Abstract
Nationalism in India arose out of resistance to colonialism and thus had a different character than the bourgeois nationalism of European countries after the treaty of Westphalia. The inclusive nature of Indian nationalism has been eroded, however, as a big corporate sector has grown in the economy and the Hindutva ideology has grown alongside it. What has now happened is an alliance between the two forces, the ‘neo-liberal’ regime in the economy having its counterpart in a ruling semi-fascist ideology. The latter presents the Hindus as a homogenous whole, whose dominance, it aims at establishing. In reality, it serves the interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy, and so is adverse to the well-being of the vast majority of India’s population.
The anti-colonial struggle in India had been informed by an ideology of nationalism that was fundamentally different from the nationalism that had developed in Europe in the wake of the Westphalian Peace Treaties in the seventeenth century. There were at least three basic differences. 1
First, the nationalism that developed in Europe put the ‘nation’ above the people: The ‘nation’s interest’ was not synonymous with the people’s interest, defined as an improvement in their material conditions of life; on the contrary, the people were always supposed to make sacrifices for the ‘nation’. This was conceptually the very opposite of anti-colonial nationalism.
Second, anti-colonial nationalism was necessarily inclusive in nature, seeking to unite all against the common enemy, namely the colonial power. ‘Nationalism’ in Europe, by contrast, had always identified an ‘enemy within’, for instance, the Catholics in Northern Europe, the Protestants in Southern Europe and the Jews everywhere.
And third, ‘nationalism’ in Europe had an annexationist, aggressive character from its very inception. It had been yoked from its inception to an imperialist project. It is no accident that the first modern imperialist venture, namely Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, occurred within months of the Westphalian Peace Treaties. This was unlike anti-colonial nationalism that sought to forge links with other countries and peoples who were similarly engaged in struggles against colonialism.
The European ‘nationalism’ constitutes quintessentially bourgeois nationalism. Its difference from anti-colonial nationalism can be explained in class terms by two circumstances: First, the anti-colonial struggle itself was a multi-class struggle with the peasantry playing a major role, rather than only a bourgeois struggle, which meant that it could not be stamped by a quintessentially bourgeois nationalism anyway and second, the bourgeoisie in the colonies, having itself been stymied in its growth by the colonial order, had a character very different from the emerging bourgeoisies of Europe in the seventeenth century, which explains the use of the term ‘national bourgeoisie’ for it in the literature of the Communist International.
The bourgeoisie, especially the big corporate bourgeoisie in India, has come a long way since then, because of which the ideology it espouses and propagates today is very different from that of the anti-colonial struggle and the post-independence dirigiste regime, that is, one where the state aimed at exercising control over the nature and direction of the economy, which carried forward, no matter how imperfectly, the legacy of that struggle. To trace this journey from an ideology of anti-colonial nationalism that pervaded the people’s consciousness, and was even subscribed to willy-nilly by the big bourgeoisie, to the ideology being sought to be propagated today to buttress the hegemony of the corporate-financial oligarchy, in alliance with the Hindutva forces, is the purpose of this article.
The Changes in the Economy
This journey has been marked by a double transition. But before I discuss this double transition at the ideological level, it is worth recalling the material development which has underlain it, and which has been marked by two features. The first is the big bourgeoisie’s embrace of ‘globalisation’, its integration with globalised or international finance capital, and its acceptance of the neo-liberal regime associated with the hegemony of globalised finance in the place of the earlier dirigiste regime. The second is the crisis into which the neo-liberal regime itself has entered in the post-2008 period.
The strategy of national economic development pursued after independence through abandoning the so-called ‘free-trade’ and ‘free-market’ policies of the colonial era (modified only by the limited amount of ‘discriminating protection’ offered to industry in the inter-war period and by market intervention in some commodities, especially foodgrains, during World War II) had been welcomed by the big bourgeoisie. In fact, the big bourgeoisie’s ambition of acquiring the domestic market for itself at the expense of metropolitan capital (forcing the latter to enter into collaboration agreements with itself for locating plants domestically), and having an array of supporting financial institutions with whose help it could produce for this market, was well-served by the dirigiste regime, notwithstanding the network of controls that this regime imposed upon it. The strategy of economic nationalism in short corresponded to the big bourgeoisie’s desire for carving out a space for itself in relative autonomy from metropolitan capital. The counterpart of this economic strategy in the realm of foreign policy was the policy of ‘non-alignment’.
The tenability of this economic strategy depended crucially upon a continued expansion of the home market. And the key to this lay in a continued expansion of public investment. The expansion of public investment in turn depended upon two factors: the growth of agricultural output (which itself of course depended inter alia upon the growth of public investment) and the ability of the State to keep impounding by fiscal means a share of the economic surplus for its own expenditure, net of transfers to the bourgeois and landed interests. Any expansion of public investment beyond what these factors allowed was generally ruled out, as it would cause excessive inflationary pressures in the economy, to the detriment of the entire labouring class and the salariat, and hence have adverse effects on the electoral fortunes of the government in power.
