INDIA TODAY : LOOKING BACK, LOOKING...

India Today : Looking Back, Looking Forward 1

INDIA TODAY :

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

Compiled by : C. SAMBI REDDY,

R. ARUN KUMAR


INDIA TODAY :


INDIA TODAY :


INDIA TODAY :


SUNDARAYYA VIGNANA KENDRAM

1-8-1/B/25/A, Baghlingampalli

Hyderabad - 44. Ph : 040-27667543

Compiled by :

C. SAMBI REDDY

R. ARUN KUMAR

Sundarayya Birth CentenarySeminar Papers

Sundarayya Birth Centenary Seminar Papers4

Publication No : 1351

Published by

SUNDARAYYA VIGNANA KENDRAM

1-8-1/B/25/A, Baghlingampalli

Hyderabad - 44. Ph : 040-27667543

Edition : April, 2015

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OVER VIEW .................................................... 7

I. SYNOPTIC VIEW .................................................. 11

1. Capitalist Development and the Indian Society

– Prabhat Patnaik ......................... 12

2. Communalism: Changing Forms and Fortunes

– Aijaz Ahmad .............................. 21

3. Imperialism and the Indian Economy :

The centrality of land question

– Amiya Kumar Bagchi ................ 39

4. Two decades of Neo-Liberal Reforms

– Intensified Struggle for Land and Lively hoods

– Utsa Patnaik .............................. 42

5. From Non–Alignment to Dependence :

Shifting Paradigms of Indian Foreign policy

– Sukumar Muralidharan ............. 57

II. THE PRESENT AS HISTORY (INDUSTRY, FINANCE, PLANNING) ..... 75

1. Foreign capital and domestic policy in India’s

long transition - C.P Chandra Shekar ................ 76

2. Capitalists and Industrialisation in India

- Surajit Mazumdar ..................... 105

3. Planning and the regime of capital in India

- Chirashree Das Gupta .............. 115

INDEX


III. WOMEN IN ECONOMY AND SOCIETY .................... 145

1. Women’s work in India in the

early 21st

century - Jayati ghosh .............................. 146

2. A note on women and public policy

- Smita gupta ............................... 163

3. India shining : Women in the eye of the storm

- Kalyani Menon Sen .................. 173

IV. THE AGRARIAN CRISIS ............................................... 189

1. The Current Agrarian Crisis in India

- Venkatesh Atreya ..................... 190

2. Economic Inequality In contemporary Rural India

- Venkatesh Atreya ..................... 207

3. Recent trends In Agricultural Credit in India

- R.Rama Kumar ......................... 219

V. CLASS, CASTE, COMMUNITY ..................................... 235

In the fight for social Justice : Some experiences

- B.V.Raghavulu .......................... 236

VI. CULTURE AND POLITICS............................................ 247

The Politics of Culture in the era of Neo-liberalism

- Malini Bhattacharya . ............... 248

VII. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ................................... 259

1. Knowledge and Science as Commons

- Prabir Purkayastha ................... 260

2. Science, Education and Research :

Problems and Prospects - Rama Krishna Rama Swamy .... 269

VIII. CONCLUDING SESSION....................................... 277

Politics of Neo-Liberalism - Prakash Karat ..................... 278


Over view

When we started talking about this seminar as a tribute to a very

distinguished and unique leader of the communist movement in India, I

would say of the Indian People, one of the upper most things in my

mind was the sheer intellectual acumen, breadth of interests and the

engagements for which the late com. Sundarayya is famous and which

continues to inspire so many of us. Therefore we try to conceive of a

very comprehensive seminar with respect to various aspects of Indian

society as evolved since independence.

Now the current crisis that India is undergoing, the crisis conditions

are of course are associated with neo-liberalism and when we speak of

neo-liberalism we tend to speak of neo-liberalism as an economic

phenomenon almost exclusively. One major concern for us was to

actually assess what the consequences of this neo-liberal regime have

been across the various areas of the society, of Indian society not only

political, economic but also in media, in culture, in science & Technology,

in various areas emanating from the new kind of policies that began to

emerge with the neo-liberal regime around 1990. The extraordinary fact

that this, the most aggressive kind of communal offensive in India

coincides logically with the beginning of the neo-liberalism in India and

therefore trying to see what the connections between this economic

phenomenon and this much larger much more complex social and

historical phenomenon of Hindutva might be.

