Modern India sans the Impact of Capitalism - Economic and Political ...

Modern India sans the Impact of Capitalism
Prabhat Patnaik
Perry Anderson is among the most
outstanding Marxist thinkers of
our time. When he writes on
India, that is cause for excitement. The
present book, however, based on his
three pieces published earlier in The
London Review of Books, makes one feel
short-changed, notwithstanding the fact
that it is, as one would expect, lucidly
written and eminently readable.
The title, adapted from Marx’s famous
work, refers to a set of ideas propagated by
a group of distinguished Indian writers,
notably, Amartya Sen, Meghnad Desai,
Ramachandra Guha, Sunil Khilnani and
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, which celebrate the
contemporary realisation of the “idea of
India”, marked by “four tropes”: “antiquitycontinuity,
diversity-unity, massivity-democracy,
multi- confes sionality-secularity”.
Like a ‘Drain Inspector’s Report’
Against this celebration, Anderson postulates:
first, that India being a nation
united since antiquity is a myth; second,
that the Congress Party which led the
struggle for freedom from colonialism,
even though it imagined itself as representative
of the nation as a whole, was
essentially a Hindu outfit, only 3% of
whose members at best were Muslims,
and whose leaders like Gandhi and Nehru
continued to remain, in varying degrees,
trapped within the constraints of a Hindu
mindset; third, that this assimilation
of the “nation” into itself by a predominantly
Hindu Congress Party was responsible
not only for its intransigence that
resulted in the country’s partition, but
also for the armed occupation till date,
at great human cost, of Kashmir and the
north-east, which makes the claim of
the “unity of the nation” being based on
a shared feeling of oneness, a hollow
one; that Indian democracy rests upon
a combination of repression and caste
manipulation; and that underlying the
“secularity” of India is an abysmal state of
30
review ARTICLE
The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson (Gurgaon:
Three Essays Collective), 2012; pp vi + 184, Rs 350 (PB),
Rs 550 (HB).
continuing impoverishment of its largest
religious minority.
The question of whether the writers
he is criticising can be legitimately accused
of upholding a celebratory “Indian
ideology” with the specific features attributed
to it, or can even be lumped together
as constituting one single set, is something
I shall not take up in this review. I
shall focus only on Anderson’s argument
that the religious underpinning of the
struggle for independence not only engendered,
in a manner comparable to Israel
and Ireland, a more rabid representation
of itself, in the form of the Hindutva
forces, but also distorted the purported
achievements of the republic that are
usually so cheerfully celebrated, namely,
“unity”, “democracy” and “secularity”.
As an antidote to the gloating that one
often comes across about “ours being the
largest democracy”, and as an account of
the horrendous repression upon which
this “democracy” rests (in which the
massacre of 40,000 innocent people by
the Indian army when it marched into
Hyderabad is one of the lesser-known
episodes), this book is certainly valuable.
Its relentless exposures, some may feel,
make it read like a “drain inspector’s report”,
to borrow Gandhi’s phrase; but if
the drain happens to be running through
the house, and is wide and full of putrid
matter, then the drain inspector’s report
becomes a must-read for all. Indeed in
some respects things are even worse
than Anderson presents: in several parts
of India at present, most notably UP,
large numbers of innocent young Muslim
men are arrested and kept in jail for
years without trial, under the Unlawful
Activities (Prevention) Act; and lawyers
are threatened, even beaten up, if they
dare to defend such persons who are
branded as “terrorists” because of the
mere fact of their arrest.
The problem arises however with
Anderson’s argument. Let us accept his
argument and ask the question: where
does India go from here? Since “the poor
remain divided among themselves” (because
of the caste system), the “workers
are scattered and ill-organised” (making
the Left ineffective), and the intelligentsia,
notwithstanding its quality and
excellence, remains trapped within the
celebratory “idea of India”, Anderson
effectively sees no prospects of transcendence
of the current Indian situation.
He ends his book by suggesting that
the exit of the Congress from the “scene
would be the best single gift Indian democracy
could give itself”, but, no matter
whether one agrees with him on the
consequences of such an exit, this is not
something that can simply be wished
into being. The continuing existence of
the Congress Party after all is socially
conditioned, whence it must follow according
to him that India has no future
that is any different from its recent past.
