India After Independence: 1947-2000 (76 page)

Women, therefore, have been the main victims of India’s failures on the elementary education and literacy fronts. When primary schools in
villages do not function, boys are sent to neighbouring villages or towns or even to private schools, but girls are usually just kept at home. Social conservatism, combined with the notion that investing money in a girl’s education is like watering a plant in another man’s house, since the benefits will accrue to the girl’s in-laws’ family, lead to this decision. But if schools are available, and teachers are regular, and classes are held, a large proportion of girls do get sent to school in most parts of the country. The consciousness of the value of education has spread to this extent even among the poorest sections. In fact, the poor are more aware that education is their one route to upward social mobility. But in a situation when single-teacher schools accounted for one-third of all schools (in 1986) and where, as recent surveys have shown, two-thirds of teachers were found to be absent during inspections, where there are fifty-eight children for each teacher at the 6-10 age group level, where India ranks 82nd in terms of the proportion of public expenditure on education to GNP among 116 countries for which data is available, it is small wonder that the rate of female literacy is as low as 39 per cent (1990-91).

Another factor that is very important in improving gender justice is the provision of free primary health facilities at the grassroots level. As in the case of education, if health facilities are not easily accessible or are expensive, the loss is unequally that of women and female children. In fact, unequal access to improved facilities as well as to improved living standards is the major cause of the sharp decline in the female-male ratio in India from 972 to 927 between 1901-1991. It is not that the survival chances of women have decreased in absolute terms—on the contrary. But relative to men, women have gained less from the improved access to health facilities and better living standards and therefore their proportion has declined. To correct this imbalance, health facilities have to be brought within the reach of women. Where this has been done, as in Kerala, where over 90 per cent of women deliver their babies in medical institutions, the results are dramatic.

Thus, if the legal and political rights granted to women in the Constitution, which are theirs by virtue of their own efforts as well as by all norms of social justice, are to be realized and democratized, millions of women have to become capable of understanding and exercising them. Kerala, and Himachal, at two poles of the country, have shown the way: the heartland has to follow. The women’s movement also needs to incorporate education and health as priorities into its strategy for women’s empowerment.

The national liberation struggle that gave birth to an independent India in 1947 left a deep imprint on the nature of the post-colonial Indian state. Its legacy has seen the nation through for more than half a century, though now, as it enters the new millennium, some of the forces against which the movement had stood so steadfastly have surfaced, and threaten the nation’s delicate fabric. The national movement or the liberation struggle was a multi-class popular movement of the Indian people. This century-long struggle led to a ‘national revolution’; a revolution that was national in the sense that it cut across class, caste, religious community, gender, age, representing them all, even if differentially. Seldom has a revolution in any country attracted the finest of its people from such diverse spheres. Social and religious reformers, poets, writers, musicians, philosophers, traders, industrialists, political thinkers, statesmen, all joined hands with the common people, gave direction to and learnt from their initiative to bring about one of the biggest mass movements in human history. It is this character of the movement that lent the Indian nation state, ‘new’ that it was in relation to many others, a deep legitimacy and resilience.

Apart from the all-embracing, mass character of the national movement, there were certain other basic features of this remarkable occurrence which not only explain the survival of the nation state but its distinct character. These were its deep anti-imperialism, total commitment to secular democracy and an egalitarian, pro-poor orientation. Being a mass movement, as distinct from a cadre-based revolutionary movement, meant that these ideas were carried to the deepest layers of Indian society, making any reversal from these basic features an extremely difficult process. The kind of strong resistance governments in India faced in any move to distance themselves from these principles (witness the response to the temporary restriction on democratic rights during the Emergency, 1975-77) makes an interesting comparison with the ease with which the Soviet Union and China were able to do a virtual about-turn from the legacy of their socialist revolutions.

The extent to which the basic ideas of the Indian liberation struggle or national movement permeated into or impacted upon the governments
or regimes that came to power after independence and on other state apparatuses such as the bureaucracy, police, judiciary, legislature, education system, media, political parties, etc., as well as on civil society, or among the people in general, was to play a critical role in determining the nature of the post-colonial Indian state. It is important to clarify at this stage that ‘government’ is not to be confused for the state, as it is done often in common, day-to-day, usage, though ‘government’ is an important, even critical, apparatus or organ of the state. Sole emphasis on the government may lead to hasty and inaccurate characterizations. For example, a government may be headed by a staunch socialist like Jawaharlal Nehru, it may get the parliament and even the Constitution to declare socialism as an objective, it may have the most radical laws for the protection of the poor, the landless, oppressed castes, tribals, bonded labour and other such sections, and yet the state may closer fit the definition of a bourgeois rather than say a socialist one, because the power balance in the other state apparatuses and in society as a whole may be very different from that reflected in the leadership of the government. It may determine how the laws, the Constitution and other institutions are interpreted, implemented or used.