Moreover I have used the phrase ‘extreme capitalism’ for

neo-liberalism. The important fact in this is that the neo-liberalism is the

most recent and the most savage form of capitalism. What we need to do

is to actually see both the continuity between the policies of the Indian

capitalist classes, Indian property exploiting classes over a period of time

and then also see what enormously great qualitative and quantitative

changes have come about in the era that we call neo-liberalism. So what

we are talking about is both an element of continuity and an element of

enormous intensification of the exploitative regimes.


These ideas were built into even the title of the seminar. The phrase

‘India Today’ as comrade Arun pointed out in the very first session

actually refers to ‘India Today by R.P.Dutt, that book which we find

serious political economy perspective – Marxist perspective, how colonial

Indian economy began it was one of the founding texts for that and we

want to, a sort of, recall that and say that ‘a New India Today’ needs to

be written to explain the dramatic changes that have happened, more

over the element of continuity is what made us choose the other half of

the title ‘Looking Back Looking Forward’. Looking back at the

continuity the particular moments in which dramatic changes are

introduced which then accumulate until 1991 and major shift then takes

place.

That was for the perspective and yet we found that no matter how

many days, three full days of very tight scheduling of heated hours of

the seminar, there are large areas that we were unable to cover such as

for example the whole issue of the ripping of the Indian Natural Resources

both by the Indian corporate and for the benefit of Global Finance capital,

the issues, what’s happening to the tribal societies and so on, issues on

which we could not even touch although we had a very comprehensive

programme.

In my own view the seminar was extraordinarily successful. First

success was that with the exception of just one or two people who truly

just could not make it. One of them is out of country V.K.Rama

Chandran, with the exception of just one or two people every one we

asked enthusiastically and immediately agreed to do which ever part of

the seminar we requested them to participate. So that was our first success

so, as you go down the list of speakers in various panels the sheer level

of distinction in each panel is quite extraordinary. So the result is virtually

every panel became a mini seminar in itself. You could in fact, it was

amazing sort of, form of conversation in that. Then within that frame

work we tried to do two different things. One is what we call the synoptic

presentation, that is to say, on particular topics to have longer

presentations more of a question and answer sessions. For example the

whole issue of what the neo-liberal media, what the neo-liberal regime

has done to the Indian media, the devastating effects on Indian society

through corporatization of the Indian media. Right from the beginning

there was a great deal of emphasis on various areas of education, because

there was again some speech some presentation such as of Amia bhagchi,

Prabhat patnaik on the overall structure of the post independent Indian

economy and major points at which shifts came. While other whole

series of shorter talks – then focus on particular areas. One of the great

pleasures for me in listening to the seminar was the appearance of no. of

younger scholars who presented excellent work. For example Chirasree

Das Gupta, very young scholar, just started teaching somewhere, gave a

brilliant presentation on first 10 or 12 years of the Indian economy after


independence. She pointed out to us, it was in 1950that Pandit Jawaharlal

Nehru himself gave a written guarantee that foreign capital shall not be

allowed freely (?).

Between her and another young scholar by the name of Surajit

Mazumdar two of them on the same panel looking at early Indian

economy as a whole, but particularly with reference to the planning and

industrialization showed clearly, from the beginning planning in India

was conceived in such a way that the public sector was to serve the

private sector. It was not so much to win (gain) as an autonomous, and

controlling economic sector in India but as facilitating the private sector.

They also demonstrated that, about the public sector, the main thing

is that, it occupied the strategic positions in the Indian economy. But it

was always a very small part of the Indian Economy as a whole. This

whole mythology that there was a period of early India when there was

top heavy state ownership in India and private capital was somehow

throttled, doesn’t stand up to any kind of analytical or quantitative

measurement.

Now it’s not my intention to go on summarizing the presentations

of all the speakers. But just to give a couple of representative examples.

Now there was this whole range of presentations on the Indian Political

Economy but half the seminar at least was devoted to the impact of all

that structural basis in the rest of our society.

For example we had two very fulsome really quite brilliant

presentations on the media and market, state market and media by shashi

kumar and P.Sainath. Full session of that kind. Full session on the

question of culture. Prof.Malini Bhattacharya congratulated the

organizers of the seminar for allotting that much space to issues of culture.

