not succeed in forcing the Pakistani army to surrender and thus in withdrawing from Kashmir; however, a few years later, in 1971, a good opportunity arose to decisively revise the border on the north-eastern front, which India seized with determination: The decision to support the rebellious East Bengalis against military subjugation by (West) Pakistan and to “liberate” East Pakistan by means of a military intervention to create an independent state called Bangladesh ensured that the Pakistani adversary was reduced by a considerable amount of land, people and thus power. With this shift in the balance of power, India also demonstrated its supremacy on the subcontinent. And the fact that the Indian leadership went ahead with the invasion of East Pakistan despite Chinese threats also underlined the fact that the expansion of Indian power was aimed not least at rejecting Chinese claims of control.

The strategic appropriation of small peripheral and island states spanning from Nepal and Bhutan to Sri Lanka and the Maldives was also a result of the goal of establishing India as the clear and sole power in South Asia. They are seen as components of Indian security and given the status of useful economic dependents and prevented by all means from possibly serving as gateways for Chinese, Pakistani or other anti-Indian interests.[50] Conversely, internal opposition movements, especially those of a Muslim or Maoist character, are immediately scrutinized and combated from the point of view that they act as a fifth column of foreign powers in the country, undermine India’s monopoly on the use of violence and thus endanger the nation’s internal and external security.

At the same time, India’s expansive state-building program has attracted the attention of its large Asian neighbor, the People’s Republic of China. Its claim to leadership does not tolerate any inner-Asian rivals, which the then still red Chinese wanted to make clear in the victorious border war of 1962 – there are also unresolved property issues between India and China! – and subsequently proved by permanently supporting and arming Pakistan. According to the self-diagnosis of the political elite, the Chinese lightning victory represented a “trauma” that India has still not overcome. The suffering testifies to the high claim to power of this nation, which cannot tolerate inferiority and – therefore – inevitably has a showdown with its Chinese rival on its agenda.

It was therefore logical for India’s leadership to refer to the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964 and promptly use it as a decisive reason to mandate a program for developing nuclear weapons. The option that the declared opponent of the atomic bomb, J. Nehru, did not want to rule out when he set up a “National Atomic Energy Commission” in 1948 thus became a reality.[51] With wise foresight! For statesmen like him, it was as crystal clear that a state like India, which wants to assert its interests on a continental and global scale, must sooner or later also have the ultimate weapon at its disposal. This is the only way – in inevitable cases of conflict – to force powerful rivals who want to assert the same thing, i.e. their own interests, to tolerate, i.e. respect, their own ambitions for a power that establishes order. Clearly, for Indian democracy too, as for all bomb owners, ‘recourse to the atomic bomb’ is a matter of defending the freedom and peace that has been won. It is directed solely against the enemies of peace, i.e. the evil neighbors who threaten independent India and its irrefutably legitimate rights. And the fact that the other nuclear powers – the USA, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union – refused to offer India security guarantees against the People’s Republic of China only confirmed the necessity of nuclear weapons to the politicians in New Delhi. They cannot deny that a ‘credible’ security policy is not possible without the independent ability to deter, i.e. to inflict massive damage on an opponent, and certainly not by those who derive the right to control all other states from the power of their destructive potential. The moral objection that always circulates – especially among the opinion makers of the Western nuclear powers – that nuclear bombs would not suit a ‘developing country’ that is “unable to feed its own population” is therefore misguided and is aggressively rejected by Indian politicians as hypocrisy: The sustenance of the masses, if necessary, should be sacrificed for the sustenance of the nation and not the other way around. After all, the self-proclaimed “legitimate nuclear powers” have been demonstrating this elementary truth of state rule to the rest of the world for decades. In fact, they find it utterly ridiculous that their welfare recipients at home or the starving people and slum dwellers they care for abroad in the course of the capitalization of the globe should first be properly cared for before they are protected with nuclear weapons!

b) Non-aligned and conditional cooperation between the enemy blocs

The build-up of a nuclear deterrent potential is not only aimed at immediate local rivals. It is intended to provide the decisive means for the implementation of India’s supreme reason of state, namely not to allow itself to be politically patronized and economically “colonized” by any power in the world. Confronted with the epoch-making Cold War, India did not want to be tied into the ‘logic of the conflict of blocs’ and did not want to be dependent on the calculations of either the USA or the Soviet Union. This applied even if arms supplies and political support from Moscow were welcomed as vital protection against the strategic grip of the China/Pakistan axis in the north and the American naval power off all its coasts.[52] It rejected a world order dictated by the violence of the superpowers, by means of which the rest of the world, including India, would be excluded from the upper echelons of the competition for a worthwhile, i.e. nationally useful, world peace. India consequently opposed the policy of “nuclear apartheid” as a form of “political discrimination” against the majority of nations by the few. It refused to obey the oligopolistic regime of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as demanded, i.e. did not join it, after having pushed in vain in negotiations from 1966 to 1968 to make the NPT a generally binding disarmament treaty and in this way to get the major powers to relinquish their nuclear privilege. India was by no means “only” concerned with the principle or with equal status with its large neighbor, which had just made the leap into the exclusive club by proving its nuclear qualification with a test. It soon had the very tangible experience of how naturally the existing nuclear powers use their nuclear annihilation potential for blackmail in order to prevent wars that do not suit them and to force warring parties that they do not like to ‘restrain themselves’. Not only the People’s Republic of China reacted to the preparations for intervention in East Pakistan with clear warnings, but also the American world power: President Nixon sent an aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal and at the same time openly threatened to use nuclear bombs if India tried to “devour” West Pakistan. Three years later, India detonated a nuclear device and, with this so-called “peaceful nuclear explosion,” documented its ability and determination to take seriously its policy of autonomous power development.

Contrary to rumors, the Gandhis’ and Nehru’s peace mission in world diplomacy against the Cold War had nothing to do with pacifism. It consisted of opposition to the hegemony of the superpowers who were fomenting world war along with their alliances, which India saw as a restriction on itself and more (in the case of the USA) or less (in the case of the SU) a threat to its liberation. That is why this third-world nation, as large as it is ambitious, took it upon itself to organize a movement of “non-aligned” states between and against the two system blocs. In doing so, it wanted to defend itself from being instrumentalized by hostile world powers and, through a broad alliance of the less powerful, to command the respect that they otherwise lacked. The newly created status of non-alignment stood for a formal neutrality of the participating states, which for the majority of them was not much more than a diplomatic pretense that took precedence over practical relations of dependency on one superpower or the other. For India as a leading nation, however, the conglomeration of non-aligned states at least granted it a formal gain in status: it acted as an appellate body and, in terms of numbers, an immensely large faction of votes at the UN General Assembly. The nuclear bomb capability and the “fight against nuclear apartheid” underpinned the moral reputation that India enjoyed in the Third World. However, even this was in no way sufficient to establish material dependency, i.e. exploitation and supremacy, vis-à-vis the assembled neutrals, as India was far from being able to provide security guarantees to the more or less powerless states from the world powers and thus counter the hostile global political camps with the real power of an alternative third bloc.

Below the UN diplomatic level of struggling for cross-bloc recognition, the ‘realpolitik’ strategy of the Indian state leadership was to exploit the interests of the Cold War parties in India as much as possible. For example, it received economic development aid from the West and trade goods, modern weapons, and certain alliance benefits from the Soviet Union; and, quite unironically, elements from both sides for its universally disapproved of nuclear program: the Tarapur nuclear station, including the necessary spare parts, from the USA and heavy water from the Soviet Union. In this way, the nuclear arms project was set in motion with the help of the rival superpowers. On the other hand, the policy of exclusion and sanctions, with which the West in particular reacted to India’s violation of the nuclear regime, led to bottlenecks in the entire nuclear sector and to a certain restraint (“strategic ambiguity”) in the expansion of the military sector: this took place covertly, further tests were avoided for a while; there was no political use for the growing number of warheads; and there was certainly no gain in an order establishing status.

c) After the Cold War: Determined to rise independently in the unipolar capitalist world

With the peaceful capitulation of the Soviet Union to the superiority of the capitalist system of exploitation, the political rules of procedure for India’s policy of non-alignment and use of the bloc were also over. On the one hand, the nation’s leaders had to acknowledge a certain “security vacuum,” as they lost their most powerful ally with the disintegration of the real socialist East. Some of them therefore publicly welcomed the attempted coup by the Russian military against the perestroika president Gorbachev. On the other hand, India, like other states, saw the end of the confrontation between blocs and dependence on its conjunctures, as well as the end of the constant threat of world war, as an opportunity for the rise of the nation. India wanted to make the transition from being the representative of the underprivileged third world states to a powerful player among the potent state powers, all of which felt compelled and free to fight for the redistribution of power.

