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Subject: [India Thinkers Net]Sumit and Tanika Sarkar on Aspects of Contemporary Indian - March30, 2005



From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed Mar 30, 2005 8:21pm
Subject: Sumit and Tanika Sarkar on Aspects of Contemporary Indian Politics  

http://www.lefthook.org/Interviews/ShingaviSarkar033005.html

Extensive Interview On Politics in India

Snehal Shinghavi of UC Berkley recently interviewed
Tanika Sarkar and Sumit Sarkar on a broad range of
Indian political issues, including the rise of the
Hindu Right, weaknesses of leftist parties, role in
Iraq, and relations with Pakistan. Until his recent
retirement, Sumit Sarkar was Professor of History at
Delhi University, India, where he began teaching in
1976. His most recent publication is Beyond
Nationalist Frames. Tanika Sarkar is Professor at the
Department of Modern History at Centre for Historical
Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Q: What are the features of Hindutva in India and do
you think that it is fair to describe it as a kind of
Indian fascism?

TS: It has very strong features of that, but so far as
it is still operating within an electoral, democratic
framework, and insofar as India is a very huge, large
country and the Hindutva forces are very unevenly
spread out and there are many countervailing factors,
I don't think that it has all the marked features of
fascism.

It doesn't have a very formed, organized left enemy
that it contends against. That's a major difference. I
also think that the fascistic efficiency levels are
also missing. Their governance has been unlike the
fascist governments, you know. Their governance is
terrible, absolutely atrocious. So in some ways the
potentialities are weak. I think that the aspirations
are very similar.

Then again, I'm not very clear, and I might be wrong,
that genocide, complete genocide of the fascistic
sort, is actually an intention.

SS: You see, it's such a big population of Muslims
that you can't really finish them off in the sense
that it was more or less possible to finish off the
Jews in Germany. The attitudes are similar. And they
are also rather different, in the sense that fascism
rose in Germany, obviously, but to some extent even in
Italy in the postwar situation, in a situation of
near-total economic collapse. Massive unemployment and
so forth. We have a lot of economic problems in India
- we have unemployment. But in comparison, in Germany
it was a sudden development in a way, a sense of
tremendous crisis, where the alternatives seemed very
stark in the perceptions of a large section of the
people there, whether in reality or not is a different
matter. So either a socialist revolution or Nazism. I
don't think that it is quite like that in India.

But, as you say, the attitudes, the kind of temper, as
well as some indications of sympathy for Nazi or
fascist ideologies, if you look in history, you find
that. You find it just now, because what's the point
of that. But there is that famous statement by
Gowalkar, which he never disowned, in his We, or Our
Nation Defined (1939) when he described precisely in
November 1938, shortly after kristalnacht, that's when
it was written, that the way Hitler had dealt with the
Jews should be an example for us. So there is a
sympathy.

And you may have seen also this bit of data that this
Italian historian - Marzia Cassolari - she wrote an
article based on archival research in India on the
contacts between Moonje, an associate of the RSS,
active in the RSS, one of its founders actually, and
he had come to Italy and had developed quite good
relations with the fascists, and possibly Mussolini,
though I'm not quite sure of that. And so there are
certain articles that came out in RSS papers and so
forth.

TS: Two differences, also. I think, more than the fear
of class revolution what activated the RSS and its
wings into a kind of mass movement was the fear of
caste uprisings and the change in the caste situation
especially after the Mandal Commission recommendations
went through. And the other thing is that fascism was
energized by a mass phase, a fairly egalitarian vision
before the compromise with the high bourgeoisie was
made. There is no such thing in our Hindutva movement.

Q: What then do you understand to be the features or
the project of the Hindutva movement in India?

TS: The most obvious and the most dangerous is
communalism. Making India into a Hindu nation-state.
That is their USP, so to speak. That is how they
define themselves: that India is a Hindu nation in its
civilizational essence. Everything else is an add-on.
Everything else is not just extraneous but subversive
of that Indian essence. They in their definition
exclude Muslims, Christians, and Communists as
antithetical to the Hindu civilizational essence. So
that is one.

So immediately it leads itself to a vision of
exclusion of what is not Hindu. But one wonders, you
know: even though the Muslims are a substantial
population, the Christians are not, and they are being
attacked with equal ferocity. And both Muslims and
Christians are educationally extremely very weak,
vulnerable, not a competitor in any sense, not like
the Jews of Germany. So that is missing. So what are
they scared of vis-? -vis the Muslims. Is there an
agenda behind it? What would the Hindu nation be doing
for this kind of group? Why is there such an urgency
to declare itself a Hindu nation?

So, it makes one wonder if the real targets are not
the fault lines within the Hindu community in India -
that is caste. So caste, inasmuch as caste is allied
to class, in our country, very strongly allied to
class. So this continuous exclusionism and this
continuous emphasis on redefining India as Hindu in
its essence actually is to unify Hindus while blanking
out the internal caste-caste, class, and gender
problems.

