1 Introduction
India has been undergoing momentous changes in the economic and political spheres of life. Those who control India's resources and political institutions are engaged in actions that adversely affect the country's majority, i.e. the workers and small-scale producers, including peasants. While there has been a Rightward turn, the Left appears to be increasingly weak. These changes occurring in Indian society are the focus of this book. The economic and political elites know extremely well what they are doing. They, more or less, control the production and dissemination of ideas, including through the media and the academic world, that inform their actions and promote their interests. But do the massesāor at least, the educated elements among the masses āalso have a similar level of knowledge about what is being done to them and what is to be done to change their situation?
Much intellectual writing is either too much based in raw facts (which are often in the form of statistical information about what is happening), so it fails to give an explanatory interpretation of the big picture, or it is based on convoluted conceptual arguments, often with numerous citations and with statements about who said what, with little clear linkage to the real world. Besides, much intellectual work is inadequately critical of social-economic power relations in society or it is not critical at all. More specifically, it fails to adequately situate the changes happening in society in their proper class context, i.e. the context that is defined by the interests and ideas of the economic elite, supported by those who manage the state and by those who control ideas and actions in 'civil society' (the sphere that is outside the economy and the state). The absence of critical thinking, a hallmark of which is the erasure of distinctions in society that is based on class (and social oppression) is especially noted since a pro-market, probusiness turn occurred in the sphere of economic and social policy, since the late 1980s. This is a turn that seeks to obviate, and indeed delegitimize, critical thinking in the name of what is called development or, worse, national development, or national interest, and in the name of good governance. This lack of critical attitude is, more or less, a worldwide trend.
It is also the case that: whether a piece of writing is empirical or conceptual, it is not presented from the standpoint of ordinary educated men and women. That is, it is not always presented in the form in which an educated, intelligent person without a specialist knowledge of a subject can understand the crux of the argument. All this is true about much intellectual writing in general. This is true about intellectual writings about India.1
There is absolutely a role for academic writing and research for a specialist audience. I have written this kind of material myself, more recently a book on the nature of the social critique itself and on the various ways in which critique can be produced (Das, 2014) or indeed how to theorize class inequality and to critically examine society from a consistently class-based perspective (Das, 2017a; Das, 2020). Like other academic writers, I have enjoyed doing so. However, those in academia have a public role: to disseminate difficult ideas in a simple manner so that both academics as well as educated people outside of academia can understand, in order to make sense of what is happening around them and to act on what is happening, if necessary, possible.
It is from this standpoint that this relatively short book is written. This book represents a contradiction. On the one hand, I do believe that research on society must be difficult (Das, 2012a). It must be difficult in part because what appears to be the case is not indeed the case, so one has to go beneath the surface appearances. To be able to do that requires theorization, and theorization, which involves abstraction,2 among many other things, is hard labour (Das, 2012b; Sayer, 1992). On the other hand, research should not be entirely for researchers. Researchers are able to do research partly because they receive support from ordinary people.3 Therefore, this book is partly a response to the advice I have received from colleagues and students and to my own realization that I write for the working masses (and younger scholars who have just begun their serious study).4
The book is conceptually driven and is a result of research, but it seeks to avoid the 'perils' of academicism.5 The essays that make up the book provide short and critical commentaries on different aspects of Indian economy or polity or where these spheres meet. The book discusses some of the themes that are being constantly talked about and are of relevance to ordinary people in India: agrarian crisis; farmers' suicides; neoliberal economic policy; protests against dispossession; poverty; the state of democracy; and the religious Right, etc.
The discussion in this book aims to help us to see society in India (and elsewhere), in terms of the reciprocal interaction between the economic and the political processes, and in terms of unequal power relations (between the rich and the poor, and between state elites and ordinary citizens) that determine the nature of that interaction. This is a standpoint that allows one to envisage a future society that is deeply democratic in all spheres of human society. The nature of the discussion presented here is informed by, and is hoped to shed light on, the fact that ordinary people's right to live a decent life has not been quite respected, and that, in more recent times, there has been an attack on India's democratic and secular tradition.6
As mentioned, the book seeks to promote a critical imagination among the educated strata of the working people, including, but not just, those who are in the universities and colleges, so the degree of academic nature of the discussion, with its usual protocols (references, quotations, detailed presentations of various sides of a debate, etc.), is kept to the minimum, although some Chapters are somewhat more academic in nature than others. The book talks about what has been happening in just one country, India, which is, arguably, a most interesting labouratory for social science research, given its combined and uneven development.7 It is hoped that people living in other parts of South Asia, and indeed in the global south, can relate to its content.
There are 12 Chapters in the remainder of the book. Chapter 2 talks about the nature of neoliberalism (i.e. neoliberal capitalist class relations), and the state of the Indian economy in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis. Chapter 3 reflects on a specific issue that is, in many ways, a manifestation of neoliberal capitalism: the continuing agrarian crisis and farmers' suicides. This topic is examined from a theoretical standpoint that places the Indian economy in its global context, arguing that the agrarian crisis is not merely agrarian.