But with land concentration left more or less untouched by the limited land reforms that were undertaken after independence, 2 the rate of agricultural growth, though greatly higher compared to the colonial era, remained constrained, and with the government’s ability to impound the economic surplus dwindling over time (which brought about a fiscal crisis of the State), the dirigiste strategy increasingly moved towards a dead end. The big bourgeoisie, stifled by this development, began looking for a closer integration with international capital as a means of breaking out of its straitjacket, and this occurred at a time when metropolitan capital itself was becoming increasingly globalised. It is this conjuncture which underlay the big bourgeoisie’s turn towards neo-liberalism.
The big bourgeoisie has done remarkably well under the neo-liberal dispensation, as is evident from the massive increase in wealth inequality during this period. According to Credit Suisse data, the top 1 per cent of households in India today control almost 60 per cent of the total wealth of all households in the country. This wealth concentration has occurred alongside an acceleration in the growth rate of the gross domestic product (GDP), whose chief beneficiaries too have been not the workers and peasants (the peasants, on the contrary, have been the victims of a process of ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ which has also affected the workers adversely through swelling the reserve army of labour) but the surplus earners and those other sections who live off the surplus. This last social group, consisting of lawyers, doctors in private hospitals, advertisement executives, public relations experts, event managers and such like, which includes a substantial (upper) segment of the middle class, has been a vocal supporter of the neo-liberal regime, and, given its importance in a society like ours, which Michal Kalecki (1971) 3 had famously drawn attention to, albeit while painting a somewhat misleading picture about the prevalence of an ‘intermediate regime’, gives it a strong social base.
But the boom years of the world economy under the neo-liberal regime, which produced the high growth phase in India and several other third world countries, depended essentially upon asset price bubbles in the United States. The ‘dot-com’ bubble in the USA in the 1990s and the ‘housing’ bubble thereafter had sustained the boom in the world economy; the collapse of the housing-bubble in 2008 has plunged the world economy into a crisis, from which it is yet to recover, and whose impact is now reaching our shores as well, posing a serious threat to the neo-liberal regime in India and the hegemony of the corporate-financial oligarchy that it represents.
The ideological transitions that I discuss below have to be seen in the context of these changes occurring in the sphere of the economy.
The Accompanying Ideological Transition
Neo-liberalism was a fundamental departure from the dirigiste regime and hence from the entire thrust of the ideology of nationalism that underlay our anti-colonial struggle and informed that regime. But, the anti-colonial tradition was strongly rooted among the people. The ideological defence of neo-liberalism, therefore, had to be presented in a manner that apparently did not break with the anti-colonial tradition; it had to be effected in other words by presenting neo-liberalism itself as a carrying forward of the goals of the anti-colonial struggle.
This was done accordingly under the guise of nationalism, but by introducing a subtle shift in this concept, whereby economic growth per se became a yardstick of the nation’s advance. There was of course nothing novel about this. In fact, post-Westphalian ‘nationalism’ in Europe which had put the ‘nation’ above the people had also emphasised the wealth of the ‘nation’, seen in total isolation from the conditions of life of the people at large, as the desired objective of the ‘nation’.
A host of writers from the Mercantilists to Adam Smith had been occupied with the question of how this wealth could be augmented. It is indeed a curious fact that Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which took it for granted that the augmentation of wealth was desirable, was also candid that a larger national wealth did not result in any higher wages for the workers. And David Ricardo who rigorously carried forward the analysis of ‘classical political economy’, and was lauded by Marx for it, was perfectly clear that workers’ wages would remain stuck at a subsistence level despite capital accumulation unless they curbed their propensity to procreate and stepped out of a world where the Malthusian theory of population prevailed. The workers, in short, were supposed to be responsible for their plight and capital accumulation could not help them, and yet this did not deter Ricardo from lauding capital accumulation, the rationale for which in short had nothing to do with the condition of the workers.
The apotheosis in neo-liberal India of a high growth rate of the GDP as a ‘national’ objective therefore was nothing new; it merely harked back to what the bourgeois nationalism that developed in Europe had traditionally emphasised. What was new was its presentation as if it was a continuation of, and followed directly from, the anti-colonial nationalism of the freedom struggle. And this was done by suggesting that GDP growth brought about an improvement in the people’s living standard.
This view was originally argued through adopting a ‘trickle-down’ thesis. But after that thesis had got discredited, the argument took another form, namely that while high GDP growth did not automatically improve the people’s living standards, it created a situation where the government through fiscal means could do so by mobilising larger revenues from a larger GDP. This argument, given in the Eleventh Five-year Plan document, became a common justification for GDP fixation and ‘nationalism’ based upon such fixation.