But that doesn't mean that the Muslims or the
Christians are simply an aside or simply an excuse
because for a hundred years there had been tension,
conflict, violence, mutual violence. This is something
that also carries a weight of its own. It's not simply
a cynical excuse for something else. It has a reality
of its own. But the deeper need for this kind of focus
on excluding what is not Hindu is meant to
continuously keep Hindu as one on their guard and to
forget about their internal conflicts and differences.

SS: Just one more point, about using the category of
"fascist." I think that both of us have been
suggesting that it's not very precise and in any case
historical parallels are always tricky sorts of
things. What it helps to do perhaps is to highlight
the fact that Hindutva is not just a right-wing
movement. It is a particular kind of right-wing
movement, if you like, conservative movement. So it is
from that point of view that maybe playing with the
category of fascist as distinct from just conservative
or right-wing helps. Hindutva is different, distinct
from other broadly right-wing, religious-oriented
political groups like the Christian Democrats in Italy
or their counterparts in Germany or at one time in
France. That is different. They didn't represent,
however corrupt, however right-wing, a kind of a
threat to the very existence of the Italian Republican
constitution or the German Republic or whatever. This
does. It is in that fundamentally different.

Q: So how do you explain the electoral alliances
between the lower caste and depressed caste forces and
the BJP?

TS: Precisely because of this anxiety of ruptures. The
RSS is still pretty brahminical and upper caste. The
leadership remains very brahminical, brahminical more
than upper caste. But in post-independence India the
upper caste just cannot rule by itself.

You know what happened since independence is that the
transition to electoral democracy and full adult
franchise necessitated ??¦ even just after independence
Gowalkar quite openly said that India is not meant for
electoral democracy. And he was extremely unhappy. And
it took them a little while to develop an electoral
wing that would be able to contend in the electoral
field. So a new compulsion appeared on the horizon.
Between 1925 and 1947 the RSS could happily be
brahminical and depend on and rely on an inherited
authority, a social authority, a prescriptive
authority. After independence, if they want to get
anywhere in a situation of full franchise, and in a
situation where the left was the dominant opposition
to the Congress in the first elections, in that
context you cannot abide by the old and much more
honest framework. After 1947, it's forgotten how open
the RSS had been about the need for a monarchical
India, the need for a brahminical India, because that
language had to be dropped. And somewhere between the
1950s and 1960s, Deendayal Upadhyay made that kind of
rhetorical shift. And the BJS was formed and a more
democracy-friendly rhetoric was developed.

But what did not develop was a recognition that India
is a poor country and there are social contradictions,
that there is great exploitation. That never entered
into RSS discourse or into the discourse of any of its
allies. But nonetheless, in order to prevail in an
electoral situation, they have to look for caste
allies. Either they have to develop an agenda to
hegemonize the lower castes themselves. Or they have
to function through lower-caste electoral partners.
And I think [Christophe] Jaffrelot has suggested that
initially they tried the first and tried to restore or
relocate their brahminical prerogatives, their social
leadership prerogatives on the plane of a new kind of
leadership on the electoral field. That didn't work
out and hence the turn towards lower-caste partners
was a tacit admission of failure - that they can't do
it on their own. Nonetheless, what is more dangerous
is not that they are looking for lower caste partners,
but that they are finding them.

SS: And that is a difficult problem to explain. But
maybe here you come across some of the problems with
powerful, significant, at the same time pretty limited
affirmations of lower-castes and Dalits in our
country. Because what has developed particularly in
this last fifteen or twenty years -- partly different
from the situation under Ambedkar or under Periyar in
Tamil Nadu or Phule in Maharashtra - is a series of
pretty narrow forms of identity politics. And insofar
as the rallying cry has been reservations - while that
was both necessary, indeed indispensable, and up to a
point certainly a valid demand - but movements which
have tended to confine themselves to that have run the
risk and face the reality indeed of repeated splits.
So conflicts between various types of lower-caste
formations have manifested themselves on an increasing
scale, which allows the BJP to make its selections, so
to speak, playing one against the other. And that
playing is not just something the BJP is doing out of
cleverness. There are real tensions. The tensions
between Dalits and the people called the OBCs [Other
Backward Castes] - the OBCs include very poor people
but also include some relatively landed groups. And
insofar as the Brahmins or upper castes are often
pretty thin on the ground in many parts of the
country, in the rural areas, the immediate enemy for
the Dalits, the immediate oppressor becomes the
landlord [usually an OBC] or something like that. So
these are the kinds of tensions that the BJP is making
use of.

Q: What of the other far-right formations?

TS: The Shiv Sena is a strong ally. The Shiv Sena has
some differences. It's a very localized, Marathi
chauvinist organization right now. It's very urban,
mostly urban. It's in some ways more expansive because
it has really worked with OBCs certainly and
occasionally with segments of Dalits in the slums. It
has got a much more active slum-based program. It's
much more integrated with Bombay city politics than
the BJP is. The BJP has not been able to develop an
urban profile of its own, very markedly, nor a rural
profile. So in some ways it is more ambitious in its
scope. But again it's very, very localized and it's
not internationalized.