Hegel, basing himself on a colonial
document of 1812 that talked of the unchanging
“village communities”, had
famously said that India had no history,
only a change of dynasties. 1 Anderson’s
book says in effect that India will have
no history, only a change of governments
in a repressive parliamentary democracy
that is simultaneously sustained and
“debauched” by the caste system.
Marx, while holding a similar view as
Hegel’s regarding India’s precolonial
past, had seen in colonialism a revolutionary
agent of change. This was not
just an empirical observation, but based
on the theoretical position that once a
society, no matter what its past, got
drawn into the orbit of capitalism, it
could no longer remain changeless. We
SEPTEMBER 7, 2013 vol xlviii no 36 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

cannot in other words talk of India’s
future, and colonial and postcolonial past,
without reference to its relationship with
capitalism. And to me the greatest problem
with Anderson’s book is that capitalism
does not figure in it. Trapped within a
paradigm where Hinduism is elevated to
the role of an explanatory factor, without
any reference to the capitalist system
that is characterised by an immanent
logic of its own to which India is inextricably
tied, Anderson, not surprisingly,
sees no dynamics in its evolution. He examines
neither how capitalism impinges
on this society, nor how Hinduism itself
changes through the impact of capitalism.
Once we bring capitalism into the
picture, the narrative will change; and
what is more, many things attributed by
Anderson to the influence of Hinduism
will appear to be explicable otherwise.
Anti-Imperialist Nationalism
The ignoring of the impact of capitalism
vitiates his analysis of the anti-colonial
struggle itself. In my village primary
school in the 1950s we were taught that
independence, and all the benefits it
brought, came to India because of the
sagacity of the leaders. Anderson’s analysis
seems to me a mirror image of it:
Independence and all the sufferings that
accompanied it, and the travails that
have subsequently ensued, came to
India because of the limitations of the
leaders, their Hindu outlook and the
conceit embodied in it that it represented
the “nation”. The people, what made
them act, the circumstances in which
they acted, do not figure in either of
these narratives.
Peasant societies typically look up to
leaders with a streak of renunciation.
This has nothing to do with Hinduism.
The renunciatory streak one finds in
Gandhi for instance, enmeshed no doubt
in his own personal philosophy into
which Hinduism was an input, is paralleled
by what one finds in Ho Chi Minh
or Muzaffar Ahmed or P Sundarayya.
But the credibility of a leader associated
with a renunciatory streak is not enough
in itself to mobilise the peasantry. It is
a necessary not a sufficient condition,
for which the material conditions must
in addition be conducive. The specific
additional factor that roused the peasantry
in India and made it swell the
ranks of the anti-colonial struggle was
the impact of the Great Depression. (The
agricultural crisis that was a principal
component of it began, it must be remembered,
in 1926 itself.)
To make this mobilisation possible,
the Congress placed before the people
a blueprint of what the future India
would look like, through a resolution
adopted at its Karachi session in 1931,
which envisaged inter alia universal
adult franchise; a minimum standard of
living for every Indian; free and compulsory
primary education; equality
before the law irrespective of caste, religion
or gender; and a separation of religion
from the State. Women’s suffrage,
it may be recalled, had come to Britain
in 1928; the fact that within three years
of it, universal adult suffrage was
sought to be introduced in India is not
to be belittled. True, as Anderson points
out, Ceylon too introduced universal
adult suffrage in 1931; but the idea of
universal adult suffrage in a society
characterised by “untouchability” and
even “unseeability” (as in Kerala) was
astoundingly revolutionary. I have seen
with my own eyes the intense anger among
the powerful upper caste landlords in my
village when the dalits exercised their
franchise in the 1952 general elections.
The Karachi resolution (which had even
advocated abolition of the death penalty)
did not, paradoxically, have “land redistribution”
on its agenda, but this was
rectified to an extent during the Congress
Party’s campaign for the 1937 elections.
The Karachi resolution, however, does
not figure in Anderson’s account of the
freedom struggle.