A major tendency of neoliberal capitalism is towards the commodification of everything. This includes education. Chapters 4-5 shed light on the commodification of one aspect of education, i.e. preparation for entrance exams for civil services and for professionalāespecially technicalāeducation. These Chapters reflect on the nature of the craze for civil services and for technical education, and on how this is connected to the class character of the Indian economy and polity.
With the onset of neoliberalism there has also risen a right-wing view of economic development (and of society and polity, in general). Chapters 6-7 offer a critical reflection on what is being called the Gujarat model of development or 'Modani' model of development, and on the Hindu Right's world-view, including its view of nationalism. Among other things what this discussion suggests is that: as long as there are conditions in the world which make people follow a religion, they should have the freedom to do so, that all religions contain, however contradictorily and inadequately, some humanistic and lofty ideas about humanity (while they also contain regressive ideas and promote political passivity), that no religious group (the majority or a minority) should suffer from discrimination, that no religion should be seen as inferior or superior to another, that affairs of the state and politics should be kept away from people's religious views/practices (to the maximum extent possible), and that no one should be allowed to politicize people's religiosity and mobilize public support, covertly or overtly, in the name of religion. The Chapters also argue that society's problems such as poverty, unemployment, low wages, etc. do not fundamentally exist because of the religious divide but that when religion-based politics and policies in support of neoliberal capitalism are combined and reinforce each other, problems get worse and economic development gets more lopsided, that the politically-manufactured conflict between religions diverts attention from the real cause of society's problems that affect the common people of all religions, which points to the need to unite them across the religious divide, to demand democratic and social rights, etc.
Chapters 8-9 broaden the scale of analysis to consider the problem of poverty as such. Proverbially associated with India, poverty has to be seen in terms of the class character of societyāi.e. in terms of the question of who controls society's resources and whether they are used for profit or to meet people's needs. After introducing briefly, what a class analysis of poverty might look like, Chapter 8 critically reflects on the weakness of the Left's theory of Indian society, partly in relation to the problem of poverty. The next Chapter discusses in some detail the connection between the state and poverty, arguing that the capitalist state is a main causeāif not the main causeāof the continued existence of poverty in a class-divided society such as India's.
Chapters 10-13 turn to progressive-politics-from-below. Chapter 10 discusses the crisis of development as the crisis of livelihood and provides critical reflections on the politics of protest against neoliberalism. The idea of protests against neoliberalism, including against SEZs, is found to be inadequate. If that is the case, and if the right-wing politics (discussed in Chapters 8-9) is also problematic, then the question is: what is to be done?
This matter is discussed in Chapters 11-13, from the standpoint of the economic, social and political rights of the workers and small-scale producers, who are the majority of the nation, but from a perspective that is also critical of the current theory and practice of the Left. These three Chapters constitute the conclusion part of the book. Together they argue for a stronger Left that must work on the basis of united front principles to become a tribune of the people, to fight against tyranny and oppression wherever they exist. The Left should promote a counter-hegemonic class-consciousness of the masses through a critical engagement with theoretical ideas that explain the nature of capitalist society and the nature of a relatively less developed capitalist society such as India's.8 This is a consciousness that imagines a new society, one that is thoroughly democratic in every sphere of life (economic, political, etc.), and that is based on the principle that society's resources should be collectively controlled by, and in the interest of, ordinary men, women and children (i.e. those who perform the bulk of the skilled and unskilled work, some of whom may be slightly better off than others) to meet their material and cultural needs. Such a society is very different from the current Indian society where one per cent of the population controls more than half of its wealth, and which decides the economic and political conditions, and where the vast majority of the people are unemployed or under-employed, or when employed, they are not earning an income to allow them to experience a decent standard of living. A counter-hegemonic consciousness must seek to undermine any existing hegemonic consciousness from the side of the Right or the Centre, that often seeks to support/justify one or both of the following in varying degrees:
- (a) an attack on democratic rights of people to freely express one's ideas and to engage in acts of resistance that do not resort to unprovoked violence, an attack that is increasingly manifested in communal terms (i.e. attack on religious minorities) and casteist terms (i.e. attack on Dalits); and
- (b) a system of class-exploitation, as well as dispossession of small-scale producers, and privatization of public resources (e.g. state-owned companies; governmentowned land or forests) in order to increase profits in the hands of domestic and foreign businesses.
A counter-hegemonic consciousness must also seek to be critical of the existing hegemonic consciousness from the Left. This has taken at least two forms. One is that while in power, the Left has practised neoliberal policies. But more importantly, the Left's general vision is to confine itself, more or less, to a fight for a modification of the current system to make it slightly more tolerable, including on the basis of trade union struggles and putting pressure on the state for minimally pro-poor and easily reversible policies, without such a fight being conducted within the framework of the fight to transcend the system itself in order to establish democracy in every sphere of life which would allow the common people, those who perform manual an...