SS: And it's also criminalized in the sense of running
protection rackets. It's a little bit like a mafia
with some of the protective functions that mafias
normally discharge. And that gives it a lot of
strength. I don't think the BJP has quite that kind of
activity.

TS: And it's also turning out increasingly to be a
one-leader party. Thackeray was the founder and it
seems to be going down with him.

SS: It has an enormous cult of personality, which
again the BJP does not quite have. They try to project
Vajpayee and Advani, but it's not quite on that scale.
They switch their leaders pretty easily.

Q: How do we understand the role that Congress plays
in its sometime opposition, sometime complicity in the
Hindutva project?

TS: I would say sometimes more than soft Hindutva. The
Congress is very cynical. So far the Congress has
tried to play the Hindu card whenever it felt that the
BJP is gaining because of that. It's only in the last
election and it's only really Sonia Gandhi and a few
other people around her who projected a strong secular
alternative. Up to Rajiv Gandhi, then, in fact Indira
Gandhi in 1981, the tendency had been to be more of
the same thing and contest them on their own ground
instead of setting up another ground.

In Gujarat, its record had been abysmal. It's very,
very bad. Some of the Congress actually rioted. The
Congress leaders did nothing to give any protection to
the Muslims. They completely turned their face away.
And in their next election campaign, Waghilad played
the soft Hindutva card and nothing else. They did not
organize any relief. They completely failed to
organize any relief in Gujarat. Even in UP and other
places, a lot of rank and file Congress people have
been shaped by the shakha (branch) ideology, and maybe
even go to the shakhas for all we know. I found out to
my horror from the work of a Japanese anthropologist
that a pretty strong RSS wing, a front organization,
in Madhya Pradesh is actually funded by the Rajiv
Gandhi foundation. So there all sorts of overlaps and
so on.

The only thing is that the Congress plays the Hindutva
card, the soft Hindutva card, opportunistically. It
has no actual attachment to it as a party. It's not
something that it stands or falls on. It's not its
USP. It's cynical about it, it can use it, and it has
of course unleashed one of the biggest and most
terrible anti-minorities rioting in 1984. So it's
there. But it's not what makes the Congress the
Congress. What makes the Congress the Congress is
difficult to spell out. It's extremely elastic. It's
extremely flexible. It's extremely opportunistic. But
that itself is a bit of a resource, you know, because
it can also accommodate. When it sees it's necessary,
it can also play the secular card.

And historically, that had been the Congress's agenda,
you know, from 1885 onwards, when they could have
defined the nation as Hindu, because the Congress was
a very Hindu organization, it did have an open and
multicultural perspective on the nation.

SS: Also a certain kind of economic policy and a
certain concern for poverty. In a capitalist nation,
though it may, but still, improvement. And perhaps the
Congress historically has had all of the weakness but
at the same time some of the strengths as well as so
to say the unavoidabilities of a centrist formation.
That is what it is. So it's historical method, so to
say, for tackling alternatives, whether on the left or
on the right, has usually been to, depending on what
is the greater pressure, move a bit towards that.

You see that for instance in the 50s and early 60s
when the left still united before the China thing,
seems to be coming up because definitely the united
Communist Party was the biggest party in the
opposition, it was the main opposition party, and the
Nehruvian Congress effectively spiked its guns and
forced the Communists to moderate their policies by
moving a bit to the left. Nehru for instance just
before what the Communists had hoped would be a great
triumph for them, the first Andhra elections in 1955,
announced at Abadi that Congress also stands for a
socialist pattern of society. And that is the peak
period of Nehruvian radicalism. You have the second
five-year plan, a strengthening of the planning
commission, in effect a virtual alliance with the
Soviet Union to build a powerful public sector,
pursuing a pretty problematic but still real economic
development through the public sector.

Then, as the left declined or stagnated, got split and
various things happened, by the 70s with signs of the
Hindu right coming up, the Congress in the later phase
of Indira Gandhi ??¦ Indira also initially carried on
some time more aggressively the Nehruvian policy, but
during the last phase of the emergency and
particularly after the emergency started flirting very
openly with a kind of soft Hinduism. So it is that
kind of thing.

Even culturally. Historically, the Congress has had,
it still has but to a much diminished extent, element
of some phases of slight kind of common language with
the old left. Still has it. It had it much more in the
30s, when some of Nehru's writings and speeches in the
30s seem almost indistinguishable from what the
communists would be saying, apart from loyalty to the
Comintern, which he didn't have. But apart from that
it was very similar.

On the other hand, probably a bigger section would
have a common language with the Hindu right or
whatever. So it is that kind of open-ended situation,
a lot depends on interventions on the left.

TS: You know the Congress communalism has to be very
sharply watched out for, because they have been
responsible for so much. The Neogi Commission, which
practically forbade conversion, that was the
Congress's doing. The opening of the lock of the Babri
Masjid in 1986, again the Congress did that. And also
in a sense playing up to Muslim communalism - with the
Shah Bano case - and of course the 1984 riots. It has
to be watched very carefully.

SS: At the same time you can't in the foreseeable
future do without Congress, because the left is just
strong enough ??¦ and even when it was strong it has
also suffered from bouts of extreme sectarianism,
which hardly helped.