Building or transforming a state structure involves much more than just the government. Gandhiji understood the complex nature of the state. In his successful attempt to overthrow the colonial state he did not focus only on critiquing and changing the colonial government but on gradually corroding the power of the colonial state. This he sought to do by countering the colonial influence in the education system, media, bureaucracy, police and most importantly among the people. It is such an understanding, we shall see, which was missing among many who wanted to give an alternative direction to the post-colonial Indian state, if not to transform or overthrow it.

The legacy of the national movement resulted in the formation of a popular-democratic, sovereign, multi-class ‘national state’ after 1947. The precise class balance in the state or its class character was to be moulded by the strategies of political mobilization and garnering of social support evolved by the constituent classes. Just as the open-ended nature of the national movement made it possible for its class-orientation to be altered in favour of or against any class or group of classes, so was this the case in the popular-democratic national state that it gave birth to. More on this later.

Second, a fundamental legacy of the national movement was anti-imperialism and maintenance of national sovereignty. The founding fathers of the Indian national movement had already by the last quarter of the nineteenth century developed a comprehensive and sophisticated critique of imperialism and the colonial structure. They were perhaps among the first, world-wide, to do so. They made an important shift in the understanding
of how modern imperialism was underdeveloping the colonies rather than deepening or creating the conditions for the development of capitalism, roughly at the same time as did Marx; even before Hobson and Lenin they worked out a detailed economic critique of colonialism. The long struggle against imperialism, the continuous updating and refining of its critique and the carrying of these ideas to the masses has had a lasting impact and it is perhaps in this sphere that the post-colonial state has stood most firm.

The model of a ruling coalition consisting of a ‘triple alliance’ between international capital, state (i.e., the indigenous government) and local capital, which was seen as central to dependent capitalist development in Latin America and even to parts of East Asia, though the role of international capital there was seen to be relatively less,
²
did not apply to India. In India, a foreign bourgeoisie or international capital, did not constitute a part of the ruling class coalition or the Indian state after independence. The bargaining with international capital did not occur within the state or the ruling coalition of which international capital was a part, as is argued to be the case in many other post-colonial countries, but between an independent state, with an entirely indigenous ruling class coalition, and international capital—an important difference in terms of autonomy.

An Indian variant of the ‘triple alliance’ model, i.e., that the Indian state after independence is dominated by the bourgeoisie/big bourgeoisie and landlords who are increasingly collaborating with foreign finance capital/imperialism/TNCs as subordinate partners, has been supported for a long time by a section of the orthodox left. It is also argued that the Indian bourgeoisie or the capitalist class ‘which came to power’ at independence was comprador or compromising with imperialism and consequently the post-independence Indian state was neo-colonial or dependent. In fact, having assumed the dependent nature of the colonial bourgeoisie, it has been argued that post-colonial countries like India cannot develop independently unless they overthrow their bourgeoisie and the capitalist system in favour of socialism. These views have been challenged
³
and the overwhelming evidence to the contrary has by and large pushed such views to the fringes though there are a few loyal adherents surviving even in mainstream left scholarship.

We have demonstrated at length elsewhere the political and economic independence of the Indian capitalist class and how it not only imbibed the anti-imperialist ethos of the national movement but was at the forefront of evolving an economic critique of imperialism since the twenties.
⁴
The capitalists were very much part of the Nehruvian consensus at independence which was to put India on the path of planned, self-reliant economic development without succumbing to imperialist or foreign capital domination. In fact, one of the central objectives of the Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy was to free the Indian economy of foreign domination and dependence—an objective which was realized to a much greater degree under the leadership of Indira Gandhi when, inter alia, the role of foreign capital in India was brought down to negligible levels. (See
chapter 25
and
26
.)
Also, it may be noted that though the working class has been unionized on a large scale it increasingly moved in a corporatist direction. The left as an political alternative suffered a decline even among the working class. In other words, it never came close to posing a serious enough threat to the system, leading to the creation of the often-predicted classic situation where the bourgeoisie would go over to imperialism or seek external help for its survival. As for the feudal landlords, their power had been much weakened during the national movement itself and the land reforms after independence marginalized them completely except in a few pockets.

