http://www.zmag.org/southasia/primer.htm which is out of action at the moment.]
*** Part I: Why Not Decolonization? ***
India was one of the first colonized nations to
get rid of imperial rule, in 1947. At the time,
it was believed that with freedom, the former
colonies were going to win a chance to develop
their own resources in the interests of their
own people.
It didn't happen. Colonialism was replaced
by neocolonialism, and economic independence was
not an option. While the `cold war' and
the existence of the Soviet Union gave former
colonies a chance to try to play one power off
against another, the U.S. and the West
intervened in country after country to destroy
the prospects of independent development and
social reform. Where they didn't intervene
militarily, they used economic coercion,
electoral shenanigans, arms sales, and the
threat of starvation.
Not every country was bombed or made to face the
marines. But every country knew this was a
possibility, and had to face at least the
threat. The US wouldn't leave a corner of
the world untouched. It formed a military
alliance with Pakistan and supplied that country
with weapons. It withheld food aid from
Bangladesh and India, using it as a weapon to
win economic or political concessions. It
operates aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean.
With the USSR, it helped move Afghanistan from a
divided country to a country with a civil war,
to a country destroyed by war - with 1 million
dead, 3 million disabled, 5 million refugees,
and a regime that has made the country the most
miserable place on earth for women. (See Bill
Blum's `Killing Hope' for details)
Unlike Afghanistan or even Indonesia, however,
India has been big enough and anti-imperial
enough to make much intervention in its affairs
cost-ineffective for the west. Without huge oil
reserves or resources of great value, there
wasn't too much reason to intervene in this
way in any case. But like all other countries,
there was reason to intervene to prevent
economic independence- and like other
countries, the first weapon employed was the
ideology of `development'.
*** From Justice to Development ***
The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
and the ideology of development that accompanies
them are like the long-range missiles of western
intervention, often doing the job so that direct
coercion and troops don't have to.
Before colonialism, India had plenty of
labour-intensive, quality industry which the
British had to go to considerable effort to
destroy. The British also interfered, though to
a lesser-extent, with India's
self-sufficient, labour-intensive,
resource-efficient agriculture. It had been
distorted for colonial needs by the time of
independence into a system for colonial revenue
extraction that produced cash crops, suffered
from exploitive landlord control and hence
widespread land alienation, and food crops
pushed to marginal lands. There were plans to
move Indian agriculture to a more decentralized,
participatory model by land reform and small,
space specific projects that accounted for
regional diversity (under Agricultural Minister
K.M. Munshi, 1947-51). These would have helped
correct the economic destruction wrought by the
colonial system and brought some justice to
agricultural communities as well.
Instead, in 1951, the Ford Foundation arrived in
India and brought with it the American model of
agriculture: chemical fertilizers, genetically
homogeneous fields, and mechanization. From an
agriculture dependent on internal inputs, India
got an agriculture dependent on imported
petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, and a
financial system dependent on Western
development loans. When the native crops were
found to be unresponsive to fertilizer,
`improved crops' were used. This kind of
development was centralizing - it depended on
western knowledge, and led to an erosion of
indigenous knowledge systems. It was also
capital intensive, and hence extremely
inefficient, in a country where labour was and
is far more plentiful than capital. Small
farmers can't do capital intensive. So
development favoured big farmers, rich farmers,
in the richest regions - these were the people
who got the credits and the inputs.
The millions of poor and landless in contrast,
received assurances from the West that the
West's experience was that when the state
favoured the rich, the wealth would trickle down
to the poor. Eventually. Well, soon - just a
few more years...
This new agriculture promised to produce enough
food to feed all, to produce enough abundance to
make social reforms unnecessary. What has
occurred is that India is now dependent on
Western seeds, chemicals, and credit. Worse,
the intensive agriculture `necessitates'
big dams - and all the horrors that come with
them.
What are the problems with big dams? First,
dams can't make water - they can only
redirect it. Where is it being redirected from?
Who's losing? Second, dams displace
people - something like 30 million people in
India alone. The land that becomes waterlogged,
often good agricultural land, becomes salinated
and then desertified, quickly. Third, dams take
control over water resources away from local
communities and put it in the hands of the
state. The whole system centralizes food
production for the country into one small region
of India (the Punjab).