Q: What role does the organized left play in these
developments? What do you think are real activist
strategies that might break the movement for Hindutva?

TS: What the left did in the 1989 elections was
unforgivable. Because the signs were very clear.
Bhagulpur had happened. Meerat Maliana had happened.
The VHP was well on the streets. They just did not
watch the signs. They did not follow the tendencies at
all. They moved like illiterates.

That was a big shock. After 1992 the left got a very
big jolt, and I don't think that is going to happen at
all in the near future, or even in the remote future.
They are far more careful now, though not careful
enough I would say. We were both very shocked. Because
just after Gujarat in July 2002, Praveen Togadia of
the VHP went and ran an armed combat training camp in
[Communist controlled] West Bengal. He was forbidden
to enter into Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, which were
under Congress rule then, and the West Bengal
government allowed him to run a combat training.

But nonetheless in its national policy certainly the
left is very anti-BJP. The kinds of economic policies
it recommends also. It's not only opposed to its
communalism but more so the opposition is on the BJPs
drastically curtailing and selling off the PSUs [the
Public Sector Units], letting foreign multinationals
enter, and so on. So it's a very comprehensive
opposition now.

But I would say that the left is just not following
what the RSS is doing. And nobody is actually tracking
RSS movements and activities. The way in which AWAAZ
has been keeping track of how they function, what they
do, what exactly are their modes of activities and
mobilization, there is absolutely no sense of it on
the ground. And the left is content and most secular
forces are just content to say that they are terrible,
they are atrocious, they are hands off, people have
nothing to do with them, and that's that. They have no
idea of the beast that they confront. And that is a
very, very major weakness.

You know, Teesta Setalvad, in the six months before
the Gujarat riots broke out warned of exactly the same
thing. She talked of Trishul Diskha. She talked of
arms distribution. Nobody was interested. No one was
following it. In our country this is the problem of
the secular forces. And if you do want to talk about
the RSS, if you do want to report on what they are
doing, there is a great resistance. You know, it is
almost as if they are untouchables. And by talking
about them you are adding to their force. I remember
being told by secular feminists when I did some work
on the women's front that if you talk about them, if
you cite what they are saying, you are doubling the
space that they have. They compared it to the
anti-obscenity campaigns. That you do not recycle the
obscene materials into the public domain. So that
would be doubling their space. So this is a very major
failure.

SS: I think historically the left has had two major
failures. I mean lots of failures, but two very
staggering failures in India. One is its inability for
a long time to recognize the dangers of communalism. I
mean both Hindu and Muslim communalism, but in the
last couple of generations it is Hindu communalism
which is of course the bigger force. The other has
been the failure till [the] Mandal [Commission] hit us
all to recognize the significance of caste. And in
both cases, a somewhat vulgar, orthodox Marxism
reduced all other tensions too easily, too speedily,
in a real reductionist manner, to class. So the usual
kind of assumption, not usually often stated but in
the back of the minds of the old generation of
Marxists and even in the present generation sometimes
quite often, that if you can develop the class
struggle these things would take care of themselves.
And that has been a terrible failure. So, with the
result that the dangers as well as sometimes the
opportunities, so far as lower caste formations are
concerned, which this situation, the specifics of the
subcontinent offered or posed, were not really taken
account of. It's quite remarkable how little
communalism and caste except in the context of major
crises like partition and so on, how little they have
figured in Communist Party documents or Comintern
documents for that matter, throughout the whole
period. If you look through them you won't find it. A
third area of failure is gender also, but of course
this is not peculiar to India. That is one of the
major problems with the old left.

TS: But nonetheless the left-organized women's
organizations are flourishing. And the RSS women's
organizations are not. So it's a failure but it's also
one of their strongest areas of work.

SS: In fact, the CPM Women's Front, that is the AIDWA,
All-India Democratic Women's Association, is probably
the one broad front associated with the CPM that is
going from strength to strength. At its last congress
it claimed a membership of 8 million. That is slightly
exaggerated, I don't know, but it's a remarkable
figure. And it has expanded a lot. And it takes up and
intervenes in a whole gamut of situations where
sometimes I at least feel surprised. One would have
expected the Communist Party leaders themselves to go
there, but it's always the women's leaders who go.

TS: In the anti-communal struggles also it has been
the women's organizations of the left that have been
the most active. Not the trade union front. The trade
union fronts could not offer any real help.

SS: Well, trade unions are in a bad way, I would say,
throughout the world. But even then, they couldn't
really, because trade unions have been really very
much immersed in corruption, that is there also, and
you need to understand that also given the present
situation also of overall crisis, the post-Fordist
flexible accumulation, the disintegration of factories
and so on, are all maybe too much for it, but that is
there ??¦

TS: I wouldn't say that, you know, because the AIDWA
in Delhi, the Janwadi Mahila Samiti (the Socialist
Women's Congress) organize precisely among the working
class women. The wives of the people who are losing
their jobs, are thrown out, and doing piecework and so
on - and not just the JMS but other women's
organizations, and these women have been extremely
effective in firefighting operations.