I personally thought that there just wasn’t enough time to discuss culture

in the kind in which it needs to be discussed.

Now in both of these areas, specifically of media which is itself now

so overwhelming part of modern Indian culture anyway as well as what

we traditionally know as culture which is the Arts. In all of these areas,

both the, whole dialectic of what neo-liberal capital, the exploitative

regimes, the kind of pressures that come down from there, the communal

ideaology, the communal organization, the kind of pressures that come

from them, and the kind of resistance that we need to organize.

So that on the one hand there was a very very interesting discussion

primarily led by com.Baby and com.Malini on how elements, both of

traditional culture as well as the existing practices in popular culture can

be mobilized to create more firm basis for a complex syncretic widely

based modern progressive Indian culture as against the corporatization

of culture which is essentially imposing globalized western forms on

our culture.


Similarly M.K.Raina showed an extraordinary piece from a longer

film in which the Shakespeare’s play King Liar is recast in the popular

folk traditional form of Kashmir to show what happens to a society

when land is divided so that contemporary Kashmiri tragedy in dilemma

and is re-enacted in a form, cultural form, artistic form, that had been

suppressed during the entire Jihad period to impact through various

traditional European texts (?). So the kind of innovative work that can

be done within the spaces provided by the cultural resistance.

Similarly there were issues that came up with respect to the whole

question of the media. Media is where capital intensity corporate control

and right wing ideology both from the Global routes and contemporary

consumer as well as communal ideologies, all get condensed and reach

into deepest corners of our society and into our households. How do we

challenge them? So what kind of Media and Technology the Left itself

needs to develop and exploit new kinds of forms precisely within the

interstices of those varied technologies?

Final example of the kind of things that were happening comes from

the session on science and technology. Where even in areas such as the

development of nuclear technology how it gets profoundly reoriented

during the period of neo-liberalism. One would have thought nuclear

science and nuclear technology were something very far removed from

issues of neo-liberalism and so on.

For example Dr.Gopala Krishna, very distinguished nuclear scientist

himself demonstrated in a very straight forward way that till the 1980s

the development of the nuclear technology – independent nuclear

technology- indigenous nuclear technology-precisely at the time the

western parts had put India under severe sanctions was the period in

which indigenous nuclear technology was infact made great strides for

the use of nuclear technology for the peaceful purposes inside the country,

where as it is the insistence of Manmohan Singh’s government on the

Indo-nuclear deal which was conceived from the beginning in his head,

the consequence was the suppression of Indian technology.

Inspired by the great departed leader P.Sudarayya, for three days we

witnessed time and again in one session after another or engaged in

politically responsible high standard scholarship addressing various areas

of Indian life. In this I think we had extraordinary success. I congratulate

and I thank the organizers from the Andhra Party, who made it possible

for us all to participate in a seminar of such excellence.

- AIJAZ AHMED


I

SYNOPTIC VIEW


Capitalist Development

And the Indian Society

- Prabhat Patnaik

Karl Marx’s remark about capitalism creating the agency for

its own transcendence, namely the proletariat, was rooted in the reality

of classical capitalist development. But on how this reality itself had

come into being there is a significant misunderstanding.

The usual view is that capitalism first undermines the previous

mode of production, and uproots a large segment of the working

population engaged in it which is thrown into the ranks of the reserve

army of labour. But after a lapse of time it progressively employs the

bulk of the uprooted population, leaving only a certain relatively small

fraction of the total working population as a reserve army of labour.

This perception underlies the famous debate on poverty and

the Industrial Revolution in Britain between Eric Hobsbawm and Max

Hartwell. While Hartwell rejected altogether the idea of any increase

in poverty in early nineteenth century, even Eric Hobsbawm’s claim

about the increase in poverty following early Industrial Revolution

was tempered by the implicit concession that it subsequently came down

because of the absorption, into the ranks of the active army of labour

under industrial capitalism, of the bulk of those who had been thrown

out of work in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

And the same perception, of capitalism producing a painful

but only a necessarily transient period of uprooting of pre-capitalist

producers also underlies Amartya Sen’s remark that the building of

London and Manchester could not have been effected without throwing

people off their lands. The implicit suggestion is that those people or

their descendants overcame eventually the travails of such uprooting

because of the inherent nature of capitalist development itself.


