So, “Bharat Bhagya Vidhata”, the destiny writers of the biggest democracy in the world, the people of India, are once again standing at the crossroads of destiny, about to record their joint decision, seemingly oblivious and confused about the disputes that need solutions. What is the actual dichotomy of politics in India since the time of Independence?
The people of India are encumbered with a responsibility to choose, and their choice will not only change the direction India is moving in but will also alter the fate of the subcontinent, possibly the world itself.
The world is currently living only on palliatives, having experienced successive socio-economic shocks of various intensities, rampant violence, and impending environmental cataclysm. A significant economic slowdown is imminent, trade wars are escalating, and cold war which was once thought to be resolved forever has risen from the dust, more dangerous and more bloodthirsty; ready to flare up into a full-blown world war just any moment. The only difference is that this time war will be utterly devastating with nuclear weapons proliferated into the hands of many decision-makers around the world.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have both pulled out from the treaty banning test and deployment of nuclear arsenal and missiles, which was signed between the US and the erstwhile USSR just before its disintegration.
Who will win a nuclear war? No one! Innocent civilians from both sides will be simply annihilated, as the leaders and the super rich will go into safe hiding! It will be the mass-murder of humanity. The doctrine of deterrence which is said to have saved the world so far from this pathetic fate is (best known by its acronym) MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction.
India too is a nuclear power, and so are its two contiguous neighbours who have a track record of bitter relations with us. A nuclear war here will definitely be much more devastating in our country due to a higher population density than in the USA or Russia.
Europe is witnessing mass political unrest manifested, for example, in the Yellow Vest protests and BREXIT. The Middle East is sizzling hot under its religious and racist conflict in the face of all US-led NATO interventions; in the Pacific, North Korea remains as recalcitrant as ever, and in Latin America, Venezuela is being militarily backed by Russia. As per some reports, Russian nuclear-capable warplanes have been deployed in that country, and the USA is well within their striking range.
Intolerance and terrorism have reached unprecedented scales, and innocent citizens are dying in terror attacks throughout the world.
Is Economic Disparity The Root Of All Conflicts?
The root of all wars lies in economic relations, and the mother of all conflicts is poverty, the faulty distribution of resources among humans. In Emmon’s words, as per the World Bank, about 2.8 billion people, or half of the world population lived, on $2 a day or less, and that this number, versus the relatively tiny number of people on the peak of the wealth pyramid, represented “what is potentially the most explosive socio-economic challenge facing the world.”
According to a UNDP report “the richest 20 percent of the world’s population receives 82.7 percent of the world income, the second richest 20 percent receive 11.7 percent, and the remaining 60 percent received 5.6 percent, with just 1.4 percent of the world income accruing to the poorest 20 percent.”
This report pertained to 1992, and the gap between the rich and the poor only widened further by 2015. Treanor reported that only 1% of the world population controlled 50% of the wealth, and the other 99% had only access to the remaining 50%. The position has been no different in India, as is evident from a large number of farmers’ suicides, deteriorating macroeconomic indices, and increasing unemployment.
In recent years, there have been claims of unprecedented GDP growth in the country. Some experts have challenged the method of calculation that has been adopted. However, even if we accept that the figures are a hundred percent correct, this cannot become a solace in itself until it results in employment-generation and all-around improvement in the livelihood of ordinary citizens.
Growth and development are not synonyms. Every single incidence of growth should not be mistaken for healthy development. Cancer, for example, is ‘growth’, but is unhealthy and can in no way be called development. Obesity is ‘growth’, but it is a problem in itself. Growth to be healthy, and worthy of being called development, even if it is a bit slow, must be proportionate in all the organs of the system. Thus, it is hard to get swayed by the slogans of the high growth rate alone.
How The British Contributed To India’s Poverty-Stricken State
Poverty and destitution at the mass level were unknown to India until the British East India Company, the original corporate raiders, entered the scene. In her book, “Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II”, Madhusree Mukerjee writes:
“In late 1665, traveling eastward from the Mughal court in Delhi, physician François Bernier arrived in Bengal to find a vast, populous delta, its myriad channels lined with vibrant towns and cities interspersed with fields of rice, sugar, corn, vegetables, mustard, and sesame.”
Bernier declared it “the finest and most fruitful country in the world.” He wrote further about the food of the common inhabitants that “The three or four sorts of vegetables which, together with rice and butter, form the chief food of the common people, are purchased for the merest trifle,” and that “Bengale abounds with every necessary of life.” Foreign merchants—the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese, and the British—worked the wholesale markets, offering to buy produce in exchange for silver, since they had practically no merchandise which the locals would need to buy from them. A major city in the north, Lahore was superior to many European cities of those days in size, civic amenities, and volume of trade.