India thus faced up to the ‘new situation’: the loss of arms and security policy support, the collapse of trade run on a settlement basis, the imperatives of the now globalized capitalist world market and the totalitarian claim to leadership of the only remaining world power, which wants to transform the wealth of nations into a permanent source of American enrichment and bind foreign rulers to the guidelines of the ‘only remaining’ American world power. The sudden compulsion to conduct all international trade in a capitalist manner, i.e. to have to pay for Russian raw materials and armaments with real money, the acute payment crisis caused by this and the dependency on international credit sealed as a result of this, gave India an external constraint for what was in its program for a long time anyway: the opening of the country to international capital. Of course, the decision to make the national location fit for Indian world market offensives did not amount to a passive adoption of the ‘valid rules’ and commandments that the proven beneficiaries and guardians of the now globalized business system prescribe to the rest of the world. The equation they demanded, that the license to use the universally available sources of wealth must naturally go hand in hand with political subordination to the licensors, was rejected. Its own interests and conditions were asserted; and in part successfully, because and to the extent that foreign speculation on the “billion-dollar market India,” i.e. the profitable exploitation of the labor and mass purchasing power there, also accepts certain restrictions. India also demanded that the global economic powers abandon their protectionist practices, the sealing off of domestic markets and the subsidization of (agricultural) export goods. In alliance with other “emerging economies,” it sometimes rejected world trade rounds rather than bow to the liberalization demands of the USA and Europe.

India’s claim to the status of a recognized global political subject is all the more incompatible with a renunciation of sovereignty at the decisive level of competition between states: that of the military balance of power. The reaffirmation of the nuclear weapons oligopoly of the five official nuclear powers during the renegotiation of the NPT; the rejection of the protests of states such as India; the program launched by the USA to tighten the nuclear regime, which was intended to ensure the exclusion of non-nuclear states from acquiring the “ultimate weapons” by means of sanctions and war; the corresponding demands on India to give up its nuclear program and sign the NPT[53] – all this proved to India’s leaders that they must not bow to “nuclear apartheid” if their national interests are to be respected. India’s ‘equal right’ – vis-à-vis the United States and other powers – to safeguard its interests with its own military force has never been an option for India’s leaders. It is all the more non-negotiable if India defines its interests as reaching worldwide and wants to assert its role in responsibility for the global order of competition. For the Indian government, it went without saying that such an intrusion into the established imperialist hierarchy inevitably amounted to contesting the political ‘vested rights’ of the traditional great powers, as did the conclusion that the realization of its own power ambitions stands and falls with its ability to muster the potential for military blackmail. The expansion of one’s own military power is therefore the overriding task that both government and opposition parties prescribe for their state. One thing is clear to everyone: only its own nuclear forces can guarantee the ability to take seriously its claim to world power.

This means that research and development is no longer carried out in secret, and nuclear warheads and missiles are no longer just built. India has decided to show the world that it has a powerful nuclear potential – because it wants to use this potential to make global policy from now on. The Indian government does not shy away from a risky demonstration of strength, which represents a provocation to its large neighbor, the People’s Republic of China, but above all to the USA, which ultimately wants a nuclear world war monopoly: India, despite all the warnings and threats of sanctions from Washington, put on an “impressive series” of powerful nuclear tests in 1998 and moved on to regular demonstrations of missiles with increasing ranges. After all, nuclear war emancipation naturally includes ballistic delivery systems that guarantee a credible global deterrent in the first place, as well as a satellite program that enables the necessary reconnaissance and precise tracking of the deadly missiles under its own control. Thus, at the highest level of competition for the use of force, it made clear that India cannot exclude itself from the means of mass destruction that others diligently regard as their higher right to possess. And thus India also acts as a revolutionary element against a world order that not only the USA considers to be in great need of improvement.

In addition to nuclear weapons, India is making itself strong as a military power in all ‘conventional’ departments. Its political elite demonstrates that a catching-up imperialism like India’s is not only diligently learning from its standard-setting role models when it comes to the atomic bomb, but also in asymmetric modern warfare.[54] In any case, the largest democracy has no shortage of human manpower for a huge machinery of violence; and it goes without saying that the poverty of the working classes should not only be made useful for the profit of private property, but also for the power of its political guarantor – at least for the elected representatives of the people, regardless of which party banner they feel committed to.

d) How India is enriching the newly opened competition for influence and the reach of (inter)national supervision

India wants to conquer “its place” among the leading superpowers. Its rejection of the first Iraq War in 1991 and the American campaign to create a “New World Order” that it heralded was also a statement: India opposes “every hegemonic ambition,” i.e. the USA’s program of using overwhelming force to enforce something like an American monopoly on world order. On the world diplomatic stage, the “world’s largest democracy” follows the formula of America’s rivals to power and advocates a “multilateral world order.” The political class in New Delhi thus makes it clear that India wants to enter the picture as one of its framers: it claims general recognition for its country as a major power sharing responsibility for the global competitive order. It demands a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, i.e. the promotion of India to one of the leading nations responsible for deciding on war and peace in the world. It wants to decide on the rights and duties of the “international community of states” on an equal footing with the five Council members who, as nuclear powers, have qualified for the political status of a world power. In order to assert this claim, resources and allies must be mobilized. This is one of the reasons why Indian politicians pushed ahead with the development of nuclear power and decide on the public demonstration of the acquired capabilities. India no longer wants to and can no longer present itself as a more or less virtual nuclear power, because it wants to use the credible material availability of the greatest means of destruction as leverage and credentials for joining the elite club of recognized world leaders. And it reinforces its demand for “a few” to stop discriminating against India’s possession of nuclear weapons and finally grant the country the status of a legitimate nuclear power and include it in the club of the few.[55] It allied itself with Germany, Japan and Brazil to form a gang of four, which put pressure on the Security Council “to adapt to the new circumstances” – initially in vain, as the existing veto powers clung to the exclusivity of their special rights.

India has reservations about the relativization of international law enforced mainly by the USA – which particularly likes to invoke the irrefutable primacy of human rights – and the resulting redefinition of the UN’s criteria for military deployment. If the Americans and their NATO allies only show respect for the sovereignty of states when the respective rulers are committed to “good governance,” the Indians see this – not without justification – as a license for political and economic blackmail, including the military subjugation of unpopular states that refuse to serve and submit to the USA as demanded. They are particularly opposed to “humanitarian interventions” such as those in favor of East Timor and the NATO “campaign” to “protect the Kosovars” from the “Milosevic regime,” which pave the way for political separatism, and point clear-sightedly to the selfish interests of the self-appointed Western freedom fighters. This is because they see themselves as potential victims of this type of ‘protection of minorities’, knowing full well that the human rights weapon can also be used against India if necessary, because the latter categorically refuses the old UN demand for a referendum in Kashmir. India also denied the right of the Americans and British to “liberate” Iraq and criticized the degradation and instrumentalization of the UN for a “unipolar” world order policy. So there is no doubt about what India wants from and through the UN. It wants to have a say in all questions of war and peace, of right and wrong in the inter-state and internal use of power, including the criteria for legitimate sanctions and interventions. And with itself as a new member in the highest rank of world leaders and with like-minded partners, it wants to ensure that the UN is ‘upgraded’, making it more difficult for the American superpower to go it alone. After all, the diagnosis that the traditional “structure” of the United Nations “does not adequately reflect” the current balance of power in the competition between states is aimed at changing it in its own favor.

*

India’s claim to be recognized as a legitimate nuclear power is actually confirmed a good thirty years after the first nuclear test. The world power USA ends its policy of ostracism and embargo against the country and grants it the right to a military nuclear program. Of course, this does not happen as a result of a belated insight or as the result of a formal diplomatic negotiation process in the UN or one between India and the club of nuclear states, but – a fine imperialist example – due to a new strategic calculation by the Americans following a real war scenario in which the Indian military power got involved without being asked, but was all the more challenging for this reason.

The starting point was the first stage of the USA’s war on terror. The direct response of the world power USA to the airplane attacks of September 11, 2001 became a direct challenge for India. America attacked the northern neighboring state of Afghanistan and established itself with its armed forces in Central Asia. Not that the Indian leadership had anything against the war on “Muslim terrorism.” On the contrary, this fight was the object of their equally assured solidarity with the USA, as India itself was being threatened by Muslim terrorism according to its own definition, because its evil neighbor Pakistan was sending its holy warriors to Kashmir and Indian cities. And that is why the government in New Delhi was very much in agreement with the violent removal of the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban government. It even offered Indian territory as a base for American war operations. However, the fact that the USA was once again forcing and promoting its arch-enemy Pakistan into the role and status of a US ally (namely the most important one in terms of cases) caused the utmost concern: the neighbor, which was intent on a violent revision of the borders at India’s expense and was therefore fuelling the holy war, was suddenly being upgraded to an anti-terrorist ally of the USA – i.e. protected and armed! India would not and could not accept this. It stepped up to the plate to protect its interests and unmistakably confronted the world power USA with the decision as to how it intended to deal with India’s interests. It threatened to cause a major disruption to the war scenario around Afghanistan which was being prepared and controlled by the USA: Following a series of terrorist attacks in 2001/2002, the Indian government mobilized militarily on a grand scale against the so-called Pakistani “backers” (i.e. the Pakistani army and its ruling general) of the Kashmiri Muslim “freedom fighters” – and thus signaled its readiness for a heated escalation of the conflict with the reactivated US ally Pakistan, which has always been fraught with nuclear weapons.

