By Minerwa Tahir and Shehzad Arshad
On 19 April over 900 million Indians began casting their ballots in what is billed as the world’s biggest democratic election. That Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will win for a third term is not in doubt; the real question is whether he and his ‘Hindutva’ allies can win 400 seats in the 543 seat Lok Sabha, India’s lower house.
Such a massive victory would allow amendment of the secular constitution to define the country as a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, a Hindu majoritarian state. Voting closes on 1 June and results will be declared on the 4th.
Over 2,600 parties are contesting the election, but Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is far ahead in opinion polls. In 2019 it won 303 seats and, with allies, controlled 352. Now its proclaimed goal is 400.
The BJP is the richest party in India, with the backing of big capitalists, such as Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, who are the first and second richest people in Asia. Their wealth has ensured an iron grip on the media. For example, the critical news channel NDTV was simply bought by Adani and is now a reliable BJP mouthpiece. In return the government has awarded many energy and infrastructure contracts to Adani’s firms.
A recent court ruling revealed how much the BJP had benefited from an opaque form of campaign finance, known as electoral bonds. The party received more than 60bn rupees (£570m) in donations, far more than any other political party.
Meanwhile, key contestants from the opposition alliance (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, ‘INDIA’) consisting of over 27 parties, including the Indian National Congress, have faced state repression. Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party who is also the chief minister of Delhi, was jailed ahead of the elections, while the Congress party saw its funds frozen by tax authorities.
Economy
Although in the 1990s the Indian economy was characterised by a high degree of state ownership, the Congress-led government turned to a neoliberal programme of privatisation. This opened the way to the emergence of a number of extremely wealthy tycoons, like Ambani and Adani, who prospered from the growth of modern industry and government contracts.
Today, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, car and motorcycle manufacturing are the backbone of India, together with mining of iron ore, bauxite, gold, coal, oil and gas. Meanwhile high numbers of skilled, English speaking and educated workers constitute the IT and business services sector. More generally services constituted 48.4% of GDP in 2022, while agriculture fell to a nominal 16.7%.
India is the world’s fifth largest economy in terms of GDP. At $3.94 trillion, it is closing in on Japan. However, India’s GDP per capita, which is a measure of living standards, is just $2,730, compared to Japan’s $33,140 (the UK’s is $51,070).
Class inequality is, thus, extremely stark. On the one hand, about 60 per cent of India’s 1.3 billion people live on less than $3.10 a day, which is the World Bank’s median poverty line. On the other, Mukesh Ambani gave his wife an airbus, complete with living room, bedroom, satellite TV, Wi-Fi, sky bar, showers and an office, worth $60 million, for her birthday.
Such uneven, and unequal, development could generate extreme social tension and conflict. To counter this Modi’s government relies not only on the repressive forces of the state, such as the police and army, but also on the paramilitary militias of the various far-right groups of the Hindu nationalist movement, known as the Sangh Parivar.
With its burgeoning population and a rapidly growing economy, India is emerging as an important player on the global stage. It is increasingly seen as an alternative to China for investors, manufacturers and consumer brands. With ties between Beijing and most of the western world getting strained, India enjoys healthy relations with most major economies and is attracting investments.
Related to that, India has changed its traditional position on the occupation of Palestine and has openly supported Israel. Significantly, Adani’s Aero Defence has had a pact with Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit since 2016.
Pogroms
This change is rooted in a state-sanctioned policy of Islamophobia against the 200 million Muslims of the country. The construction of the Ram Mandir temple in Ayodhya, on the site of the Babri Masjid mosque destroyed by Hindu crowds, is the most extreme expression of anti-Muslim racism and hatred in India.
This extends to political repression of Muslim activists such as Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who have been incarcerated for years. Home Affairs Minister and Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, has announced plans to implement the reactionary Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which allows only non-Muslim religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to seek citizenship in India.