Official pronouncements never tired of emphasising GDP growth (and they still have not, judging by the Modi government’s recent attempt to ‘discredit’ the earlier UPA government by putting out new statistical estimates which scale down the GDP growth which the UPA had achieved). When it became clear for instance that even the high GDP growth that had been achieved under neo-liberalism had not ameliorated poverty, the then Finance Minister Chidambaram argued that this only showed that poverty amelioration required a still higher GDP growth rate!
Indeed, this GDP fixation became so acute that the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had identified the Maoists as the number one enemy of the country, had explained the reason for his doing so in terms of the fact that as long as the Maoists operated, the country might as well bid goodbye to any hopes for a 10 per cent growth rate!
This GDP-centred nationalism, which claimed lineage from the anti-colonial nationalism of the earlier period, actually, however, meant a complete withdrawal from it, indeed a complete inversion of it. If a high GDP growth rate is taken to be the national objective, then it follows that whoever helps in achieving it is serving the nation well, while whoever is acting in a manner that prevents such higher growth from being realised is ipso facto anti-national. And since growth depends upon investment, the big capitalists who undertake investment are the real nationalists, while the workers who demand higher wages, and the peasants who struggle against the take-over of their land for infrastructure or industrial projects are letting the nation down. And so, of course, whosoever promotes worker or peasant struggles is anti-national.
The means of carrying forward the anti-colonial nationalism in the interests of the people therefore are, paradoxically, to attack the people themselves, their struggles against dispossession and impoverishment. Nationalism demands, on this view, the appeasement and subsidisation of big capitalists in the interests of the people. Of course, this was never stated as such in the beginning but it was implicit in the GDP-centred nationalism that developed under the neo-liberal regime and became clear with the passage of time.
Rudolf Hilferding pointed out in his opus Das Finanzkapital (1910) 4 that the ideology of finance capital consisted of a glorification of the ‘national idea’. Hilferding, however, was writing of a conjuncture when finance capitals were essentially nation-based and engaged in intense inter-imperialist rivalry. A glorification of the ‘national idea’ by finance capital in such a conjuncture was understandable as it buttressed the position of each set of finance capital belonging to a particular metropolitan nation against its rivals.
What is ironical however is that this glorification of the ‘national idea’ occurs even when such rivalry has got muted and when finance capital has got globalised: What is even more ironical is that it occurs also in third world countries like India where the interest of the domestic corporate-financial oligarchy is made synonymous with the interest of the nation while pretending all the time that the interest of the nation is synonymous with the interest of the people.
The Crisis of Neo-Liberalism and the Addition of Hindutva
I now come to the second transition in the development of the ideology sustaining the hegemony of the corporate-financial oligarchy. This refers to the buttressing of the ‘national idea’ propagated by finance capital with the addition of Hindutva. And it becomes necessary because of the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. With the onset of the crisis, the corporate-financial oligarchy senses a threat to its hegemony and needs an additional prop to defend itself. It needs to find an explanation for the crisis not in the functioning of the system, but in the existence and the machinations of an ‘other’; it also needs to divert people’s anger and energy towards combating this ‘other’ rather than the hegemony of the corporate-financial oligarchy that characterises the system.
Hindutva, of course, is the specific form that this additional prop takes in the Indian situation, but all over the world, there are similar tendencies coming up in the context of the crisis. They take cognisance of the unemployment and distress caused to the working people by the crisis but blame for it the ‘other’, such as immigrants, rather than the system and seek to create the supremacist unity of a dominant group in society against this ‘other’. They have an obvious ‘usefulness’ for corporate capital; and where this ‘usefulness’ has led to their being backed strongly by corporate capital, as in India, they have moved to the political centre-stage and even acquired power, pushing the polity in the direction of a fascist State. One should not, of course, expect from this to be a mere re-enactment of what had happened in the 1930s in Europe; the situation today is very different from then, but the direction of movement they unleash is unmistakable.
In the Indian context, this additional ideological prop, which takes the form of Hindutva, entails at least three changes in the concept of the ‘anti-national’. First, it now gets extended from the non-government organisations, Maoists, and other such groups who are accused of opposing so-called ‘development’ by speaking up for the displaced peasants and tribals and all those peasants and tribals who actually follow them to newer groups. Above all, others in this list of new additions are the Muslims who are branded by the Hindu supremacists as being actual or potential sympathisers of ‘terrorists’ out to wreck the ‘nation’. But the list also includes the Dalits and other oppressed segments and groups and those speaking for them, who challenge the concept of a homogeneous Hindu society propagated by the Hindutva groups.