The calculation worked to a certain extent. The USA wanted to do both: secure Pakistan’s military services and “integrate” India as a major power factor, i.e. bring it under control and make it usable for its current and future war fronts – especially in Asia. India was to be positioned and developed as a “counterweight,” i.e. as a powerful instrument against the designated main rival of the world power USA.[56] New Delhi received the offer of a comprehensive strategic partnership.[57] It included recognition of India as a nuclear power, promotion of the civilian nuclear industry, and the military armament of the country.[58] This was very much in India’s interest and was seen as a decisive global political breakthrough as well as proof of the strength and importance of its own nation. However, the offer came at a price. America demanded that the civilian division of India’s nuclear program – yet to be declared – be placed under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and that it submit to the political conditions of the – American – supplier. It wanted to turn India’s voluntary nuclear test moratorium into a permanent obligation for the still underdeveloped nuclear state and thus permanently hinder the progress of its nuclear weapons development. And it only wanted to supply modern nuclear technology and the necessary nuclear fuel if it didn’t benefit the expansion of the bomb arsenal. Enrichment of the transferred uranium and reprocessing of the spent fuel rods were only to be permitted if they took place in a yet-to-be-created “building facility” under permanent IAEA control, i.e. exclusively and verifiably for the civilian purpose of energy production; otherwise the sender could demand the return of the technology and the fuel rods.[59] And of course the partnership offer included the urgent and by no means merely tacit expectation of the world power that India will constructively integrate itself into the American world order “efforts” and not strengthen an enemy state such as Iran through energy development and purchase agreements (worth 40 billion dollars) or even military cooperation (including the use of Persian military bases and joint training). This made the US offer a very double-edged sword for India. As a result, the partnership agreement was highly controversial among the country’s political elite; its opponents warned that India’s supreme reason for being, its independence and sovereignty, was being sacrificed. As a result, the “historic nuclear agreement” was only signed by the government after two years of “controversial negotiations” (US statement). Remarkably, the American side did so with the explicit reservation that the “agreement can be terminated immediately” if India decided to conduct another nuclear test; while the Indian side, conversely, emphasized that the freedom to conduct nuclear tests was not affected by the agreement at all. In any case, the Indians insisted that, as an equal nuclear power, they retain free decision-making and control over the goals and means of their military power.[60]

The envisaged partnership is an impressive example of how imperialists calculate with the conflicting interests of their competitors. The strategic alliance with the global power is intended to strengthen Indian power and bring India closer to the goal of becoming a global power on an equal footing with the USA; however, the superior partner links the promised advantages to the calculation that India can be instrumentalized for the global security needs of the USA. The question of how much consideration India can enforce for its own interests will be decided in a practical comparison of power.

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India wants to strengthen the freedom to assert its interests in Asia and worldwide. Alliances should serve this purpose and not establish one-sided dependencies in the decisive means of sovereignty. This is why India – especially since its prospective partnership with the USA – is keen to develop or further develop ‘common ground’, i.e. useful cooperative relationships, with the powerful competitors of the USA. All of these partnerships, which are usually described as “strategic,” are characterized by a peculiar and fundamental contradiction. India is seeking alliances with these nations, which are motivated not least by anti-American sentiment, on the basis of a positive relationship with America that is to be expanded in the future and on the premise that the Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and Russians are also interested in constructive relations with the USA: They are intended to slow down the sole superpower. These countries have made enough offers of partnership, firstly because they are up to the same thing, and secondly because the fact that the USA is intending to use India for its strategic needs, and thus upgrading it, stimulates the competition among them to present India with attractive prospects on their own side. And for the time being, India is not turning down any of the offers. It is virtually the strategic ideal of the Indian nation to avoid committing itself to one alliance that makes it vulnerable to blackmail by maintaining relations with all its powerful competitors. Of course, the effort to exploit the competition between the great powers, which are looking for allies against each other, is not an original Indian invention. After all, that is what everyone wants.

– For example, India is repeatedly faced with Russia’s request to create something like a Russia-India-China axis that can effectively contest America’s role as a militarily aided Asian superpower. India partially joins by helping build up diplomatic counter-positions against the USA’s anti-rogues policy,[61] concluding long-term energy supply contracts with Moscow and taking up nuclear and arms technology offers. Under President Putin, Russia has once again become India’s most important weapons supplier; among other things, it wants to provide two submarines and four Backfire bombers that can be equipped with nuclear weapons.

– India thus supplements its efforts to counter the “Chinese threat” with nuclear weapons and US support with a policy of détente with the People’s Republic of China. Where possible, it wants to make China’s economic growth productive for its own growth. New business spheres are conquered through the export of commodities and capital – e.g. through “software meets hardware.” Strategic cooperation is intended to complement the competition between the two “resource hungry” growth giants: According to the latest agreement, the development and exploitation of energy resources – in Asia and elsewhere – should no longer be carried out against each other, but with each other, in order to better defend and assert themselves against the established supervisory power over the global oil and gas business, the USA. India’s recognition as a maritime power is promoted by joint maneuvers with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea; the growing range of its militarily operational area is intended to slowly but surely change the strategic balance of power to the detriment of the previously unrivalled naval power, the USA. India’s willingness to expand bilateral cooperation, which China for its part values as a means of “peaceful progress” – in plain language: to counteract the American interest in its encirclement, but also to expand its lead over India! – leads to a weakening of the Sino-Pakistani alliance.[62] India can chalk this up as a partial strategic success. And for the time being, both sides have sufficient reasons to downgrade their territorial conflicts.

– At the same time, India takes advantage of the opportunities it is offered to benefit from Japan’s anti-Chinese “balance of power” policy. This not only concerns extended access to the Japanese market and some ‘development aid’. Japan also wants to position India as a counterweight to China in order to make headway in the intensified competition for leadership in East Asia, and is therefore giving the imperialist newcomer access to key regional alliances (such as ASEAN-Plus and the East Asia Summit). And the island nation’s overriding interest in securing sea routes to the Persian Gulf, i.e. under its own control, becomes an opportunity for the Indians to once again expand the scope of useful military cooperation, in this case with the state-of-the-art Japanese navy.

– Finally, the European Union, which is now also making efforts to attract the new South Asian heavyweight, is one of India’s most important trading partners and a significant source of capital inflow. Offers to participate in strategically important “high technology” projects attract particular interest: India wants to participate in Galileo (the European rival project to the GPS satellite navigation system which has so far failed to get off the ground due to the competitive zeal of its dear partners) as well as in ITER (an international nuclear fusion project). All the governments in New Delhi categorically reject attempts at political paternalism from Brussels: when the EU wrote political conditions (namely clauses demanding respect for human rights and restraint with regard to weapons of mass destruction) into the bilateral free trade agreement envisaged by both sides, India said no and opted for “realistic corrections.” In any case, the Indians are keen on mutual coordination in global political conflicts and within the framework of “international institutions” in order to assert complementary – often anti-American – interests more effectively.

If India’s plan to strengthen itself through cooperation and alliances with the rival capitalist superpowers is currently working out to some extent, this is not due to the special skill of the ruling statesmen in securing advantages from all sides through “multilateral” tactics. Rather, it is due to the calculations of the powers in the first league of imperialists, who for their part are counting on – and indeed competing for – the “world power of the future,” i.e. its economic and military upswing, to be productive for themselves. Because and as long as “the big players” see India above all as a potential and very potent ally against their main competitors, India is a major beneficiary of the ongoing reshuffling of the world of states: “India, along with China, is the winner of the last decade.”[63] However, the “secret of success” of the Indian state – that it is increasingly attractive to others – has a catch. After all, the friends who are currently “courting” India want to see (alliance) achievements and not a new powerful competitor and/or ally of their imperialist rivals. The more they intensify their competition with each other, the more India is forced to make a decision – between the expectant partners, i.e. for the one and against the other. Moreover, to the chagrin of the Indians, the established powers that want to functionalize the country for themselves through partnerships repeatedly form a common front in the WTO, UN or elsewhere and make it clear to the newcomers that they must abide by rules of order that only they are authorized to set.

*

Finally, India is increasingly making an impact as an economic and strategic competitor of the leading world powers. With the end of the ‘bipolar world order’ and the decision to prove itself in the midst of and through the now one capitalist world, the former leading nation of the non-aligned nations is also putting its relations with the states of lesser caliber on a new footing. It is resolutely setting about replacing the merely formal and negative political commonality as – at least ideally – neutral sovereigns with real imperialist cooperative relationships. It uses its “soft means of power,” its economic potential, as well as its hard means, its military capacities and the “political weight” that this gives it, in order to create dependent relations with the authorities of nearby and more distant regions which are useful economically and in terms of energy and security policies.

The program operates under the title of responsible global politics – as is customary among states that want to expand their access to and influence over foreign sovereignties: India wants to “promote an ever-expanding zone of peace and stability around itself.” The countries in South East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East are the first to be targeted. In the meantime, however, Africa (where India now acts as a provider of ‘development aid’) and Latin America are also among the continents on which India’s global claim to co-determination has to prove itself. The specific economic offers (from cheap food to software specialists and capital investors for oil fields) are used as a strategic means of exerting greater influence on the political will, business and security policy orientations of the various countries. This is particularly true with regard to the countries of the “2nd ring,” as the not-so-near abroad is called, which are interesting due to their sources of raw materials and/or geopolitical situation. The “neighbors of India’s immediate neighbors” ruling there are to be integrated and “promoted” in order to stand up to the latter – meaning Pakistan and China – in their similar efforts for regional supremacy. In such acts of friendship, the diplomats from New Delhi can not only invoke the millions of Indian minorities who have gathered in these countries; they can also use them as a lever of influence, as they often play a significant ‘economic role’ in the countries concerned. Seen in this light, the mass emigration of surplus Indians has already paid off for their state. In terms of security policy, the focus of interest is on the states on the opposite coasts of the Indian Ocean, which is claimed to be an original Indian possession, as well as the countries bordering the South China Sea. Military cooperation is being stepped up with these countries in particular in order to make successively expanded (maritime and other) areas of vital interest accessible to its own military and to counter China’s strategic expansion, but also to reduce the dominance of the omnipresent superpower USA.