Once the Company, through its Machiavellian machinations, succeeded in coercing the Mughal King at Delhi to cede Diwani rights to them, they changed the basic structure of tax collection in kind as a proportion of the produce, to a fixed amount accepted as ‘rent’ only in the form of silver coins, irrespective of the level of production. As a result, during collection time, the farmers had “uncommon plenty” of grain, which they could neither retain for their future consumption nor pay towards the liquidation of revenue demands. Purchasing power was needed to be supplied to intermediaries for making speculative purchases of the produce at throwaway prices, which the farmer could pay into the treasury to save his land, life, and honour.
In this scenario, Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, proposed the ‘General Bank of Bengal and Bahar’, “to remedy the situation arising from the contraction of the currency in circulation at the time of the collection of revenues”, as a palliative. The RBI history book referred here, quotes a minute from the extract of the proceedings of the Council of Revenue held at Fort William, on April 13, 1773, containing the ‘Plan’ for the establishment of the ‘General Bank in Bengal and Bahar’ as under:
“[T]he great complaints which are made from all the northern districts of the two provinces, of the inability of the Farmers to pay their rents, on account of the uncommon plenty and cheapness of grain, are primarily owing to the great drains, which have been made of the current coin in the districts by the collections.”
The result was a spell of successive artificially engineered famines in which at least 22.9 million Indians died, even if we reckon the figures of famine deaths between 1857 and 1947 only. And, lo, poverty was bestowed upon India!
Once the British Crown took over the administration of India, they started tweaking with the currency and monetary system of India to facilitate them in looting the country subtly under the direct advice and supervision of John Maynard Keynes, through a system of flexible money supply, “elastic” at the discretion of the government, to meet its perceived “requirement of the public” at its sweet will.
As the international economic and trade tussles slowly progressed to the advent of the Second World War, Keynes strongly advocated the establishment of a separate Central Banking Institution, so that “elastic” money supply could be stretched to meet perceived “requirement of public [read – the government],” through promissory paper currency and bank balances, without its inflationary impact being felt in England. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) came into existence after a long-drawn tug of war on its control between the Indian elected government of the time and the Crown, which of course was settled in favour of the latter.
In the words of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, “It was British financial wizardry which deflected Indian attempts to win a real measure of autonomy in this sphere. Britain was forced to set up a central bank, known as the reserve bank of India, in 1934. But it was to be under London’s and not New Delhi’s ultimate jurisdiction.” It played its role as a mechanism to transfer Indian wealth to Britain until 1947.
The 1857 Indian War of Independence, which the British called the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, shook the Crown badly, and they consciously decided to divide Indians into mutually hostile subgroups looking at each other as devils and each separately looking at the Britishers as the benefactors and protectors. As a result, when they decided to leave the country where they thought they had nothing more to loot, they left it fragmented into two political and three geographical splinters.
The Express Tribune reported on April 05, 2015 that “During the horrific period of partition in 1947, an American documentary photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, captured some of the crucial moments of that time that sum up what partition was like and how it affected millions of lives. … ‘The street was short and narrow. Lying like the garbage across the street and in its open gutters were bodies of the dead,’ writes Bourke-White’s biographer Vicki Goldberg of this scene.”
How India Emerged As A Leader Post Independence
The foremost challenge for the Indian government immediately after Independence was to avert the recurrence of famine deaths, that too in the face of layoffs from the army and due to the closure of industries which supplied for the Second World War. In addition, there was the refugee problem, loss of wheat producing land to West Pakistan and rice and jute producing tracts to the then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), in a backdrop of communal mistrust between the two primary components of the population, and treacherous warmongering by two of the contiguous neighbours. In retrospect, an Indian cannot help but feel proud that the country overcame all these problems, despite a slow GDP growth due to inherited infrastructural bottlenecks, and a population boom, made marvellous strides in education, medicine, and science and technology including space technology and atomic technology.
It emerged as a world-class leader in political ideology, especially through the Non-Alignment Movement, a move disdained by western powers led by the USA. We also, to our pride, succeeded in liberating Bangladesh from Pakistan’s racial oppression and were able to shoulder the burden of thousands of refugees and thousands of Pakistani POWs (prisoners of war) despite our extremely limited resources.
After Independence, to direct the flow of bank-created money to these developmental needs, the RBI was nationalized, to the chagrin of many business interests in the country itself.
The rift or conflict in the orientation of the ruling leaders of the nation emerged for the first time in the open when the Government of India, through the Banking Laws (Amendment) Act, 1968, “provided ‘for the extension of social control over banks,’ in part by laying down that fifty-one percent of a bank’s directors should come from agriculture, the rural economy, and small-scale industry. The government might acquire a bank, after consultation with the Reserve Bank of India.”
Later, through an ordinance called the Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings Ordinance, 1969), the Government nationalized the 14 largest commercial banks with effect from midnight on 19th July 1969.
