Needed, a renewed socialist concern - The Hindu

Needed, a renewed socialist concern

V.R. Krishna Iyer

India needs democracy, development and a distributive strategy to salvage the lives of its have-nots.

Indian Independence is a political phenomenon that has the sovereignty of the people enshrined in the paramountcy of a Socialist Secular Democratic Republic created by the Constitution. Our administration comprises triune instrumentalities that are accountable and transparent. We, the People of India, who are over a billion strong, not you, the multinational corporations, the corrupt mafia, the freebooter billionaires and the imperial controllerate over the state’s r esources, are the final authority, since we are no colony. We are a rich nation albeit with poor people, a marvel of culture and rare talent, never to suffer submissive status and foreign pressure. We are a globally glorious jewel, the Kohinoor, but shine no longer as brave new Bharat. We are great, not under the shadow of another giant of the unipolar world but as a peer partner of a grand quadrilateral alliance of China, Russia, India and the U.S.

This vision was projected at a recent conference. Yes, India is no satellite but the co-author of Panch Sheel (the five principles of peaceful co-existence). Ever for non-alignment, never an international mendicant, our nation was allergic to the Soviet pattern of proletariat dictatorship. We also rejected as anathematic Western mega-industrial capitalism and surely regarded U.S imperialist disregard for other sovereign nations as bete noire. Feudalism was our curse and agrarian backwardness the symbol of a fossilised economy. Swaraj was a struggle against these savage vices as well as British imperialism. Thus, inevitably, compassionate humanism and democratic socialism became our socio-political culture without an alternative.

Globally powerful corporate privatisation of industries may make us a satellite and a banana republic unless we dare to defend our people’s tryst with destiny. But the state must run industries and services of strategic significance for the people’s survival. It should ensure non-exploitation, fair employment and workers’ participation in management, sound marketing facilities with community concern, and price control sans rackets. Cornering of land, real estate terrorism, mafia manoeuvres, business and trade corruption and professional lawlessness must be abolished by state authority. A planned economy and public morality with the common good of society are crying needs today.

We made a tryst with destiny upon awakening to Independence. Operation Swaraj was a wake-up call to abolish oppressive inhumanity and establish economic democracy. In substance, our pledge was not to create a creamy layer of wealthy industrialists, latifundists or toxic technologists, or to invite foreign investments and duty-free imports that will wipe out swadeshi. A socialistic pattern of society has been our dire desideratum. That “cyclonic sadhu,” Swami Vivekananda, declared: “I am a socialist because half a loaf [for the hungry Indian humanity] was better than none.”

Jawaharlal Nehru voiced in the Constituent Assembly the fundamental national proposition when he argued: “We have given the content of democracy in this resolution and not only the content of democracy but the content, if I may say so, of economic democracy. Well, I stand for Socialism. I hope India will stand for Socialism and that India will go towards the constitution of a Socialist State.”

The generation of Professor Harold Lasky; the political peers of Nehru and Subash Bose; Left intellectuals like E.M.S. Namboodiripad; P.C. Joshi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Dr. Ambedkar; and all leading British thinkers such as Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sydney Webb, belonged to the socialist fraternity. Small wonder, cadres and leaders of the nationalist movement were comrades against imperialism and capitalist ideology. Socialism was strengthened by that phenomenal expounder of dialectical materialism and Communism, Karl Marx.

Swaraj, that epic march for Indian liberation, had a crimson hue and the Constitution that our Founding Fathers forged spelt economic democracy. This tall goal was proclaimed by Nehru, the first Prime Minister, on Independence Day. But what has since found expression is a culpable reminder of our guilty, greedy ‘growth’ ideology that is unapproachable for the larger, weaker masses.

Nehru did organise basic institutions and instrumentalities such as the Planning Commission, public sector enterprises, strategic state-managed industries and river projects. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did more: she nationalised key industries, abolished the privy purses, and set urban land ceiling. By means of an amendment to the Constitution she declared the Republic to be Socialist. This terminological transformation stood the test of time, despite parliamentary and Cabinet changes. Even today, under the Constitution India is a Socialist Republic, and every Member of Parliament and Minister, the President and the Governors, are oath-bound to uphold the Socialist mandate.

A cartoon recently pictured the status of the republic with sardonic veracity. Two hungry Indians hold the peels of a banana but the banana itself has been already eaten by the rich Indian and the alien. If we jettison the nation’s resources to be consumed by capitalists, the people below the poverty line will have to hold the peel. The fruit, euphemistically described as ‘growth’, would have been craftily consumed by corporate capitalists.

The glory of Bharat can be regained only if the democratic socialists of India unite without factions and divisions. They have to win, without discrimination, distributive justice by full and fair use of its resources. They should give a just opportunity for all to share its work, wealth and happiness. The latest technology should be geared to maximise the common people’s economic worth, and the educational facilities, in order that the needs of the underprivileged are met as the state’s first charge, far above the pampered seven-star pleasures of the millionaires. The health, egalite and income of “We the People of India” should desiderate socialist concern.

The patriotic, truly crimson comrades of India, the Communists of plural parties, will you listen to the noble command of Karl Marx as still relevant to India: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The pathology of class-caste-creed communalism wrapped in fossil feudal socio-economic thralldom finds its finest pharmacopoeia in a democratic socialist diversity planned with sociologically scientific dialectical materialism, inspired by a moral-spiritual value glory.

Speaking generally, since 1991 the national economy has become noxiously contra-constitutional, anti-people and dollar drug-addicted. Let me cite Shashi Tharoor: “India annually gets richer by $200 billion. India’s foreign resources have exceeded $140 billion. Remember, the country had to mortgage its gold in London because the foreign exchange coffers were dry! In the list of the world’s billionaires, 27 of the world’s richest people are Indian, most of them staying in India. A large portion of the world’s poorest people live in India too and you don’t need to go to Davos to meet them. Our country’s poor live below a poverty line that seems to be drawn just this side of the funeral pyre. 250 million people living in conditions that are a blot on our individual collective consciences is too grave a matter to be lightly dismissed.” (The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century, 2007)

The world is moving fast but the have-not humanity waits. The wake-up call given by President Pratibha Patil is timely to overcome the tragedy and travesty of today’s Bharat. In her Republic Day-eve address she said that the disadvantaged “too should find a place to enjoy the sunshine of the country’s growth and development.” The President added: “Our efforts and our commitment, while pursuing the goal of high growth rates, should be to ensure that all people of our country benefit from it. Our pledge will remain unfulfilled until, as Gandhi had said, ‘we have wiped every tear in every eye’.”

Will Dr. Manmohan Singh assert, as Nehru did, “I am a socialist?” Will Sonia Gandhi, as Indira Gandhi did, swear for nationalism or emphasise the Republic as being Socialist? Will President Pratibha Patil swear by the Gandhian conviction, “I have believed and repeated times without number that India is to be found not in its few cities but in its villages?”

Sky-high concrete jungles, five-star hotels, lunatic traffic, foreign-addicted luxury life, terrorism and sexism, robbery and privatisation everywhere: this corruption has assassinated all that Gandhi, Nehru and Indira represented. There is an anti-Gandhian crypto-terrorist campaign for globalisation and privatisation, which is a force for creative destruction and submission to colonialism. The finest capital of a country is its creative humanity, not lavishment in luxury and star-culture — which is but a negation of swaraj and socialist, secular, democratic constitutional sovereignty.

Indian humanity ought to battle afresh for swaraj.