But not to worry - the west has more solutions
for these problems. Not rainwater
collection - but tubewells to pump the water
out of waterlogged areas. Not decentralized
organic agriculture and land reform - but
biotechnology, genetic engineering, and more
international trade. Not local control over
affairs and resources - but more western
management `expertise'. (Please see
Vandana Shiva, `The Violence of the Green
Revolution', and Arundhati Roy, `The Cost
of Living', for more details)
*** It was the Poor! They did it! ***
Isn't population growth a factor in poverty
and environmental destruction? How can I blame
western development and not the awesome
fertility of India? The short answer to the
first question is yes. How important a factor
is it? For the environment, it may matter a
lot. For women, whose quality of life can be
reduced by frequent births and sole
responsibility for caring for many children, it
can matter quite a lot. For economic growth,
not so much. In 1995, for example, China's
population growth rate was 1.4%, India's
2.1%. Their GDP growth rates were 7.7% and 3.1%
respectively. If you switched their population
growth rates (giving China 2.1% and India 1.4%),
you'd change their GDP rates to 7% for China
and 3.8% for India. Not a huge difference at
all. (This is calculation is from Dreze and
Sen, “India: Economic Development and Social
Opportunity”)
The lesson is: be very careful when people talk
about the importance of population control. 22%
of the world consumes 70% of the energy, 75% of
the metal, 80% of the wood, 60% of the food, and
contributes most of the carbon emissions. The
bottom 20% consume 1.3% of the income. Would
population control change this distribution?
Another frequent argument about population and
the environment is about forests. Forested
areas are being deforested by poor migrants.
Where are these migrants coming from (yes, yes,
of course you'll be told that they're
breeding too much, but where are they actually
coming from?) They are displaced by war,
sometimes. Other times, by commercial
agriculture, ranching, logging, mining, and of
course, dams.
These arguments are not harmless. Scarce rural
health care centres are being replaced by
`family planning' clinics where people can
walk in wanting treatment for cataracts and
leave sterilized. This with increasing evidence
that functioning health care, basic education,
literacy, female participation and agency in
society decrease fertility far more than
coercive family planning policies. This with
the knowledge that women are not a means to an
end, but people who have a right to freedom and
dignity, to control over their fertility and
contraception. It's a despicable policy, but
one which, unlike land reform, the west is more
than happy to contribute its expertise and
development aid. (Please see the work of Betsy
Hartmann for more details.)
*** Part II: Why not Democracy? ***
Surely South Asian women are oppressed by an
ancient patriarchal system. Surely economic
progress is impeded by local elites and corrupt
governments. Surely not all the blame can be
laid at the West's door?
When people ask me whether India is really
democratic, I usually reply that it's as
democratic as the US. That is to say, it is
patriarchal, built on a rigid and comprehensive
caste system, a place of vulgar inequalities,
patriotic chauvinism, suppression of indigenous
peoples, and militarism.
A democracy is a society where people have a
say, an equal say, or better a proportional say
in their governance. They have basic rights
guaranteed, they get to participate in
society's functions.
If a society has decided that full participation
in it requires literacy, then that society has a
responsibility to educate all its members.
India has done the former, but not the
latter - despite having a well developed higher
education system, India has a dismal record on
basic education.
If a society has decided that full participation
requires employment or income then it should
ensure all its members have those things.
Likewise with health care, access to public
spaces, interaction and exchange with other
members of society.
A society, on the other hand, where many are
marked from birth as low, impure, untouchable,
uneducable, unfit for any but the most rote
work, not allowed to enter public spaces, not
allowed to dine with or marry outside their
caste, facing instant violence for breaking
these taboos, cannot be said to have anything
resembling participation. (Please see Arthur
Bonner et. al, `Democracy in India: A Hollow
Shell', and B.R. Ambedkar, “The
Anihilation of Caste”)
The same goes for a society with 35 million
missing women, a sex ratio skewed by radically
different child mortality rates for girls and
boys, where female literacy is far lower than
male, where women's sexuality is strictly
controlled and carries caste prestige, where
women are burdened with all the domestic labour
and often prohibited from activity outside the
home. India, like North America, has a gendered
division of labour. Like North America, all the
property is in the hands of men. Unlike North
America, however, India has several practices
which are especially harmful to women's
interests. When married, women move in to the
house of their husband's family - this harms
the incentive for families to invest in them,
since the family will lose them at marriage.