These banks contained 85% of bank deposits in the country. Even Jayaprakash Narayan described the step as a “masterstroke of political sagacity.” Jay Dubashi wrote in India Today, on May 15, 1980, that in the view of Atal Bihari Bajpai “it would teach the Birlas and Tatas a lesson.” Within two weeks of the issue of the ordinance, the Parliament passed the Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Bill, which received the presidential approval on August 9, 1969.
Mukund Sathe describes the dichotomy that became evident with this step in these words “In May 1967, the Congress Working Committee adopted a radical Ten-Point Programme which included social control of banks, nationalisation of general insurance, [the] abolition of princely privileges, etc. making it a left-wing [party]. However, the Congress right, Syndicate opposed it.”
The divide became more pronounced and open when Indira Gandhi took away the finance portfolio from Morarji Desai, as he, according to her, was too conservative in implementing her radical financial reforms. Later, the Syndicate expelled Indira Gandhi from the Congress Party for alleged indiscipline committed by her in not supporting their candidate for the post of the President of India, for which they had aligned with Jana Sangh (the precursor of BJP) and the Swatantra Party, which had the support of traders, industrialists, and erstwhile princes.
The Rise of Congress (R) Requisitionists
The Congress party did split up, “with Indira Gandhi,” writes Sathe, “setting up a rival organization, which came to be known as Congress (R) – R for Requisitionists. The Syndicate-dominated Congress came to be known as Congress (0) – 0 for Organization. In the final countdown, 220 of the party’s Lok Sabha MPs went with Indira Gandhi and 68 with the Syndicate. In the All India Congress Committee too, 446 of its 705 members walked over to Indira’s side. Indira Gandhi won 1971 elections with 2/3rd Majority.”
What followed was the Jaya Prakash (or JP, as he was called) movement in which he, in a way, stole the storm brewed by the ABVP (the student wing of the Jana Sangh) and the implementation of the Emergency. JP was able to bring elements as diverse as the Hindutva preaching Jana Sangh, the Islamist Jamaat e Islami, the elements of Syndicate, and the Swatantra Party; some looking extreme right, others extreme left, some advocating capitalistic market control of the economy, and others preaching Marxism, in a hotchpotch called Janata Party.
The party succeeded and formed a government under Morarji Desai, who became distinguished for being the only Indian to win Pakistan’s highest civil honor, the Nishan-e-Pakistan. He also won India’s highest civil honor, the Bharat Ratna, and later for fighting an unsuccessful lawsuit in a US court against Seymour Hersh when the latter alleged in his book, “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House,” that Morarji Desai was a CIA agent (Morarji Desai, Plaintiff-appellant, v. Seymour Hersh, Defendant-appellee, 954 F.2d 1408 (7th Cir. 1992), 1992).
The conglomerate eventually broke on the question of dual membership of some of the leaders in the Janata Party and RSS, simultaneously. Indira Gandhi again strode to power on the slogan “Vote for the Government which works.” She again nationalised six more banks in the second go.
It is also really enlightening to go through the news report of the debate in the Parliament on the Bank Nationalization Bill, published on July 29, 1969 in the Madras (Chennai) edition of the Indian Express which says that “As expected, Jana Sangh and Swatantra members severely attacked the measure,” because “the shareholders who used to get 22% return on paid-up capital would now be given ‘bits of paper called bonds’ which would bring them interest at [four and a half] percent.”
The same newspaper reported on November 13, 1969 that “Mr. Balraj Madhook, Jana Sangh MP, said the CWC’s action ‘was a good thing’ for ‘it should pave the way for polarisation and the emergence of two evenly balanced major political forces in the country’.”
The actual dichotomy in Indian politics, it would have been evident by now, is the social control of the monetary system vs its commercial control mainly by the capitalist shareholders of the banks, and the abolition of special privilege (the ‘privy purse’) to the families of the rulers of the erstwhile princely states vs its maintenance.
Should the monetary resources of the nation flow to serve the underprivileged masses, or to serve the commercial interests of the corporate houses, hoping to create employment and eradicate poverty through the so-called trickle-down effect? Communal divide and fear psychosis have only been created, in the footsteps of the British rulers, as a smokescreen so that you do not have time to know, think, and debate over the real issue. I need not tell you where the bank money has gone in the last four or five years, and what has happened to employment generation. You know it only too well.
Thus, you must press the button on the EVM, and that you must, depending on your well-thought decision, based on the actual polarization as rightly pointed out by Mr. Balraj Madhook in Nov 1969. If, and only if you think that the monetary resources should be channelled to big capitalists because that will result in a high growth rate and will result in employment generation for the masses through the so-called trickle-down effect, go for BJP. Else, if you think that the monetary resources should be strongly harnessed to serve the masses directly on priority as Mrs. Indira Gandhi did, till she laid down her life, fighting against religious bigotry, you should vote for the Congress, albeit with one rider: you must keep them if elected, on their toes to pursue this goal doggedly with courage and strength.