India After Naxalbari by Bernard D'Mello

Author:Bernard D'Mello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2018-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

BIG BUSINESS AND POLITICS-AS-BUSINESS

Basically, with the rise of a financial aristocracy, the distinction between the political and the economic, the “public” and the “private,” is increasingly blurred. Politics has also become a form of business, and a very lucrative one at that. Take the two major political parties, the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Their declared sources of funds are not even a fraction of their expenses, that is, if one looks at these over an electoral cycle. In the present neoliberal era, wherever and whenever they are or have been in power, they have helped the financial aristocracy in plundering the nation’s wealth of natural resources, aided the “big bulls” in engineering the rise of the stock and real estate markets through various means, all to amass private fortunes.

There has been a veritable orgy of corruption and graft, influence peddling, bribery and embezzlement, all following the deregulation and unfurling of “economic freedom” for the moneybags from July 1991 onward. Buying the votes of parliamentarians, purchasing the appointment of particular individuals as union ministers, shopping for the pens of senior media persons,40 in effect, paying for “‘justice,” snapping up the support of some NGOs and social activists, not to forget “laundering” of black money, and snapping up mines, forests, land, water, and spectrums at throwaway prices, all these maneuvers have been subject to market principles. Yet Team Anna, and a number of other decent people, still believe that the system can be reformed by Lok Pals and Lok Ayuktas, this commission and that legislation.41 What does one do when the system is rotten to the core? Its managers produce a White Paper on black money, and the business press and TV debate it. Some may even announce a “fast unto death” if some bill to set up another investigatory authority is not passed or their demand for some special investigation team to probe their charges of corruption against ministers, including the prime minister, is not met. But, sadly, things have gone far past such devices to reform the system.

The “February Revolution [of 1848 in France] aimed directly against the finance aristocracy”; it “complet[ed] the rule of the bourgeoisie by allowing, besides the finance aristocracy, all the propertied classes to enter the orbit of political power.” But is bringing the so-called “industrial bourgeoisie” back into the circuit of power the answer to the problems of the Indian people? Who are the Indian industrial bourgeoisie’s most powerful constituents today? The IT and pharmaceutical “entrepreneurs”? The Azim Premjis, Shiv Nadars, Cyrus Poonawalas, N. R. Narayana Murthys, Pankaj Patels, and K. Anji Reddys? But can the IT entrepreneurs contract with the who’s who of Wall Street’s financial conglomerates and gain as arbitrageurs of India’s cheap “human capital” without the banks, the stock exchange, the realty firms, and the SEZ developers? According to a government report of 2008, 62 percent of the total number of India’s SEZs were IT/IT-enabled services SEZs. So aren’t the IT and ITeS entrepreneurs beneficiaries of the process of

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