By Saswat Pattanayak
The more there are celebrations surrounding India’s economic growth, the more I grow desperate to oppose them. In a way, the more jubilant the headlines appear, the sadder I become as a reader. India is on the rise to emerge as the next superpower, and the more they try to convince me of that, the more agitated I become.
Fortunately, I am not alone in this state of agitation. The ruling class confirms that India faces the biggest threats to national security from her own citizens. But it refuses to internationalize the crisis; it instead chooses to mass murder the oppressed rather than eliminate the grounds of oppression. India’s complicity with barbarism has reached such a nadir that the burning realities afflicting the majority are being suppressed as exceptionalities, only in order to highlight the indulgences of the class minority as the desired universalities.
Intoxicated with newfound glory of being patted on the back by the imperialist powers, most elements from the Indian government, media and educated sections refuse to recognize their roles in perpetuating the myth of economic growth in a country that is profoundly anti-people. Their entities are suffused with uncritical acceptance of status quo, for any replacement of it must adversely affect the beneficiaries the most.
Amidst the desperate attempts to hold the country together (most ironically, after selling out all its natural and human resources to private monopolists), the military-prison-industrial complex prioritizes what needs to be made available in public sphere. Visionaries and revolutionaries who imagine a free India are accused of being terrorists. Mass organizers who find it impossible to accept that patriotism must cease subsequent to departure of colonialists, are rounded up as Maoists. Exploitative wealth concentration is heralded as praiseworthy, while the toiling dispossessed are routinely harassed as parasites.
Furthering the class society aspirations of the nouveau riche, technocrats and bureaucrats join hands to rewrite India’s global image to make it conducive for lucrative investments. Radio jockeys pronounce that the youths unconditionally love the new and emerging India. A spokesperson for imperialism, Thomas Friedman claims General Electric and Infosys - two of the largest private recruiters - neutralize India’s otherwise Nuclear-power status. Its the image of India which is felt as most necessary to be upheld at the expense of the reality of India.
Reality of India is what must wake us up at this critical juncture. India’s poverty line is a sham. The indicators are that of destitution. And even by that, more than 30% of people fall below a quality of life that can feed them once in a day. India has the highest infant mortality rate in the world, with over 4 lakh newborn deaths within the first 24 hours. The reality is that more than 90% of the workforce is employed in the informal economy - without job security or workplace rights (for women, it is 96%). The reality is 296 million people are plain illiterate, way higher number than that are nominally literate. India’s reality is that 233 million, largely children younger than age 3, are undernourished. As much as 48.6 percent of farmer households are in debt, with only 27 percent accessing formal credit. India’s reality is increasing farmer suicides across states. More than 60 percent of women are chronically poor in India. India’s reality is that the system has failed to take care of the most needy in the most basic manner. Even in 2009, more than 56 percent of households do not have electricity connections.
For all practical purposes, Republic of India has no moral position to aspire for a superpower status. Especially considering that the country it tries to emulate the most, the United States, as the world’s superpower indeed has one in six people remaining hungry. Image, is just that. It may suppress the realities of capitalistic economies, but cannot resolve the necessary contradictions of the class society. Time has come for India to recognize the ongoing class war as the new organized revolutionary movement grounded in scathing attacks on the root inequalities and misplaced priorities promoted by the ruling combines.