In short, two propositions have found wide acceptance: first,

that the destruction of the old mode of production has merely meant,

historically, a transfer of the working population previously engaged by

it largely into the active army of workers for capitalism, and only

marginally into the reserve army; and second, that such a denouement is

a result of the working of capitalism itself, a product of its own immanent

tendency, whence it follows that the same process will replicate itself in

India as well.

This understanding however is wrong. There were three very

specific factors that operated under classical capitalism to effect an

alleviation of the misery of the uprooted pre-capitalist producers and

none of these three is possible today. The first, and most important, is

large-scale migration from Europe to the temperate regions of white

settlement. Arthur Lewis estimates the total number of such migrants

from Europe during the nineteenth century at fifty million. The scale of

such migration relative to the population of the “home countries” can

be gauged from the case of Britain. Between 1815 and 1910, 16 million

Britons migrated to the temperate regions of white settlement while

Britain’s entire population in the initial date was just 12 million. Put

differently, the scale of migration was such that almost half the annual

increase in British population over this period left the country. If

migration were to occur on this scale from India then between

Independence and now 400 million Indians should have migrated out of

the country, which only underscores the non-availability of this avenue

in today’s context to countries like India.1

The second factor was the export of unemployment through the

imposition of deindustrialization on colonies and semi-colonies. The long

Victorian and Edwardian boom in the course of which there was much

absorption of those who had been pushed into the reserve army of labour

from the ranks of pre-capitalist producers, would have been impossible

if the colonial and semi-colonial markets were not available where British

goods, especially cotton textiles, could be sold at the expense of the local

pre-capitalist producers. Even as late as the end of the nineteenth century,

almost half of British exports consisted of cotton textiles and their main

destinations were India and China. Quite clearly India and China, which

themselves experienced mass poverty because of being at the receiving

end of “deindustrialization” are not in the same position today as Britain

then was, of having such markets “on tap”, upon which they can inflict

de-industrialization.

The third factor was the high employment intensity of machine

production in the nineteenth century. In fact machines were almost made

by bare hands, so that the use of machinery which destroyed employment

in the machine-using sectors, simultaneously generated substantial


employment in the machine-making sector, keeping overall additions to

technological unemployment restrained. The problem of absorbing the

labour reserves in other words was itself kept within tractable limits owing

to the high employment-intensity of machine making. (This high

employment intensity of machine making could have perhaps been one

reason why Marx believed that the organic composition of capital would

rise over time with accumulation, and that, in consequence, there was a

tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time at any given rate of surplus

value). The net effect of technological progress today is far more labour-

displacing than it then was.

Since none of these alleviating factors is available to countries

like India today which themselves have inherited vast labour reserves

and mass poverty from their colonial past, it is clear that capitalist

development under these conditions can not replicate the experience of

classical capitalism. The very lateness of the arrival of countries like India

on the capitalist scene leaves little scope for such replication.

On the contrary this lateness of arrival actually compounds in

their case the problem of absorption of labour reserves in at least three

distinct ways in the neo-liberal era. First, since neo-liberalism does not

permit any restraint on the pace of structural-cum-technological change,

this pace is left to the spontaneous operation of the system, with the

result that the following dialectic gets generated.

The existence of labour reserves keeps the real wage rate of

workers, even in the organized sector of the economy, tied to some

subsistence wage, and as labour productivity in this sector increases, the

share of surplus in output increases. While this fact may give rise to a

higher savings ratio, and hence, in the absence of demand constraints

(which we ignore for the moment) to a higher investment ratio and a

higher output growth rate, since those living off the surplus also have a

life-style that is largely imitative of the elites in the advanced capitalist

countries, and hence has an employment-intensity that is both low and

declining over time, even this higher growth rate does not succeed in

bringing down labour reserves. Hence an increase in the growth rate can

coexist with an increase in absolute poverty, whose magnitude is basically

determined by the relative size of the labour reserves.

Secondly, this possibility of the coexistence of increasing growth

with increasing relative labour reserves is greatly enhanced by the fact

that neo-liberal capitalism, by removing the support and protection

measures for peasant agriculture, and petty production in general, adopted

by the post-colonial State in the dirigiste era as a sequel to the agenda of

the anti-colonial struggle, accelerates the pace of primitive accumulation

of capital. A squeeze on incomes of such producers which even makes

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