In their efforts to create zones of Indian influence, all the known “techniques” of international competition are used. This also includes politicians in New Delhi trying to turn the country’s imperialist innocence into an advantage for establishing business and military relations, i.e. for the imperialist entry and rise of the Indian nation. They set themselves apart from the patronizing nature of the “old” world powers by emphasizing that their foreign policy is free of “missionarism” in terms of “human rights” and “good governance,” but full of respect for the sovereignty of the respective partner. And in fact, upholding “non-interference in the internal affairs” of foreign rulers is not just a calculated diplomatic lie, but in one respect a thoroughly serious, i.e. practised, standpoint: India’s policy of developing and maintaining useful business and military relations does not adhere to the sorting of states into friend and foe that the established world powers, the USA and its NATO allies, have preconceived or adopted. It repeatedly undermines the ‘officially’ valid discrimination resolutions against unpopular “problem” and “rogue states” or “dictatorships”; indeed, it exploits the isolation and boycotting of such states to build up positions of wealth and power for India. This is because the states in question do not perceive India’s offers of cooperation as a threat to their internal power base, but rather as a prospect to maintain it. America’s vassals receive offers to “diversify” their dependencies. America’s villains are offered alternatives to Western blackmail and threats, because they are not India’s villains. India sorts the world of states according to its own criteria. Thus, the global political climber from South Asia enjoys its good, because nationally useful, relations with the state of Israel (which supplies state of the art military technology) as well as with its and/or America’s enemies, whether they are called Iran, Syria and North Korea, Sudan or Myanmar.

If India claims the right to disregard the order of force in this way, which the authors of “globalization” shape according to their needs and decree as binding, then it is permanently challenging these rulers. Conversely, India – the more successfully it advances, the more it sees itself affected by all economic and warlike offensives and power shifts on the globe, i.e. also challenged. Every American intervention in the Middle East, every European energy partnership with Russia and every Chinese emissary in Africa now raises the question in New Delhi as to where the interests of its own nation lie. The post-Cold War competition between state powers for influence and control over and against each other is creating many cases in which India has to prove its suitability as a great power. This is certainly not a contribution to defusing all the fronts of global competition.

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[1] Germany’s international political scientists are also outspoken admirers of the country. They congratulate Indian democracy on its 60th birthday because it is so beautifully “stable,” even though “the conditions for democratic development were by no means ideal” (Informationen zur politischen Bildung: Indien, Heft 257, p. 2). They then set themselves the task of understanding “India's greatest mystery: How is it possible that such a huge, poor country with such internal tensions can function as a democracy?” (Müller, Harald: Weltmacht Indien, p. 133). And how do they then solve their riddle? With the surprising answer that obviously the same thing that produces instability here in Germany is a guarantee of stability over there in India: “from a German perspective, a national parliament with more than forty parties is a hotbed of instability and volatility. For Indian society, however, it is probably the appropriate representation with the most promising guarantee of stability.” (ibid., p.165) In any case, democracy in India is guaranteed stability as long as stability is guaranteed, the experts are quite sure of that!

[2] The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 by Indian intellectuals and businessmen; its program was the self-administration of the British Crown Colony. The indigenous Anglicized elite were particularly offended that they were excluded from the higher civil service. The National Congress opposed the colonial power’s practice of allowing Indians to study at English universities or at British administrative schools in India in order to then use them as lawyers and bureaucrats for the colonial administration as “un-British rule in India,” as a violation of the mother country’s very own democratic principles; it also opposed the plundering of wealth, the economic “drain on wealth” by the colonial power, which was at the expense of Indian traders and entrepreneurs and which caused the misery of the Indians. The independence movement gained momentum after the First World War: in return for the military service of one million Indian soldiers under the flag of the colonial power; it demanded at least “dominion status,” i.e. the kind of independence granted by the British Empire to Australia or Canada. It was denied this by British India policy, which between the world wars pursued the dual strategy of limited rights to self-government – concessions to the independence movement in order to perpetuate its own supremacy over the subcontinent – and the suppression of all demands for full independence. The actions of the National Congress under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawarharlal Nehru, the policy of “non-cooperation” (boycotting British goods, especially from the textile industry, refusing to pay the salt tax, strikes and civil disobedience) and the “Quit India” campaign turned the administration of the British Crown Colony into a permanent question of order, increasing the costs of military control of the country and reducing the returns from its economic use – a permanent burden for the colonial power, which emerged from the Second World War as a rather battered victorious power, even in debt to its own crown colony. The National Congress was supported by the victorious powers, the USA and the Soviet Union, both of which were in favor of decolonization for opposing reasons; the USA calculating that the colony, which had previously been exclusively available to the mother country in terms of world politics and economics, would be opened up for use by its superior world power and its profiteers, the Soviet Union with the strategy that an independent India would weaken the imperialist camp. The British colonial power finally bowed to pressure from the USA, which feared that Britain’s opposition to independence would drive the Indian National Congress into the clutches of Moscow, and granted the crown colony independence in 1947. It gave the Congress Party rule over the larger part of British India, while the Muslim League, which insisted on a separate state, was given a smaller part in the north-west and north-east: Pakistan.

[3] The Indian state recognizes the fundamental civil rights of liberty and equality and the human right to private property, the right to free speech and political parties, a parliamentary, “Westminster-style” system of government, from majority voting to the procedural rules of the judiciary, including the separation of state and religion, a fairly faithful copy of the English original. The preamble to the 1949 Constitution defines India “as a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic” and provides the nation with a bicameral system of representation: a directly elected Parliament (Lok Sabha) and a State Assembly (Rajya Sabha) composed of the elected legislative councils of the states.

[4] It is an irony of the founding of this state – and is mistaken by some for a contradiction – that the party of Mahatma (“Great Soul”) Gandhi, so respected by a moral world public for his “non-violent resistance,” behaved no less brutally in dealing with its internal and external enemies as soon as ot had taken over state power from the colonial rulers, who were notorious for their brutal methods of oppression. The calculating pacifism embodied by Gandhi in his whole person, to openly endure colonial injustice in the struggle for independence and to demonstratively bear his own sacrifices in order to emphasize the justification and moral superiority of striving for a self-determined India, only meant the other way around: the new rule is ennobled by its peaceful struggle for independence – and its (exercise of) violence is thus the most just thing in the world.

[5] Immediately after independence, the Congress eliminated the only significant opposition to its state-building program, the Communist Party of India (CPI). The CPI wanted to overthrow the existing property relations defended by Congress and establish a socialist India – instead of the India of large farmers and merchants – by nationalizing industrial and commercial enterprises and expropriating the many landowners. Their Maoist-style people’s liberation war in the countryside was brutally crushed by the military in the “Telengana Uprising” of 1948, thousands of cadres were murdered and the sympathizing rural population was sent to concentration camps that followed the British model. The Congress thus put an end to the systemic question, the danger of an overthrow of capitalist production relations, with all its might. The CPI drew the conclusion from the devastating defeat to abandon the armed struggle against the property system in favor of the prescribed parliamentary path. Since then, the elections have guaranteed the CPI and the products of its splits (CPI-M; CPI-ML) a shadowy existence in the Lok Sabha.

In two of the 28 union states, Kerala and West Bengal, the communists have managed to form governments. They are making a name for themselves with social programs for land reform, education and disease control and are proud of their low illiteracy and infant mortality rates as well as a poverty level that is well below the Union average. Today, the ruling communists are demonstrating what their social programs are good for: They compete with the other union states for capitalist direct investment – with the extra offer of a particularly useful, because educated and socially pacified population. Or, as is currently the case in West Bengal, they set up special economic zones in the middle of rural areas and call the police on those who rebel against evictions. This creates locational advantages for domestic and foreign exploiters!

[6] “The extensive caste system still characterizes the Indian social structure. The castes ... form a strict hierarchy, which is roughly divided into the four varna (caste groups) described in the early Hindu scriptures: At the top are the Brahmins (five percent). Their original function as scholarly priests was differentiated in the Middle Ages and modern times. They perform tasks as village chiefs, teachers, administrative officials, tax clerks and, due to their leadership position in rural regions, have often become large landowners... Next in the hierarchy are the warriors, then the traders, burghers and large farmers, and lastly the manual laborers, small farmers, day laborers, lower service professions (often referred to as ‘other backward castes’). The casteless, untouchables or, as they call themselves, ‘down-trodden’ (Dalits) – around 16 percent of the population – form the dregs of society. Occupational, ethnic, linguistic, regional, local and religious differentiations in sub-castes (Jati) lead to an infinitely fragmented structure ...The demarcation (between the castes) is maintained by linking the caste with the purity requirement of Hinduism. Since contact with a lower caste (touching, receiving food, eating and drinking together) contaminates the members of the higher caste, there is a strong incentive to maintain the given hierarchies.” (Müller, Harald: Weltmacht Indien, Frankfurt am Main 2006, p. 137f)

And in contrast to the western world, where you don’t know anything about a person if you know their name, in India the name already says or tells you the most important thing – namely, which caste the person belongs to.