The Modi regime also stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special status, effectively annexing the occupied territory. Furthermore, in the same year, having introduced the National Citizens Registry (NRC) in the northeastern state of Assam, stripping two million people, mostly Muslims, of Indian citizenship, Amit Shah also promised its nationwide implementation.
In the aftermath of CAA–NRC, Delhi witnessed a violent pogrom against Muslims. It was systematic and organised; cops destroyed anything that could be used as evidence against the perpetrators, such as CCTV footage. Shops and houses belonging to Muslims were targeted, with adjacent property left unscathed.
In scenes reminiscent of the Nazi pogroms of Jews in the 1930s, Muslim women were subjected to sexual assault as Hindu mobs attacked mosques and Islamic shrines, burned religious scriptures, and used various weapons to kill and terrorise the minority community.
The parallel between Modi’s attempt at redefining citizenship and the Nazis’ Nuremburg Laws of 1935, which marked the first step towards genocide of the Jews, is hard to miss. In fact, a number of leaders of the BJP and other Hindutva right wing and fascist parties from the Sangh Parivar have explicitly expressed the intent to commit genocide against Muslims.
Despite its sweeping victory in 2019, Modi’s party itself only won 37 per cent of the total vote. While the BJP dominates the Hindi-speaking belt in northern India, eastern and southern states, particularly Kerala and Tamil Nadu, have not joined in the Hindu majoritarian fervour.
Congress, led by Rahul Gandhi, won 20% in 2019. The party’s voting base is among secular Hindus, Muslims and other minorities. Campaign highlights include branding Modi as a threat to democracy and proposing anti-poverty policies, such as a legal right to apprenticeship, minimum support price for farmers, cash transfers of 100,000 rupees to poor families and a minimum wage of 400 rupees a day.
In spite of these promises, Congress remains a capitalist party, representing those who have not (yet?) been included in Modi’s coalition. Nonetheless its electoral coalition could deny Modi his 400 seats, since the vast majority of victims of racial and communal hatred are not going to vote for the BJP.
Strategy
Communist parties and trade unions could have provided an alternative to the rise of the right with a socialist programme. However, true to their Stalinist tradition of class collaboration, they joined Congress’ INDIA alliance. We strongly reject this strategy because an INDIA government would be a right-wing capitalist regime committed to neoliberal policies. We reject the idea that the Indian masses should vote for this popular front as a lesser evil.
Instead, we call on the Communist Parties, the trade unions and all the social movements of the oppressed to break with their bourgeois ‘allies’ and organise for the coming struggles.
In constituencies where a bourgeois candidate of the INDIA alliance is standing, we call for a blank vote. Where candidates belonging to the communist parties and trade unions are standing, we vote for them while urging their supporters to organise themselves for the coming struggle.
The various communist parties of India have a track record of making pro-worker promises when out of power, then enacting pro-investor policies if they win. This needs to change.
Therefore, we call on those parties to form a united front, including all oppressed layers, against attacks on democratic and social rights. We need to build self-defence militias against organised fascist mobs, strike breakers or state repression. These tasks are necessary even if the leaders of the reformist workers’ parties reject them. We call upon the working and oppressed masses to take matters into their own hands, using the following demands to build a united front and self-defence militias:
The far-right’s strategy of Hindutva dictatorship can be stopped by means of working class struggle, but this would pose the need to create a workers’ government based on the organs created in the struggle: workers’ and peasants’ councils and a popular militia.
Such a government would expropriate large-scale capital and introduce an emergency plan to meet the needs of the masses, developing towards a centrally planned economy. It would introduce real equal rights for all the exploited and oppressed. To form this government, we need the working class to provide revolutionary leadership.
The crisis of leadership, unaddressed for decades, needs to be resolved by building a workers’ party on a revolutionary programme. True peace and equality for all can only be established through a workers’ government that initiates the struggle for the United Socialist States of South Asia.
We call upon all workers, farmers, socialists and oppressed to join us in this mission and be part of the building of a Fifth International.
