India: Right ousted, but will the workers gain?

Submitted by Anon on 17 June, 2004 - 6:47

By Harry Glass

What do the surprise results of the Indian elections mean for the Indian working class?

The first surprise was the defeat of the Hindu chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has ruled India for the past five years. Most commentators thought that a BJP victory was inevitable, yet the party lost 4% of its vote compared with 1999 and more than 40 of its 182 seats.

The BJP fought the election under the slogan "India is shining" and promised to continue its neo-liberal economic policies. But the BJP's campaign had little resonance with the two-thirds of the 670 million voters who live in the countryside or with the one in four of the population who live in severe poverty.

The defeat of the BJP is also a blow to the communalism it whipped up whilst in office. In Gujarat, the BJP was complicit in the anti-Muslim pogrom that caused 2,000 deaths two years ago. The RSS (National Volunteers' Society) from which the BJP sprung, has been compared to fascism and the party has promoted Hindu fundamentalism and attacked secularism.

The second surprise was the resurgence of the Indian National Congress party, which has led most Indian governments since independence. Because of India's first past the post electoral system, Congress gained about a third more seats despite its vote falling by 2%.

The decision of Congress leader Sonia Gandhi to decline the nomination for Prime Minister was certainly unexpected, but she has taken the role of party chair and will remain an influential figure. Instead her preferred candidate Manmohan Singh has become prime minister, but with fewer than 150 of the 545 seats, Congress will have to form a coalition government.

The appointment of Singh is a clear sign that India will continue with neo-liberalism. In fact Singh was the Congress finance minister in 1991 who initiated India's biggest-ever package of "liberalisation" measures. Singh's first statement was to say that his priority was to "wage the battle against poverty", promising that economic reforms would continue, but with a "human element".

Singh did say that his government would not sell any more of its stake in the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, an energy prospector, or GAIL India, a gas distributor, two of the most precious of the Indian state's "nine gems". State-run banks would also remain state-run, though some loss-making state enterprises could be sold off.

The other great surprise was the showing of the left. The "Left Front" alliance -Communist Party of India-Marxist CPI(M), Communist Party of India CPI, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party, won around 7% of the vote and gained 62 seats, mainly in West Bengal and Kerala.

The left's showing means it holds the balance of seats that allows Congress to rule. The largest constituent of the Left Front, the CPI-M, which won 44 seats, has said it "cannot be part of the Congress-led alliance which will form the government, but it will, in order to ensure a stable and viable government, extend support to it from outside".

However this is a very strange left. The CPI(M) has ruled West Bengal since 1977, and despite its windy rhetoric against "imperialist penetration" has courted foreign capital. For example, the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation boasts that the state offers a "pool of technically qualified people" produced by high-quality higher education institutions. As a result multinational companies have moved into the state - IBM plans to recruit 4,000 workers there by the end of the year.

And the CPI(M) has also restricted the powerful trade unions in the state. In 2002, labour laws were amended to declare information technology an essential service and ban strikes. The state's Chief Minister said recently: "If you can do business in China, you can surely do it here".

The reference to China is no coincidence. The CPI(M) originates in a pro-Maoist split from the CPI in 1964. Today it praises the reforms being carried out by the Chinese Communist Party. It is far from being a force for working-class self-emancipation, and does not provide Indian workers with an authentic voice in politics.

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