[7] In addition to the “eternal dharma,” by which the Hindu understands such general human commandments as truthfulness, reverence for the gods or persons of respect, but also the prohibition of violence, theft and adultery, he also knows his very personal “own dharma,” which is determined by the caste of birth called “Jati” and obliges his actions to the caste order: For the Brahmin belonging to the priestly caste, dharma ideally lies in the study and teaching of the Vedas and the performance of appropriate rites, for the warrior or ruler in fighting and ruling, the farmer in caring for the land, the servant in serving, for the woman in her subordination to her husband, etc. The entire life of a Hindu is subject to the dictates of his dharma, from his profession to dietary laws and marriage rules.

[8] The constitution (Articles 15, 17, 25(2), 29(2)) not only prohibits the caste system and the practice of untouchability in principle, but also lists in detail prohibited practices such as the closure of temples and water points or the prevention of shopping and going to the movies. The fact that members of the lower castes, the Dalits or the Adivasi (tribal population) are not allowed into temples, that they are prevented from using land by the privileged castes or that access to schools and medical care is made more difficult for them can be read in the newspapers every day. You can also read that the upper castes assert their privileges with the help of bribed local police and judiciary or even by means of private terror, with paid goon squads and hit men. In almost half of all Indian government districts, violent clashes between the castes are part of everyday life.

[9] In the 1950s and 1960s, the state legally reserved up to twenty percent of places in schools and universities for members of the lower castes, the casteless and Adivasis. A legislative proposal by the current ruling “United Progressive Alliance” (UPA) under the leadership of the Congress Party to increase the quota to 49.5 percent of university places from 2006 failed due to militant protests by the higher castes. Nevertheless, the state areas in which quotas are introduced are extended from time to time.

[10] The Sikhs and the Muslims from the Punjab were held in high esteem as superior “martial races” because of their willing assistance to the colonial power in suppressing rebellious peoples.

[11] One extreme example was the forcible annexation of the princely state of Hyderabad, in which Congress instrumentalized the Communist-led popular uprising against the feudal despotism ruling there to force the Muslim maharaja into the Hindu-dominated Union. The other extreme is the accession of the princely state of Kashmir to the Union, where a Hindu maharaja with a clique of Brahmins (including the Nehru-Gandhi clan) ruled over a predominantly Muslim people. Since then, there has been war in this union state: Pakistan-backed “freedom fighters” bomb for the unification of the Kashmiri people with their Pakistani co-religionists, while the Indian army defends the “freedom” of the Kashmiri people and the “integrity” of the nation against the Islamic “terrorists.”

[12] In 1907, the “Hindu Mahasabha” (Great Union of all Hindus) was founded with the aim of an India exclusively governed by Hindus themselves. It was part of the independence movement against British colonial rule. In 1925, it set up the “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh” (National Volunteer Corps – RSS). The RSS fought for the “revival” of India as a Hindu nation: its people should be all those descended from the “Aryans” (the conquering tribes who had migrated to India from the northwest since 1500 BC, who called themselves “nobles,” spoke Sanskrit and brought several of today’s Hindu gods with them in the “Rigveda”); Muslims, Christians and the tribal population were not Indians, but were to be fought against as “foreign bodies.” Gandhi’s murderer, who single-handedly punished the “Mahatma’s” policy of reconciliation with the Muslims as a betrayal of the Hindu cause, also came from the ranks of the RSS. The RSS is a network of Hindu organizations with an estimated 5 to 10 million members who refer to themselves as “Sangh Parivar” (Family); these include trade unions, student and women’s organizations, social, charitable and religious institutions such as the “Central Council of All Hindus” (VHP) as a worldwide umbrella organization. Its youth organization is the “Family’s” goon squad and hit men, who are at the forefront of the daily war against the Muslim enemies of the people and other minorities in creating “liberated zones.”

In 1951, the Hindu nationalist movement founded the “Baratiya Jana Sangh” (Indian People’s League – BJS) as its parliamentary branch. It is the leading force in the “Janata Party” electoral alliance of Hindu nationalists, renegade Congressmen and socialists, which won the Congress elections in 1977 after the Emergency. In 1980, the Jana Sangh is re-established as the “Baratiya Janata Party” (Indian People’s Party – BJP).

In 1990, the BJP mobilized nationwide under its leader Advani against the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which Muslims had built in the 16th century on the birthplace of the mystical Hindu god Rama, with the slogan “For the rule of Rama!” Its destruction in 1992 by the Hindu nationalist vanguard was the prelude to civil war-like fighting between Hindus and Muslims, resulting in thousands of deaths. And as late as 2002, under the “reformed” BJP government, the Hindu nationalist chief minister of the state of Gujarat allowed the murder of thousands of Muslims to take place and then justified it as an expression of “understandable anger” and as a “reaction” to the fire on a train in which a group of Hindu extremists had also died.

[13] During its time in government from 1996 to 2004, the BJP ensured that Hindu rituals and astrology became compulsory educational content; it made it more difficult for Hindus to convert to other religions such as Islam, Christianity or Buddhism, by which the lower castes and Dalits tried to escape the fate of their caste in increasing numbers, and preached the high value of sacred cows against the profane view of them as suppliers of meat and, as they are increasingly contemptuously seen as, annoying traffic obstructions. The BJP served the pride of their voters by renaming the commercial and financial metropolis of Bombay “Mumbai” after a Hindu goddess – a truly successful demonstration of Hinduism, anti-colonialism and growing national self-confidence in one act.

[14] For of a yearly review of the growing scope of violent struggles and the number of victims in India, please refer to the Fischer Weltalmanach 2007!

[15] Named after the village of Naxalbari in the tea plantations of north-eastern India, where a peasant uprising was brutally suppressed in 1967 – a fact that has since been invoked by various guerrilla movements that operate according to the model and tactics of the Chinese “People’s War.”

[16] Under Article 356 of the Constitution, the government in New Delhi can resort to a President’s Rule, declare a state of emergency and place unruly Union governments, as well as those unable to establish internal peace on their own, under the administration of the central government.

[17] “If the monsoon brought a poor harvest, prices rose; if a good harvest came again, the traders tried to support the existing prices by keeping stocks ... The farmers themselves rarely benefited from this development. Traders and money lenders skimmed off most of the profits. The small farmer was often left without savings and stocks at the mercy of the monsoon (for the economic historian, it is ultimately nature that harasses the Indian farmer!) and fell victim to famine ... The business basis of the rural moneylender and trader was his intimate knowledge of the economic circumstances of his clients. Such small-scale lending did not yield spectacular profits, but fed the man and his family a little better than the poor farmers. The development of the market increased the number of these small traders and money lenders, most of whom consumed the profits they made and invested what was left over in land and precious metals. If you look at the work of these traders and money lenders as a service, you can say that once again the service sector in India grew disproportionately, as it had in the Mughal period. Then it had been the countless tax collectors, soldiers, grooms, courtiers, servants and bodyguards who fed themselves at the expense of the peasants, now it was the traders, money lenders, scribes and lawyers who were swelling the service sector. So what the British did not transfer out of the country was consumed locally by an ever-growing service class, so that there was not enough left over for capital formation in either agriculture or industry.” (Rothermund, Dietmar: Indiens wirtschaftliche Entwicklung, Paderborn 1985, p. 64)

So much for the illustration of production conditions in the countryside in the heyday of British rule. The academic chronicler views them from roughly the same perspective as the political leaders fighting for the independence of the Crown Colony: for them, the yoke of the rural population, its plundering by parasitic masters, is the same as the unproductive consumption of wealth earned by the peasants, which should instead be invested in “capital formation” - for the growth of the nation.

[18] “Land reforms had comprised a crucial section of Congress’s political armoury prior to independence. It had declared that the land must belong to the tiller; rural debts should be written off for agricultural labourers and state-credit institutions generalised to replace the hated moneylenders. The aim was to wipe out all traces of landlordism and semi-feudalism.” (Ali, Tariq: An Indian Dynasty: The Story of the Nehru-Gandhi Family, New York, 1985, p. 86)

[19] “The agrarian reform benefited the middle class, while the poor went away empty-handed. Overall, it can be said that the package of agrarian reform laws worked against the large landlords and against the poor tenants, while benefiting the middle class. Pensioners were eliminated, the large landlords expropriated, especially those who did not cultivate their land themselves (‘absentees’) but confined themselves to collecting the rent. The old feudal upper class hardly plays a role today. But the expectations of the lower classes were not fulfilled. Landless workers and sharecroppers were hardly affected by the measures, and many tenants lost their rights as a result of the transition to self-cultivation. The rural middle class grew; from above through dispossessed people with their remaining land, and from below through economic family farms that were able to increase their acreage. After the feudal lords were replaced, this middle class also assumed the leading political role in the rural areas and also achieved economic prosperity through intensive cultivation... During this time, there was also an intensive discussion in India as to whether the goal of ‘some land for every landless person’, as demanded by Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave, was actually sensible. India already has many millions of smallholdings that are almost impossible to farm economically. In fact, it was found that many beneficiaries with a small area of land soon leased it out and looked for a livelihood elsewhere.” (Kuhnen, Frithjof: Bodenordnung in Asien, 1996)

At the beginning of the 1950s, 30 million smallholders (47% of all farms), whether as owners or tenants, had an area of just 1 acre, while a further 10 million (27%) worked up to a maximum of 5 acres. To this day, agriculture is characterized by small-scale farming – despite the growth of a better-off middle class of farmers. Today, around 60 percent of the workforce is employed in rural areas; their contribution to the gross domestic product is between 20 and 25 percent.