The left is still by far the most organized and
committed force, and instinctively we look to the left
for support. But in 1992, we felt the left was
waffling. The left was nowhere ??¦ they had their
protests but they were just taken unawares. You know
like homing pigeons, we who do not belong to the
organized left on December 1992 just rushed to the
party office to see what they were doing and they
could give us no lead. So on the spot certain
independent initiatives were formed which proved to be
very effective for the time being. They withered away,
but in 1993-94 they did produce a broad platform that
proved to be very effective. And the left was not
really the leading anti-communal force and they did
certain ritualistic things. So, what are these kinds
of independent anti-communal initiatives which do
investigations among them? I would consider Teesta
Setalvad and Communalism Combat to be the most
effective, the most vocal, and the most informed.
That's the most important thing. There's no one who's
been tracking the RSS that closely. And there are some
other women's organizations - the radical and left
women's organizations - have been extremely active.
Very, very active. Certain cultural organizations like
SAHMAT and so on. But that's one leg so to speak.

The other leg should be the social movements. Because
the RSS got where it has got through leading mass
movements. And the left, the organized left, seems to
be incapable of doing that. And its greatest value
lies in the states where it rules, because if there is
a riot, they would send the army in on the first day.
We can depend upon that. But not because they can
actually fight communalism. West Bengal is one of the
most communalized places. They wouldn't allow riots.
They don't know how to tackle communalism but they
wouldn't allow a riot. They know how to tackle a riot.
But the organized left is not leading mass movements.
There are very major mass movements like the Narmada
Bachao Andolan, for years and years, the CMM, the
Chattisgadh Mukti Morcha, which virtually controls
part of Madhya Pradesh. They are declining. But there
are all sorts of movements which are sort of coming up
and going down. At any given point of time there are
vast mass movements. And they might decline a few
years hence, but they would be replaced by something
else. So there are these. And through the WSF there
has been some amount of coordination for the first
time. There is a very conflict-ridden and tense
relationship between the organized left and these
movements, but it's something that is happening. For
the first time they are moving together and at least
working together.

SS: And several issues have been pioneered by these -
I mean they are called by various names, none of them
very accurate, grassroots movements, at least one
section of the NGOs ??¦ NGOs as everywhere come in all
sizes and shapes and characters. But we are talking
about the better NGOs. For instance, environmental
issues, problems of development, destruction of
livelihood caused by big dams, water policy and so on,
historically the left has been pretty terrible on
that, because it, I think even now though they are
beginning to shift a bit, is stuck in that old kind of
Stalinist project - the more big dams the better - and
it is just development and science without any
qualification that is the solution, which is quite
absurd in today's world. And so, I think it was a
major failure that for a long time something like the
Narmada Bachao Andolan got no formal support from the
left. Now, I think that it is changing, and one of the
biggest positive developments in recent times has
been, in that context, in the internal Indian context,
the World Social Forum, and its Mumbai session and so
on, which did bring together for a variety of motives
this large and very variegated world of social
movements, activist groups of various sorts,
grassroots movements, some big, some small, and the
traditional left. And one can only hope that as the
cooperation continues despite all the tensions that
are there ??¦

TS: The elections made it very clear that wherever
globalization has worked in a particular way, that
government has been thrown out. The Congress
government in Karnataka and Chandrababu Naidu's
government in Hyderabad. So those success stories are
not going to sell electorally. And I think that
Congress has got the message quite clear. So I hope
that Congress will follow through with the Common
Minimum Program that they came up with, which even if
a fraction of it is realized it would be a
countervailing force of a very major sort.

Q: And neoliberalism in India? And the left's
complicity in neoliberalism in the state governments?

SS: This is a situation which is worldwide. As you see
in a country like Brazil. Venezuela might be a little
different, but that is because Venezuela is sitting on
oil. So strategically the situation is very different
from the time of say Nehruvian planning, with the end
of that kind of socialism and so on. So that is there,
and of course, the world domination by the US. But the
turn goes deeper. It is also connected, probably, not
just with political groups, whatever their color, but
also with a very significant section of so to say the
upper classes or upper middle classes of India, not
just the businessmen, I'm not talking primarily of the
businessmen, but the bureaucrats, officials of various
sorts, who have become very much a part of the
globalized scene. I mean, there sons or daughters
might be studying in the US or hoping for jobs in
multinationals and all that. All these rather specific
factors can also operate because it's quite remarkable
how again throughout the world governments come and go
and social democratic type regimes have been elected
in country after country but policies don't change.
Sometimes they even get worse, it seems. So there is a
world kind of drive towards that. The countervailing
force so far only comes form the popular movements and
the anti-globalization movements but they haven't been
able to change policies, so far. Or even maybe some
might even say cynically that they haven't been able
to offer anything in the way of a detailed
alternative. Protest is one thing. But what could
governance do - that is another.