Second, there is an attempt at a dual homogenisation that occurs in this context. On the one hand, there is an attempt to present the ‘Hindus’ as a homogeneous entity whose supremacy is to be instituted; on the other hand, there is an attempt to present all the opponents of the corporate-backed Hindutva elements too as part of a homogeneous group of ‘anti-nationals’, starting from those opposed to the so-called ‘development’ agenda taken over by the Hindutva forces from corporate capital (including both its actual victims and those who speak up for them), to the Muslims, to the Dalits asserting their identity against the casteism of Hindu society and to the intellectual opponents of the Hindutva project. They are all increasingly assimilated into a single entity as being ‘anti-national’ and several portmanteau terms, such as ‘terrorists’, ‘urban Naxals’, ‘urban Maoists’, ‘seditious elements’ and ‘tukdetukde gang’, are coined to refer to them.
The construction of such rival homogeneous identities is essential to Hindutva-type projects. In fact, it is a hallmark of all fascist projects, and the reason for this would become clear if we contrast it with an alternative mobilisation. When, say, peasants come together, they do so on material demands whose fulfilment would benefit all of them in common. Whether or not these benefits actually accrue can be assessed and measured, precisely because they concern material benefits. There is no need to obliterate the diversity existing among the peasants even when we use a common concept to describe their struggle.
But the Hindus as a whole, being the majority community, cannot possibly derive any material benefits from any supremacist project. The institution of a Hindu Rashtra or the construction of a Ram temple does not entail a material benefit for all those who are covered by the conceptual description of a Hindu; on the contrary, most of them would continue to be mired in their material deprivation while others among them would continue to wallow in their material luxury. To make the former feel enriched by such an ‘achievement’ on a par with the latter, the differences between them must be obliterated, that is, a homogeneous Hindu must be constructed. And the condition for such a construction must be the construction also of a homogeneous ‘other’ that constitutes its enemy.
Third, since any supremacism, including Hindutva supremacism, requires the abandonment of a discourse that relies on evidence for establishing the truth-value of a proposition, all supremacist discourses are in fundamental conflict with any worthwhile academic, or more generally intellectual, activity. The concept of the ‘anti-national’ therefore gets extended to cover the intelligentsia at large, which prepares the ground for an attack on universities and other institutions of higher education and to substitute the activity of mere skill-acquisition for that of education centred on critical thinking.
Since such an emphasis on skill rather than knowledge acquisition is also in the interest of the corporate-financial oligarchy who would like to prevent any critical voices against their hegemony and whose promotion of the commoditisation of education essentially serves a very similar purpose, we have here yet another instance of a convergence of interest between Hindutva and the corporate-financial oligarchy.
A thoughtful and critical intelligentsia is anathema for both; hence, the term ‘anti-national’ gets increasingly extended to cover ever-widening segments of the intelligentsia. What is more, the threat of being branded ‘anti-national’ serves to silence several sections of the intelligentsia and to that extent prevent any intellectual challenge to the hegemony of the Hindutva-corporate alliance.
To say this is not to suggest that this effort at silencing will necessarily succeed; in fact, at present, resistance, including intellectual resistance, is building up against this hegemony. But this is clearly the direction of movement that the Hindutva-corporate alliance is following and will continue to follow in the ideological realm.
The formation of such an alliance, and its consequence in the form of a propelling of the Hindutva forces into political power, is of course the most striking political development of contemporary India. It recalls Michal Kalecki’s remark (1971) 5 made in the context of the 1930s that under fascism, ‘the State machinery is under the direct control of a partnership of big business with fascist upstarts’.
The contrast between what had happened a few years ago when the head of the Tata group had marched in Mumbai in a demonstration against communalism, and what happened recently when the head of the same Tata group made a trip to Nagpur to visit the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh underscores the phenomenon of this alliance being forged.
Concluding Observations
The ideological apparatus being sought to be erected by the Hindutva-corporate alliance is necessarily authoritarian and antithetical to freedom of thought and expression. In fact, being authoritarian in this sense is a condition for its being able to mobilise people in its support, which requires the construction of a bogey of the ‘other’ without any possibility of being contradicted. The movement towards a fascist State may not be as rapid as it had been in the 1930s; and indeed the ultimate destination of this movement itself may not be the same as in the 1930s. But this should not make us blind to the direction of this movement.
Looking at the ideology that is emerging in today’s India and seeking to assert its hegemony, purely in terms of the Hindutva discourse, or purely in terms of a neo-liberal discourse, is misleading. The context of the world capitalist crisis ensures that just as there is an alliance between the corporate-financial oligarchy and the Hindutva elements at the political level, there is also an ideological coalescence between what one attributes individually to these two allies. This fusion is the emerging ideology of the corporate-financial oligarchy in contemporary India.