Another custom is dowry - the bride's family
pays the groom's family a sum of money at
marriage. In theory, this is to ensure the
bride some wealth of her own and some
independence from her husband-- in practice it
means that educated women have to find more
educated men to marry, and so educated women
require higher dowries - another disincentive
to enforcement of women's basic rights. (See
Sen and Dreze, “India: Economic Development
and Social Opportunity”)
In India as anywhere, public action can change
some of these gruesome realities. In Kerala,
for example, strong public action and
organization exists. Kerala has near universal
literacy, has made progress against the caste
system, enjoys much more women's agency, has
good health care and education systems. This in
a province with near zero economic growth and 30
million people. Kerala also has fertility rates
comparable to western countries.
*** Patriotism and Hindutva ***
The caste system, while a painful brake on
India's democratic function, is also perhaps
the only institution that all of India has in
common. India is a country of many nations,
languages, religions-- but a single state. No
surprise that national politics revolves around
`unity'. The Bharata Janata party, or
BJP, is arguably India's most powerful party
today. It tries to make political capital by
appealing to Hindu unity. Since Hindus are
divided by caste, class, region, and language,
the BJP settles for scapegoating - Muslims,
Christians, Pakistan, China, the West. A
separatist movement in Kashmir is met by
military occupation and pointing nuclear bombs
at Pakistan. Sri Lanka's civil strife is met
by an Indian intervention force. Thousands of
Hindus are mobilized from all over the country
to destroy a Muslim Mosque at Ayodhya. Along
with this patriotic chauvinism is an increasing
willingness to use the state's military power
for political ends, to try to suppress protest
and separatism (in Assam, Punjab, and Kashmir,
for example.)
And yet, like the US, India is a `free
society', with an elite and a press that is
self-censoring rather than controlled directly,
and enough space for courageous people to take
actions to fight for their democratic
rights. (See Bonner, “Democracy in India”,
for details)
*** III. Why not abundance? ***
Why is India poor? Injustice, a lack of public
participation, the caste system, neoimperialism,
for sure. Where public participation is high,
health care and education get delivered, the
caste system is weak, civil society is strong,
and around goes the virtuous circle, as it does
in Kerala or Tamil Nadu. Where literacy is low
and the caste system and patriarchy are strong,
education and health care don't get
delivered, politics revolves not around
substantive issues but on scapegoating and
chauvinism, and around goes the vicious circle.
Compare India with China. India has lower
incomes, and lower quality of life
indicators - because, suggest Sen and Dreze,
since 1949 China concentrated on rural health
care programs and basic literacy (like Kerala),
and India did not.
What else depresses India's economic
performance? Corruption - due to a lack of
accountability in government. Military expenses
and all the attendant waste. A colonial
infrastructure built up to speed exploitation
and serve the world market, including rural
indebtedness, skewed income distributions, and
landlords - a lot of the things that keep other
poor countries poor.
India has not, unlike China, had a famine since
independence. Sen and Dreze have shown that no
democracy with a reasonably free press where the
government depends on elections and tolerates
opposition has had a famine, despite food
shortages.
The neoliberal argument is, of course, that
India needs to promote order and stability
(read: authoritarianism), while liberalizing and
opening up to the market (read: selling assets
to foreign corporations) and rewarding the most
productive (read: transferring money from the
poor to the rich) to create jobs and growth.
Sen and Dreze, among others, argue that while
incomes and output can increase the quality of
life, the ability to turn efficiency gains
(which may come from liberalizing markets) into
social gains depends on public action and public
intervention - in the form of universal health
care, land reform and redistributive taxes,
education, positive discrimination, democratic
governance, social security/safety nets. It
could well be that these latter are incompatible
with markets, as markets have started to destroy
these things in places like South Korea and
Taiwan (places who tried to do both social and
economic growth). If that's true, it
needn't mean that places like Kerala must
give up their quality of life and public
participation to have ample and diverse goods
and employment opportunities - what it does
mean is that ways of increasing output and
productivity without the destabilizing effects
of markets must be found. This is not just a
problem for India and Indian activists, but a
question we can ask of our own economies as
well. (See www.parecon.org for one such answer
for the US economy)
[www.parecon.org is on ZNet]
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