In the Indian case there is the further problem,
perhaps, that unlike many of the Latin American
countries and certainly unlike most African countries,
the decision of the dominant groups in India to go in
for an open door to multinationals and so on - I don't
think it was a forced decision. I don't think that
there is very much an alternative for many of the
Latin American countries and not at all for Africa in
the present situation unless something changes in the
metropolitan countries - their policies change. In
India, the bourgeoisie is not like in Africa. It is a
very well developed bourgeoisie. It is profiting from
this - let's be sure of that. It's not a sell out in
that sense to America ??¦ they are a junior partner. And
it's quite a profitable partnership by and large.
There are still tensions. Even a section of the RSS
seems troubled by this, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, and
so on. The old kind of RSS base among the smaller
villages and so on, they are probably getting hit and
they are not liking it and so on. So it is a pretty
difficult situation. And it's not very clear whether
given financial resources and their inadequacies and
the lack of an alternative investment source as Nehru
had - and even then in the 50s, the US tried to starve
out India by refusing loans for state plans and so on.
Those policies also had major problems, but still they
did allow India to build up an independent economic
base. That's become extremely difficult now.

So it's not a situation which is easily resolved
perhaps.

TS: 8% growth is a bit mesmerizing. First of all, it
had no major droughts. Nature had been fairly kind and
all that, so there was nothing that the BJP had to
contend with in that sense. Secondly, growth is
countered by indices which are extremely odd in
themselves and which are really based on middle class
and upper middle class consumption habits. And the
upper middle class and middle class in India might be
poor in relation to the first world, but they do
constitute a fairly significant first world within the
third world. And it's because of the size of India -
it's huge - so what it consumes can give a very
illusory picture. Now they are doing fine; they were
been doing fine. The media completely sold out to this
notion of growth and problem-free development based on
a neoliberal economy and so on. The election therefore
was a huge shock to the media. The media was really
caught with its pants down and it has to reckon with
that. So for the next few days after the election
results came out the media was actually startled and
looking at itself. How come the people who made all
the difference in the elections never appeared on our
columns? In that sense I think our elections were very
different from the American elections where questions
of health, public welfare, do not register as
electoral concerns. In India, they still do, despite
the way in which the media had blanked out these
concerns. Farmers' deaths ultimately made some
difference. They didn't die entirely in vain, one
hopes. I mean, one doesn't know what's going to happen
in the future. But, the message has been very clear.

SS: It also reflects one of the still positive
features in the Indian situation and means the
continuing or latent strength in Indian democracy,
despite everything, that it is the poor who come to
vote in election, whereas here one hears quite often
the absolute poor don't really turn out because they
become rightly utterly cynical - that nothing will
change. The poor don't really get much of anything
from the elections. But they feel that this is the
only time that they get a certain sense of political
power. And that is all that is meant by this so-called
incumbency factor. They can throw out a government.
And repeatedly they have done that. And this time they
have done it well.

TS: So they are not very cynical. Unlike the United
States, it's the very poor who have always changed the
face of politics. So that has some sort of power and
weight still.

Q: What does the Indian ruling class imagine its role
to be in the war in Iraq?

SS: I think the Indian ruling class has internal
differences. Because this is one issue in which the
BJP did add something new. I wouldn't say so much just
a tilt to America, that had started earlier, and again
from the narrow point of view of ruling class
diplomacy the argument would be, sometimes honest
sometimes less honest, "what alternative do we have?"
The nonaligned movement is no longer there; the Soviet
bloc is no longer there. We have to come to such terms
as are possible with the US. But what is very
significant is the alliance with others, the virtual
attempt at an alliance, including military alliance
relating to military know-how, with Israel. Even
though in sheer realpolitik terms it just doesn't make
sense. But they tried to do it. Hopefully these
extreme changes are going to be reversed. I think that
they are being reversed - as shown by India coming on
the stand when Arafat died, and so on. I think that is
fairly easy to reverse.

Well, the other kind of danger was revealed in a flash
when the first thing that the BJP government did in
1998 was to go openly nuclear. Again there is both a
continuity and an element of change with Congress
policies. It was the Congress which exploded the first
bomb in India. But there is this kind of nationalism.
A dream of India as a great power, a nuclear power,
and so on, which is by and large shared between the
BJP, but the BJP being more extreme in that way, the
Congress, and I'm very much afraid that the awareness
of the dangers of this have only belatedly become
widespread in the Left. Because I remember that one
section of the Left very warmly welcomed the explosion
of the first nuclear bomb in 1975. And then it
changed. But it has never been very consistent. So
that is a major problem on which again it is some
independent intellectuals and groups, there is a
movement that has become fairly significant - the
anti-nuclear movement. It has its ups and downs. It
includes people like Achin Vanaik and Praful Bidwai
who have been contending for years on this with little
support. One fears that in 1998 if it had been the
Congress or some kind of United Front, which had ruled
earlier, if they had exploded the bomb, the left
wouldn't have had much objection. But since the BJP
did it, of course, it was natural for even the
Congress to, I wouldn't actually call it protest.

TS: The left didn't have a principled objection to
nuclearization. It wasn't committed to it, but it
didn't have a principled objection. It developed one
because it was the BJP bomb. I don't know if Israel
had been a very major departure, but I don't think
that is going to be a permanent feature.