[20] The supply of cheap food to the population was based in particular on extensive deliveries of wheat from the USA: “The planners’ greatest concern was that rising agricultural prices would increase the cost of living and ruin the plan projections. This is where the American wheat supplies came to the rescue... With these supplies, the Indian government was able to stockpile and slow down the rise in agricultural prices in India. At the same time, it was allowed to pay for the supplies in rupees and therefore did not burden the balance of payments, which became an acute problem for India after the sterling reserves left over from the war were used up.” (Rothermund, op. cit., p. 160)

How quickly the indispensable “development aid” is used as a lever of extortion by the American world power was experienced by India, to its national chagrin, in the second war against Pakistan. The USA drastically reduced its wheat deliveries as part of the PL480 export program for Third World countries in order to keep India on a short leash (“short tether policy”).

[21] “In contrast to the later Green Revolution, the pre-revolutionary increase in production was almost exclusively due to an expansion of the cultivated area, which was increased by about 15 percent between 1950 and 1964. Yields per hectare remained at the old low level because the methods of small-scale, independent farming did not change... To the extent that marginal soils were cultivated, which were usually even more dependent on the reliability of rainfall than the previously cultivated areas, they were increasingly at the mercy of the monsoon and a decisive setback was almost inevitable. The drought catastrophe of the two consecutive bad years 1965 and 1966 brought this setback, and its effects were profound: state budget and price policy, development plans and voter behavior, everything was affected by this catastrophe.” (Rothermund, op. cit., p. 158)

Here too, the German economist sees the famine from pretty much the same perspective as the local political rulers, namely as a “setback” for their policy of using a market economy to make the people productive. The Indians may be suffering from hunger, but the real victims are the state and its instruments – budget, prices, plans and, last but not least, the previously so reliable voter behavior.

[22] “The succession of technological innovations (seeds, water, chemicals, machinery) made new innovations necessary again and again, which often exceeded the possibilities of small farms, although the new technologies are largely divisible. Quite a few small farms were abandoned and the land leased to larger landowners. At the same time, the latter terminated tenants on a large scale when they realized that there was a lot of money to be made with intensive land cultivation under the new conditions. They switched to centralized farming with machines, which also cost many farm workers their livelihoods... The number of tenant farmers in Punjab in 1955: 583,000; in 1969: 80,500... There was great friction for individuals, but overall, after a transitional period, it turned out that the massive increase in yields created many new jobs, especially in the agribusiness sector. It was helpful that the redundant tenants were able to sell their draught animals or swap them for dairy cows and thus had a certain degree of security. Of significance is the emergence of a class of ‘Progressive Farmers’, small landlords and larger family farms in the irrigation area, who took advantage of the incentives for high income opportunities through the use of the new technologies, achieved prosperity and were also able to use their economic power for political power. They won many seats in district and state parliaments and prevented at least the increase in income resulting from state expenditure on irrigation, breeding stations, etc., from being taxed away. Overall, it can be said that the ‘Green Revolution’ has brought considerable increases in yields. In the irrigated areas affected, the polarization between wealthy larger farmers and small farmers and landless people living in poverty has increased, even though many new jobs have been created. Hardly anything has changed in the drylands.” (Kuhnen, op. cit.)

[23] “India’s record in countering hunger and famine is strangely mixed. The rapid elimination of famine since independence is an achievement of great significance... And yet India’s overall record in eliminating hunger and undernutrition is quite terrible. Not only is there persistent recurrence of severe hunger in particular regions, but there is also a dreadful prevalence of endemic hunger across much of India... Judged in terms of the usual retardation in weight for age, the proportion of undernourished children in Africa is 20 to 40 percent, whereas the percentage of undernourished Indian children it is a gigantic 40 to 60 percent. About half of all Indian children are, it appears, chronically undernourished, and more than half of all adult women suffer from anaemia. In maternal undernutrition as well as the incidence of underweight babies, and also in the frequency of cardiovascular disease in later life (to which adults are particularly prone if nutritionally deprived in the womb), India’s record is among the very worst in the world … In this context, it is particularly remarkable that India has continued to amass extraordinarily large stocks of food grain in the central government’s reserve, without finding good use for them. In 1998 the stock was around 18 million tonnes ... It has climbed and climbed since then, firmly surpassing 62 million tonnes [in 2001] ... To see it in another way, the stocks substantially exceeded one tonne of food grain for every family below the poverty line.” (Sen, Amartya: The Argumentative Indian, New York 2005, p. 212-4)

This is how drastically the Indian Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen sums up his country’s hunger situation, before answering the question of why as follows:

“What could be the perceived rationale of all this? What could explain the simultaneous presence of the worst undernourishment and the largest unused food stocks in the world? The immediate explanation is not hard to find. The accumulation of stocks results from the government’s commitment to high minimum support prices for food grain – for wheat and rice in particular. But a regime of high prices in general (despite a gap between procurement prices and consumers’ retail prices) both expands procurement and depresses demand. The bonanza for food producers and sellers is matched by the privation of food consumers. Since the biological need for food is not the same thing as the economic entitlement to food (what people can afford to buy given their economic circumstances and the prices), the large stocks procured are hard to get rid of, despite rampant undernurishment across the country. The very price system that generated a massive supply kept the hands – and the mouths – of the poorer consumers away from food... Building up stocks up to a certain point is useful for food security [through a policy of government-guaranteed high producer prices] ... the idea that since it is good to build up stocks as needed, it must be even better to build up even more stocks is not only mistaken, but also leads to shooting oneself in the foot.”

The Nobel Prize winner is aware of the inherent contradiction between the “biological need for food” and the “economic entitlement” to money in a market economy. But then he has also expressed the principle of the price system with its necessary opposition between producers and consumers as the reason for hunger – and by no means proof that state agricultural policy has exaggeratedly forced the stockpiling of food, whereby the state makes it “hard” for itself to “get rid of” the stocks that it builds up by means of the price incentive. It is interesting how a socially critical economist can describe the contrast between needs and prices, between human provision and state concern for an agriculture subject to the acquisition of money in crystal clear terms without becoming a critic of the monetary economy and its political guardian! He prefers to assume that those in power have the good will to fight hunger and doubts the methods chosen when the exclusion of the masses from food is controlled by the state.

[24] India has been a net exporter of wheat and rice to the world market since the mid-1990s. In recent years, it has become a leading exporter in the global trade in dairy products, fruit, vegetables and nuts.

[25] According to trade statistics, India has become the global No. 1 for dairy products since opening to the world market. However, the national dairy industry now also has to face competition from the USA and the EU: “Since India complied with demands and pressure from the WTO and the IMF in 1995 to lift protective measures such as import restrictions and protective tariffs, the Indian market is no longer safe from foreign imports ... The EU policy (eliminating surpluses with the help of export subsidies and direct aid for European farmers) is already having an impact on the Indian dairy market. The Indian domestic price has already fallen by 15% in the past two years. And the first Indian dairies have already had to close because there is no longer a market for their products... In contrast, the EU was able to export 417,000 tons of subsidized skimmed milk powder in 1999/2,000 … In order to protect the domestic market from dumping prices, the Indian government has raised the import duty on milk powder products exceeding 10,000 MT from 15% to 60%. However, the duty remained at 15% for imports below this weight. The possibilities of resorting to safeguard and anti-dumping duties are restricted by the WTO regulations, the so-called ‘peace clause’ and ‘safeguard clause against import floods’. The Indian dairy industry is therefore demanding a reduction in import subsidies for all dairy products and the strengthening of its protective rights against unfair imports... The agricultural negotiations are currently underway.” (Nayyar, Selina: Dumpingpreise der EU überfluten Indien; 2003)

[26] “The National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill, passed in 2005, created the first national unemployment insurance scheme for the rural population. The law provides an employment guarantee for 100 days a year for one adult per family household at a minimum wage of 60 rupees (equivalent to USD 2) per day. One third of the beneficiaries are to be women. If the municipalities are unable to fulfill this employment guarantee, the minimum wage will be paid as unemployment benefit. Described by Prime Minister Singh as the most important law in the history of independent India, it is intended to combat poverty among the rural population, who have not been able to benefit from the economic boom to date.” (Fischer Weltalmanach 2007, p. 229)

[27] When the state initially imposes a restriction on the capital size of companies, this also signals its desire to put the private power of money at the service of the requirements of the desired national economic development. In business practice, however, such a bow to the socialist ideals of the development phase is easy to circumvent, and this is promptly done: The large companies simply split up into a series of legally independent sub-companies. The government is happy with this; after all, it wants to use the big capital and not break it up.