Critics belonging to the orthodox left, with some influence in Indian academia, have only grudgingly accepted that 1947 did not mean a transfer of power from a colonial to a neo-colonial state with Nehru as ‘the running dog of imperialism’ (a view held by a section of Communists at independence). They periodically see in any move towards liberalization or opening up to the outside world the ‘inherent’ pro-imperialist, dependent nature of the Indian state ‘finally’ and ‘inevitably’ coming to the surface. This was the argument used, for example, during the mid-sixties when, faced with a major economic crisis, the rupee was devalued and some trade liberalization was briefly attempted. This criticism remained buried for some years with Indira Gandhi’s sharp turn towards economic nationalism in the late sixties and seventies, only to resurface (for example, in a statement signed by a number of left economists) with the attempts at liberalization and the large IMF loan taken by India in the early eighties (a loan which was eventually not even fully drawn and went a long way in helping India reduce her critical dependence on oil imports by massive increases in indigenous oil production). Again the recent, post-1991, efforts at reforms involving liberalization and a more active participation in the globalization process have been seen as ‘a reversal in the direction of policy since decolonisation’, a policy which had ‘pointed toward relative autonomy from metropolitan capital.’ It has been seen as virtually an imperialist project where ‘the policies of the nation-state, instead of having the autonomy that decolonisation promised—are
dictated by the caprices of a bunch of international rentiers.’
⁵

The broad consensus that has emerged in India in recent years, however, does not take such a dim view of the reforms. The commonly perceived need for a shift away from the excessively dirigiste, inward-looking and protectionist strategy, which was leading to a dangerous fall in efficiency and productivity levels and the urge to participate in the globalization process in the altered circumstances of world capitalism in recent decades, where major possibilities have emerged of utilizing global capital and global markets for indigenous development, has led to the emergence of a broad consensus in favour of reform. This was a consensus reminiscent of the earlier Nehruvian phase, both in terms of the objectives and width of support. The desire to achieve the same goals set out at independence—of self-reliance, rapid growth and removal of poverty —and not their abandonment, now drew support for reform and the adoption of the new strategy. (See
chapter 26
, section on ‘Long-term constraints: the need for reform’ and
chapter 27
,)

In this context, it is interesting to see the major shift made by the former Left Dependency thinker F.H. Cordoso (as President of Brazil he is guiding the country through economic reform and participation in the globalization process) from his earlier position. He has pointed out how the nature of foreign capital has changed and can be used for indigenous development of underdeveloped countries. He argues that globalization is a fact that cannot be ignored, and thus the issue is not whether to globalize, but how to globalize so that a better bargain is achieved for the backward countries and a proper cushion provided to the poor so that they are not made to bear the cost of the initial transition. A view which the supporters of reform from the left in India as well as the more sagacious business leaders have generally accepted. Very significantly, Cordoso adds that popular mobilization and community work would be necessary to ensure that the poor will be fully protected. He feels that the traditions created by Mahatma Gandhi in this respect give India a clear advantage over many other underdeveloped countries.
⁶

The third major legacy of the national movement has been the adoption of democracy as a fundamental value by the Indian state. By any international standards, India has a fully thriving democracy, and not merely a ‘formal’ or ‘partial’ one, as argued by some. It is not a ‘top down’ democracy which is a ‘gift of its elite to the masses’, nor is it a gift of the British. It is a product of a long-drawn struggle of the Indian people during the national movement and hence has firm roots in Indian society. The democratic base has been enlarged with a relatively high percentage of popular participation in elections and newer groups and classes getting actively involved in democratic institutions. In fact, the struggle for expanding the democratic space continues—witness the current vigorous campaign for greater transparency in government and other institutions and the people’s right to information.

It is creditable that India has attempted its industrial transformation within a democratic framework, a unique experiment for which there is no precedent. The initial phase of ‘primitive accumulation’, (i.e., raising of surplus for investment and releasing of labour for industry) which was critical for the industrial transformation of all the industrialized countries, whether the advanced capitalist countries of the West, the socialist countries or the newly industrialized countries of East Asia, occurred in circumstances bereft of full democratic rights. The paths, for example, of enclosure movements (Britain), forced collectivization (Soviet Union), high land tax (Japan), slavery (USA), total suppression of trade-union rights (East Asia and others), and colonial surplus extraction (several countries; Britain, for example, received as unilateral transfers from colonies in Asia and West Indies a stupendous 85 per cent of its Gross Domestic Capital formation in 1801), etc., were not open to democratic India.