It has been really interesting, because in the Afghan
War and the Iraq War, the BJP did not supply what the
American government asked them to supply. We had the
impression that the RSS was not very happy about
either war.

SS: And the urban middle class wasn't either. It also
resents this. I don't know whether Bush is a popular
figure, here ??¦

TS: Of course, in Iraq they used the excuse of
non-existent weapons of mass destruction. I suppose
the RSS feared that what if someday America makes the
dame demand of us. The other thing is the war on
terror, the global war on terror, and the BJP behaving
like America's junior partner. There is a wide level
of consensus within India and all sorts of things go
on in the name fighting terror. But this government
[Manmohan Singh's Congress-led coalition] did remove
the POTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act] which was a
very significant step. And I have a feeling that
Manmohan Singh does intend to do something in Kashmir,
I don't know. He might be defeated by forces internal
to the Congress, but there are certain, a certain new
language that is being spoken when he was in Kashmir.
And that is something that reflects a problem within
Indian handling of Kashmir and it is not something
simply done by Pakistan or terrorists employed by
Pakistan. There are some, a few gestures in that
direction. Indian does have very strong potential and
ambition of being, I mean it does see itself as being
the dominant force in South Asia and wants to go
beyond that, build on that. And the war on terror is a
tool in that.

SS: The whole mood has certainly helped the BJP and
the Sangh Parivar a lot. They have been crying
themselves hoarse about the danger from Islam and now
the whole world is talking about Islam as it pertains
to terrorism. It was a godsend for them. As it was a
godsend for Bush.

TS: I don't think any regime can get rid of it or will
want to get rid of it. It is a very ingrained and very
deep-seated thing. And the power and the charisma that
the Indian army enjoys in the country, means that no
body wants to hold it accountable, and the recent
Manipur events showed that. That the army just refused
to come and give evidence.

SS: And I'm afraid that the left virtually kept quiet
about that, apart from some sections, the CPM in
particular kept quiet.

TS: It's a huge army, it's a very bloated army, it's a
very cruel army. The Northeast and Kashmir are being
held like ??¦ they behave like an army in occupation.
It's very clearly not part of India. And there's no
reason why they should be unless they want to be. And
we look at these countries, you know, these states,
like they are forced into a non-consensual marriage,
and they have no right to divorce.

SS: The army remains a kind of a holy cow, so much so
that it is really impossible to think of a single
really anti-war or anti-militaristic Indian film.
There will be variations - some are jingoistic and
others not. But even the kind of film which at one
time would make fun, with a Colonel Klemp kind of
character, with soldiers that might be foolish and
even funny ??¦ Now there are films that are financed by
the Indian army, which are allowed to film in
high0fisk areas like Kargil.

These are the very areas in which between a fairly
secular nationalism and Hindutva there have been
overlaps. And we on the left haven't been sufficiently
aware of these overlaps. Or sometimes we go to the
other extreme of thinking that they are the same. One
has to keep in mind both the distinctions which are
real and the overlaps which are on nuclear weapons or
the army as a holy cow or this whole language of
national integration. National integration is an
ambiguous concept - why should everyone be forcibly
integrated? How much integration?

Q: What social movements in India do you think hold
the most promise?

TS: It's not so much a particular movement that looks
like a very durable movement and has a lot of future
potential but the very fact that there are multiple
movement and that they are just going on and on. They
virtually don't exist because the media does not
report on their activities at all. But nonetheless
they keep working under unimaginably difficult
situations. The Narmada Bachao Andolan was perhaps the
largest of such movements and it has had some success,
not in relation to the Sardar Sarovar Dam but in
relation to a broad front ??¦ the National Alliance of
People's Movements, it's a kind of coordination. In
size, you know, they are pretty large. And some of
them work in a very limited sphere and they are
preoccupied with that. But in that sphere they come up
against forces of global capital and multinationals
and so on and the Indian state. And they do fight them
very courageously, but they do not do enough of the
ideological work among their own cadres. There are
some which are more aware of that, like the
Chattisgarh Mukti Morcha used to be. So in a sense, I
am not very clued into this, because it is difficult
to get sufficient news, information about them,
sitting in Delhi, because the media does not ??¦ unless
you happen to know someone who is making a film or
participating or happen to know someone.

That's how you get to know about these movements,
practically speaking. And because Medha Patkar used to
come to Delhi University to mobilize students and was
able to mobilize a fair number of students we got to a
now a little about them and the CMM and so on. But
it's the fact that they rise to a peak and they go out
of action, but at any given point of time there are
many. And some of these NGO's, so called, even with
foreign funding, which are generally detested by the
left, they are actually challenging at least the local
structures of power. In giving education to the
panchayat, to illiterate members of the panchayat, or
to women to hold their own, or to challenge the local
structures of power, even without meaning to, you
know. Even the very moderate micro-credit operations
do enable rural women, because these credit facilities
are given to women, village women. And that sets up a
chain reaction in some sense that enables them to
challenge domestic violence. It enables them to
challenge the indiscriminate granting of liquor
contracts by which the local labor force is tamed by
the government. They just simply swamp them with
drinks, free drinks. That leads to domestic violence ??¦
so this chain can be broken. Or at least there can be
counter forces. So that is going on all the time but
the net effect of all that, in what direction ??¦

There are also sustained movements against
Singaporization of cities: eviction of hookers, of
pavement dwellers, of squatters, of clearing of urban
slums. There are continuous movements against that. In
the south, which do not get sufficiently reported.
What one pins one's hopes on is that there is a
multiplicity of these movements.