[28] “India’s fledgling entrepreneurs had grown by leaps and bounds. In 1927 they had set up the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) with members from different parts of the country and cutting across communal, caste and regional differences... They resented the system of preferential tariffs imposed by the raj to aid British firms and prevent Indian capitalism from becoming too competitive. They saw themselves as ‘national guardians of trade, commerce and industry’ and in 1928 the FICCI president, Purshottanmdas, declared: ‘We can no longer separate our politics from our economics ... Indian commerce and industry are intimately associated with and are, indeed, an integral part of the national movement – growing with its growth and strengthening with its strength.’ ... When Jawaharlal became Prime Minister he had already discussed the future economy of the country at length with J.R.D. Tata and G.D. Birla (the Indian equivalents of Ford and Rockefeller). Tata and Birla were in complete agreement with Nehru, as early as 1938, that economic planning was crucial in order to modernise the country. They agreed that the scale of investment required was beyond the capacities of the entire FICCI membership, and that the country needed a healthy dose of state capitalism to put the economy on its feet.... Nehru himself began to speak increasingly of a ‘socialist model of society’. When pressed he defined it as a ‘middle path between orthodox practices of the communist and the capitalist countries’ ... The men from the FICCI had no doubt as to the character of the economy: it was capitalism, aided by a strong public sector.” (Ali, Tariq: op. cit., p. 85-87)

[29] They are expressly politically authorized to do so. If the government forbids companies from laying off workers in the course of rationalization, it is because it wants to see the increase in productivity, and thus private profits, used in a socially responsible way to expand the volume of production. With this provision in particular, the ruling Congress Party has for some time been publicly accused of – or complimented with – wanting to impose “socialism” on the country.

[30] A lively foreign trade without capitalist world money took place between the Warsaw Pact states.

[31] In its economic legislation and planning, the state distinguishes between the “informal” (unorganized) and “formal” (organized) sectors of its economy. Only 10% of workers are employed in the latter, and it is only here that the state’s labor and social legislation, which restricts the freedom of exploitation, applies in practice; and it is only here that trade unions exist. 90% of all “gainfully employed” people work in the “informal sector,” where everything known from the days of Manchester capitalism can be found, from child labor and wage fraud to jobs that cost their “owners” their health and lives within a very short time.

[32] “In the mid-1990s, before reforms broke up the encrusted state economy, jobs were mainly sought overseas (by graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology). As many as 25,000 engineers went to the USA. There were 750 companies in Silicon Valley that were run by Indians.” (Ihlau, Olaf: Weltmacht Indien, Bonn 2006, p. 18)

Long before the economic reforms were introduced, “a considerable potential of scientific and technical specialists was being trained in a large number of engineering and technical schools; this potential dwarfed that of all other developing countries (including the People’s Republic of China). However, it could not be absorbed by local demand, so that a considerable proportion of the skilled workers emigrated or remained unemployed.” (India: Information on Political Education, Bonn 1996, Issue 257)

“India produces 441,000 engineers, nearly 2.3 million other graduates and more than 300,000 post-graduates annually.” (Survey Business in India: The Economist, June 1, 2006)

[33] “In the 50 years before independence, the Indian economy stagnated. Per capita economic growth was zero between 1900 and 1950. Between 1950 and 1980, it averaged 1.3 percent. This was not exactly a reason to rejoice, but it was still more than under British colonial rule – and incidentally the basis for higher growth later on.” (Thakur, Ramesh: Der Elefant ist aufgewacht, in: Internationale Politik Nr. 10 / 2006, p. 7)

[34] “By 1961 an official Government commission revealed that 1.6 per cent of the country’s companies owned 53 per cent of the total private capital, whereas 86 per cent of the others owned only 14.6 per cent of the capital. The Houses of Birla and Tata, veterans of the nationalist struggle, headed a list of twenty companies which dominated economic life in the country. Even within this twenty, the top four – Birla, Tata, Dalmia-Sahu and Martin Burn – controlled 25 per cent of all share capital and a major section of industry, trade, banking and the press.” (Ali, Tariq, op. cit., p. 87-88)

[35] There is no such thing as ‘family planning’ in the ‘world’s largest democracy’. For the impoverished mass of the population, children come ‘of their own accord’ as they always have; and for their parents, they are not really an old-age insurance policy, but the only one, and often the only possession that can be mortgaged, rented out or sold outright.

[36] The conditions imposed by the IMF, which the state had to comply with after taking out a billion-euro loan against the threat of international insolvency, dictated what the government had already committed the nation to under the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, now Prime Minister: comprehensive economic reforms that curtailed control of the private sector, privatized state-owned companies and opened up the economy to the global market.

[37] The reason for the sustained expansion of business in the software industry, which India attracts a considerable share of, lies in the importance of the products of this industry for the accumulation of capital. The fact that it is software that gives computer hardware the decisive quality that enables capital to save on paid labor in all areas of capital turnover in order to increase profits – from research and development to the production process to sales, from logistics to the entire company accounting system – makes the soft commodity the modern rationalization technology par excellence. The growing global demand for this commodity is correspondingly large and profitable, whereas its production – a stroke of luck from a capitalist point of view – requires only a relatively small capital advance: The most important production tool here is the brains of trained computer scientists. India has more than enough of them. With their tireless programming work, they are constantly producing new and even more powerful practical applications and thus the rapid wear and tear of their capitalist use value that is characteristic of this “future technology.” This is again an excellent condition for a growing business, as long as you are at the forefront of the competition for the decisive lead. And these are undoubtedly the international market leaders in this high-tech sector, who are increasingly developing and producing in India.

[38] “They are all there, the big names of the technology groups with their outsourced bastions – Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, SAP and General Electric, Motorola, Dell, Texas Instruments, Intel and Hewlett-Packard. Plus, of course, the top trio of Indian software houses: Tata Consulting Services, Infosys and Wipro... Nowhere on this planet have the global computer giants set up so many development laboratories as in India’s technopolis Bangalore. Nowhere else, not even in California’s Silicon Valley, do more computer scientists and engineers work. There are probably a good 200,000 of them in over 1500 companies... The German flagship company SAP, the third largest independent software company in the world with 35,000 employees, opened a development center at the end of 1998. Almost 3,000 Indians, average age 27, work in the glass and granite building with its futuristic design. Right next door, another SAP building is being built for another 2,000 employees... The SAP Indians don’t do much different from the SAP Germans at the headquarters in Walldorf. They develop business software in which their employer is the global market leader. And they look after customers, already more than 1,000 companies in India. But they do it all much more cheaply. SAP pays a software engineer in Bangalore a gross salary of around 12,000 euros a year. In Walldorf, the salary is four to five times higher. So for one German programmer, SAP can afford to pay five Indian tinkerers.” (Ihlau, Olaf, op. cit., p. 12ff)

The software industry is growing so fast that companies will soon be complaining about a shortage of IT specialists. The annoying thing is that their competition for human resources is causing salaries to rise and the location’s low-wage advantage to diminish.

[39] The three Indian “global players” are impressing the competition with the speed and size of their growth: “in 2006, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced a 36% increase in turnover to 3 billion dollars. Wipro grew by 30% to 2.4 billion dollars, Infosys by 35% to 2.2 billion dollars. Wipro and Infosys both employ more than 50,000 people and plan to hire 15,000 and 25,000 more respectively in the current year. TCS has 63,000 employees and plans to hire 30,000 more.” (Survey Business in India, op. cit.)

[40] “Indian information technology got a big boost from the dotcom crash, which forced many companies in the US (two-thirds of the market for Indian IT) and globally to make big cuts in their IT budgets, leading to more outsourcing to India. Today, Indian companies can literally match any service offered by the global outsourcing giants like IBM, EDS and Accenture.” (Survey Business in India, op. cit.)

[41] “The ideals of India’s development policy are also the guiding principle of euphemistic success stories such as the following: As in IT services, India has produced ‘world beaters’ in industry: in pharmaceuticals, steel, cement and auto accessories... By and large, the success is based on India’s strength as a high-value producer, not a low-cost producer. This distinction is made by Baba Kalyani, who heads Bharat Forge. This is now the second largest manufacturer of forges and presses for car engines and chassis parts after ThyssenKrupp. Like the Indian information technology companies, it competes on the global markets. Two thirds of all sales are made there. In the last two years, Mr. Kalyani has bought six companies in four countries – in the UK, Germany, Sweden and most recently in China, where Bharat Forge acquired control of the forging and press division of First Automobile Works, China’s largest car manufacturer. Mr. Kalyani says he was one of the first to realize that India could not succeed with cheap labor and cheap products. The prices were not competitive and the quality was low. In 1989, he changed the business model and invested in brand new equipment and technology, some of which he developed himself. He then adapted his workforce and transformed it into a technically skilled ‘white collar’ team.” (Survey Business in India, op. cit.)

[42] “In fact, sophisticated sectors such as automotive parts, fine chemicals, pharmaceuticals, electrical engineering and mechanical and plant engineering are flourishing. They benefit from low engineering wages and locational advantages in research and development. They are flourishing in the form and with the help of all the relevant high-tech giants, because Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, IBM, ABB, Honeywell, ThyssenKrupp and others are increasingly moving not only to conduct research and development in India, but also to set up production facilities in the knowledge- and technology-intensive manufacturing sectors in order to serve the growing Indian market and/or supply the global market with turnkey systems from there. India has already gone from being a development center to an export hub for plant manufacturers.” (Handelsblatt, 12.6.2005)

[43] “India was not a victim of the Asian currency crisis nine years ago, nor was China... Neither India nor China had free movement of capital. So they had not imported any short-term capital that could have fled when the investor panic broke out.” (Müller, Oliver: Wucht der Milliarden, in: Internationale Politik No. 10/2006, p. 60)

[44] The Indian balance of payments can now announce the following order of items under the heading ‘capital imports’: In first place are still the remittances of emigrants scattered around the globe, in second place portfolio investments, i.e. speculative financial participations of foreign countries in Indian businesses, ahead of direct investments which rank third and are used to establish or expand production and service companies.

[45] “After more than a decade of gradual opening, the conditions for India have changed dramatically: At the beginning of the 1990s, the world’s second largest country in terms of population only had foreign reserves of just under one billion dollars – just enough to cover one month’s imports. Today, Asia’s third strongest economy has 144 billion dollars in reserves, around 20 billion more than its foreign debt.” (FAZ, 3.21.06)

[46] Europe’s experts are certainly impressed: “Indian entrepreneurs are also aggressively globalizing their businesses outside the technology sector. The Tata Group has strengthened its steel, vehicle and food industries with overseas acquisitions worth billions. The pharmaceutical manufacturer Dr. Reddy’s acquired its German competitor Betapharm for 500 million dollars. The takeover of Trevira GmbH has made the Reliance Group the global market leader in polyester and given India's petrochemicals giant access to technology and new distribution channels.” (Müller, Oliver, op. cit., p. 44f)

And the fact that the Indian bank ICICI is opening a branch of its London office in Frankfurt is worth a front-page alert in the Handelsblatt: “Indians attack German banks” (Handelsblatt, 08.02.2007)

[47] Local business journalists are enthusiastically counting the financial speculators and “locusts” who are already looking to make a profit from the expectation of future growth in India: “The big investment banks and private investment companies have also long been sniffing out big business and want to make a profit from India’s expansion: The big banks are currently massively expanding their presence in India. Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Goldman Sachs, CSFB and Lehman Brothers are opening new branches in Mumbai or Delhi. The private equity companies Carlyle, Blackstone, Texas Pacific and 3i Capital are also focusing on the global expansion of Indian tycoons.” (FTD, 7.29.07)

[48] “Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wants to invest 120 billion US dollars in infrastructure over the next few years and attract an additional 150 billion US dollars in investment from abroad... The government is breaking new ground: the country’s four largest airports, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennay and Kolkata, are being privatized. The new major airports in Hyderabad and Bangalore are being built under private management.” (Müller, Harald, op. cit., p. 76)

[49] “The most effective weapon against poverty is employment. And higher economic growth is the best way to generate employment.” (Prime Minister Singh, 8.15.06)

[50] Whether it be via the Indira Gandhi doctrine of the iron hand or later, based on its results, via the Gujral doctrine: as a “soft or benevolent hegemony,” i.e. more integrative than confrontational.

[51] He preemptively announced that no one should fall for the nation’s pacifist-moralistic self-portrayal: “If we as a nation are forced to use nuclear energy for other (than peaceful) purposes, no pious feelings will prevent us from doing so.” (quoted from Michael Springer, in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, February 2002, p. 92)

[52] The Western arms embargo and the cessation of food supplies during the second Indo-Pakistani war in 1965 confirmed the Indian government’s premise that cooperating on the terms of the capitalist ‘free world’ would be extremely dangerous for India’s political independence and should therefore be avoided. The subsequent strategic rapprochement between the USA and China provided New Delhi with the certainty that America could hardly be expected to provide protection against Chinese attacks. India therefore relied on intensified relations with the Soviet Union, which in turn saw the decolonized state as a potentially useful ally against the new US-China liaison. The 1971 Treaty of Friendship between the Soviet Union and India expanded trade relations and military cooperation and also provided for mutual consultation in the event of conflict, but not a guarantee of mutual assistance. Moscow never wanted to commit to such a guarantee, which in turn strengthened India’s desire for autonomy – also on this side. Nevertheless, the alliance with the Soviet Union offers India backing against Western blackmail maneuvers. For example, the Soviet government not only prevented India’s military intervention in East Pakistan from being condemned with its veto in the UN Security Council. When the USA sent an aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal to deter India from invading, Moscow also demonstratively sent a naval unit to the same Gulf – as a sign that it would not tolerate US intervention against India.

[53] When India launched a diplomatic initiative for universal nuclear disarmament after the Cold War, it was clearly rebuffed. The USA responded in 1992 with a diplomatic counter-offensive to enforce a nuclear-free zone in South Asia and forced India to negotiate. India played for time and brought its warhead production to maturity; it wanted to carry out demonstrative nuclear tests in 1995 on the occasion of the extension of the NPT and the general test ban treaty envisaged for 1996. India repeatedly postponed this decision in response to massive threats of sanctions from the Americans.

[54] The military budget, which has risen sharply in recent years, confirms India’s intention to position itself as a global order-establishing power and to participate in the reshuffling of relations of violence in Asia and elsewhere. The much-noticed economic growth rates – or rather the freedom of credit creation based on them – have the potential to be good for an equally impressive war potential. With 1.3 million active professional soldiers and 1.2 million reservists, India has the third largest army in the world. A former British aircraft carrier is now flying the Indian flag and another is under construction; the focus of armament is on the desired triad of nuclear deterrence (land-, sea- and air-based), space and satellite technology, modern naval forces, an offensive-capable air force and missile defense systems of the most advanced technology.

[55] Accordingly, the Provisional Nuclear Doctrine of 1999 makes it clear that India claims the same right as the legal nuclear powers – and unironically declares nukes to be a necessary part of a sustainable development process: “Autonomy in decision-making in the development process and in strategic matters is an inalienable democratic right of the Indian people. India will vigorously defend this right in a world where nuclear weapons are seen as legitimate for a select few indefinitely and where the complexity and frequency of the use of force for political ends is increasing. India’s security is an integral part of its development process. India continuously aims to promote an ever-widening zone of peace and stability around itself so that development priorities can be pursued without interruption.” (Draft Indian Nuclear Doctrine, presented by the National Security Council in New Delhi on August 17, 1999)

[56] This also includes the positive calculation with a nuclear-armed superpower India, which is intended to contain the expansion of Chinese power in South Asia: “If the US is serious about its strategic goals in Asia, it is almost imperative that it help India develop its capabilities so that India’s nuclear weapons can act as a deterrent to China as a nuclear power.” (Condoleezza Rice, in the magazine ‘Foreign Affairs’, 2000)

[57] See the detailed article on the American-Indian nuclear deal in GegenStandpunkt 3-06 [untranslated].

[58] Furthermore, the Bush administration also provided a practical denial of the fears of Indian politicians that the USA might back Pakistan’s claim to the entire Kashmir province, i.e. a revision of the borders: India’s notorious subsumption of the Kashmiri (-Pakistani) ‘freedom fighters’ under the title of terrorism was vindicated by the supreme anti-terrorist, the USA pressing its allies to pursue a peace policy with the arch-enemy and to intensify the fight against jihadists operating in Kashmir, who have their home base in Pakistan.

[59] Cf. “Der amerikanisch-indische Atomvertrag auf der Kippe,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 3, 2007; also on the still controversial compromise text, which the US Congress has yet to approve: Washington Post, 7.28.2007. There, not only the resistance of many US politicians to the ‘rewarding’ and ‘strengthening’ of an illegitimate nuclear state is highlighted, but also the persistent protest of parties and commentators in India, who see the ‘deal’ as a danger of India becoming newly dependent and susceptible to blackmail:

“Government officials in New Delhi have said time and again that they will not accept US efforts to curtail India’s nuclear arsenal. Almost weekly, newspapers write outraged commentaries about the country’s need to defend its national interests ... India’s tough stance in the negotiations reflects its growing self-confidence in global affairs, a contrast to the days when it was one of the poorest and most politically marginalized countries. ‘India should keep its bomb’ – postulate article headlines in the newspapers. The Indian cabinet approved the nuclear deal on Wednesday, but the country’s major political parties are refusing to endorse the agreement in parliament until they are presented with the final version, which has not yet been made public.”

[60] The opposition Hindu party BJP sees this freedom of choice endangered by the government’s nuclear deal and is threatening to reject it in parliament. In addition, the Communists, who form the “center-left government” with the Congress Party, are also raising their patriotic objections: “their country is becoming a ‘vassal of imperialism’ against the People’s Republic of China and is thus losing its political sovereignty” (Handelsblatt, 8.22.2007). They are calling for the deal to be canceled and otherwise want the governing coalition to collapse. This would mean that the strategic nuclear agreement celebrated as a triumph by President Singh would indeed be on ice for the time being.

[61] In mid-February of this year, the foreign ministers of the three largest Asian states met and agreed to work “towards a more balanced and multipolar world order.” (El País, 2.15.2007)

[62] China recognized the elections in Kashmir for the first time in 2002 and now defines the Kashmir conflict as a “bilateral issue” between India and Pakistan, whereas it previously insisted on forcing India to implement the UN resolution calling for a referendum in Kashmir. Of course, this does not prevent China from continuing to support Pakistan militarily.

[63] In this respect, the current Indian boss can proudly state that the goals of old Nehru (see opening motto) are working out better than ever:

“Over the past two years, we have been successful in creating an international environment that is conducive to our development goals. Our relations with the United States of America, China, Japan and the European Union have never been better, and with Russia we have further strengthened our proven partnership. In South East Asia, India has been included in the ‘East Asia Summit’. We have considerably expanded our political and economic relations with the Gulf States and the Arab world. At present, the continents of Africa and Latin America are the focus for our diplomacy and India’s engagement has become truly global. The greatness of our achievements since independence is recognized and the world wishes to see India progress.” (Prime Minister Singh, 8.15.2006)