SS: In these movements there has been an interesting
coming together of some of the best elements of
Gandhism, you know the old kind of Gandhians. They've
gone in two directions. One section has really landed
in the Hindutva camp. The others have come here. Along
with these ex-Gandhians you have a significant number
of ex-Naxalites, who have been disillusioned about
armed struggle. By the way, I should mention there are
armed struggles going on, often quite heroic ones, but
it's difficult ??¦ and the more effective of these would
be those which combine armed struggle with a certain
amount of work not qualitatively different from this
kind of work. And that -- there are pockets in several
parts of the country. The only problem is that a)
these have very sharp indeed violent internal
differences and b) groups which carry on with an armed
struggle perspective for x numbers of years tend, and
there are examples of this all over the world - the
Shining Path movement is the classic example - to get
corrupted, really being subsidized by one gang of
warlords. And that certainly has happened in Bihar and
some other areas. And c) perhaps most centrally, the
Indian state is a very strong state.

These movements I don't think worry the state too much
in fact it often provides them opportunity to justify
POTA or the war on terror. Because, it is difficult
given the high development of communications and the
strength of the Indian army to think about these
movements being able to overthrow the state. And so
far the army hasn't been involved at all in
suppressing these movements. A few other groups have
been involved and the police. Whereas in Telangana in
1948, it was a much more serious challenge, not just
because the movement was strong, it was, but also
because the Indian just after independence was a
pretty weak state. It's very different now.

Q: India-Pakistan - what motivates the rivalry between
these two countries and what are solutions?

TS: For the moment the US would not like Indo-Pak
tensions to escalate into any major war, that is one
check. It puts pressure, and where it puts its
pressure, it's hard for India and Pakistan to go
beyond a point. Minor wars, but not more than that. In
a sense the ruling classes and the ruling parties of
both countries need this situation. Need this kind of
threat perception to keep themselves going, to
strengthen the army, to shove class issues out of
sight, and so on. On the other hand, even the BJP did
make certain gestures, did lead to an opening up. What
their economic thinking is, I don't know, because that
is a mutually profitable area potentially. The coming
together of the two countries or at least the easing
of tensions between the two countries. And that's
possibly happening from the BJP onwards, a certain
amount of commercial flow. It's very significant that
in this opening up of borders to a certain extent the
initiative was taken by concerned citizens. Cultural
organizations, who actually began the flow to and from
??¦

I don't know beyond that, because I haven't been to
Pakistan. It's said that people there feel friendly
towards India, not towards the government, but towards
the people of India. Indian people don't feel friendly
towards Pakistan at all.

SS: I'm not so sure of that. There was excessive media
hype when Musharraf came. I think that there is a
rather complicated situation where there is great
mutual tension but also mutual attraction,
particularly also in the two parts of Punjab. And so
it's rather complicated. It's very emotional. And that
emotion, depending on the situation and political
intervention, can lead to extreme confrontation or
something else. For the moment it seems to be leaning
towards something else.

TS: Pakistan went through a second partition. So I
think that ??¦ the whole historical memory about
seceding from India, or whatever, that has become
rather dim. But Indians especially in Punjab are still
living with that and refurbishing the memory and the
bitterness of the 1947 partition. And that's going on.
So there's a lot of anger in India.

SS: The other thing is that the situation is not just
India-Pakistan. Not at all. I suppose that Muslims,
their aspirations, and a significant section of half a
billion people throughout this region would have been
not becoming integrated into India but not to get
integrated or absorbed into Pakistan. But some kind of
alternative. And it's here that the Indian government
under Nehru made a very bad mistake, when Sheik
Abdullah was moving that way. Instead of striking a
bargain, which would have been quite possible given
Sheik Abdullah's history, his excellent personal
relations over a long period with the Congress and
particularly with Nehru, I don't think there would
have been a terrible disaster if an autonomous Kashmir
had come under some kind of international guarantee,
demilitarized and so on. But at the time, the Indian
government and I think the Soviet Union also, which
was very close and almost an ally at that time, felt
that this would be an American base and so wasn't
going to allow this to happen. And the other factor
has been this rather cynical argument that Kashmir
cannot be allowed to leave India because immediately a
very strong secular argument will go, which is rather
tough on the Kashmiris frankly. That for the cause of
Indian secularism they have to swallow this bitter
pill.

TS: And since Indian secularism has done remarkably
little for Kashmiris ??¦ There should be a plebiscite.
And India has no claim as far as I can see. And no one
has done anything.
Snehal Shingavi is a PhD candidate in English at the
University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of
the Interational Socialist Organization.


 







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