The peasantry in the 1930s wanted
above all its economic demands to be
met, which is why in Punjab it was not
the Muslim League but the Unionist Party
of Sikandar Hayat Khan, Fazli Husain
and Chhotu Ram that won the elections.
Chhotu Ram, as revenue minister, brought
in legislation to provide debt relief to
the peasantry and is remembered to this
day by the Jat peasantry of the region.
(I have seen his statues dotting almost
every mofussil town I have visited in the
region of the erstwhile Punjab which
REVIEW ARTICLE
came to India.) The appeal of the Congress
in short can scarcely be said
to have been based on religion, since
the appeal of religion itself was rather
limited prior to the communalisation
that came later. (Indeed, the Unionist
Party which prided itself upon being
multi-religious, would not have got
elected in Muslim-majority Punjab if
religion was the deciding factor.)
The Congress did, in short, try to provide
a charter of citizenship transcending
religion and caste, and had some justification
in claiming that it was speaking
for the “nation” as a whole. This
claim cannot simply be brushed aside as
the mere pretension of a Hindu elite that
dominated the Congress. (The latter
could no doubt have been a subsidiary
factor, but that is not pertinent).
Of course, when Independence came,
not all the pledges of Karachi were
redeemed. In particular, while some of
the political elements of the Karachi resolution
were implemented, no matter
how imperfectly, the socio-economic
elements were not, a possibility anticipated
by Ambedkar in his closing remarks
to the Constituent Assembly, remarks
that Anderson finds fault with. But the
reneging on the socio-economic elements
of the Karachi Resolution was not
because the Congress was trapped within
Hinduism but because it was committed
to capitalism.
The capitalism it developed after
independence however was itself sui
generis. It was a national capitalism,
developed in relative autonomy from
imperialism, by using the public sector as
a bulwark against metropolitan capital,
and the State (with the assistance of the
Soviet Union) as an active promoter of
the project. It was, in short, a capitalism
sought to be developed on the soil of the
anti-colonial national movement, by
carrying over the anti-colonial legacy
of the movement, to a policy of nonalignment,
and of escape from the
economic embrace of post-war imperialism
dominated by the US. India was
not the only country where this was
tried; on the contrary, virtually the
entire third world adopted such a
regime which Michal Kalecki (1972) has
called an “Intermediate Regime”, an apt
Economic & Political Weekly EPW SEPTEMBER 7, 2013 vol xlviii no 36 31

REVIEW ARTICLE
description, though somewhat misleading,
at least in the case of India, in its connotation
with regard to the class nature
of the State (which Kalecki himself
cautiously admits).
To understand this trajectory one
must note that, even leaving aside the
Muslim League, there were two quite
distinct strands of “nationalism” in pre-
Independence India. One was an anticolonial
overarching nationalism that
sought to mobilise people on the basis of
a charter of demands which treated
them as citizens; the other was a specifically
Hindu nationalism, that was not so
much anti-colonial as anti-Muslim and
that aimed to establish a Hindu Rashtra
without any clear agenda of what it
would mean even for the Hindu citizens
of this future Rashtra. (I am loath to use
the word “nationalism” for the latter, but
do so only for convenience, out of deference
to existing usage.) No matter how
Hindu and upper caste the individual
leaders of the Congress might have been,
no matter what rituals they practised in
their homes or even at official venues,
the Congress on the whole stood for the
first kind of nationalism; the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh and others for
the second.
This has an important implication.
The nature of a movement is not assessed
by merely aggregating a set of empirical
beliefs that its leading participants
may happen to hold at a certain
point of time. On the contrary, these empirical
beliefs, apart from being shaped
and modified, are also overlaid by the
purpose for which the movement stands.
The leading participants of any living
movement, in other words, rise above
their empirical selves in constituting the
movement, whence it follows that major
events in the course of the movement,
such as the Poona Pact or the Partition
of the country, cannot just be explained
in terms of these empirical beliefs of
the leaders, having to do with their
Hindu mindset.
The point here is not to endorse the
Poona Pact or to absolve the Congress
leadership from responsibility for the
Partition, but to suggest that in examining
the motives behind these decisions, explanations
that spring from the overall
nature of the movement must have precedence
if they exist. And in the present
case they evidently do (such as, for instance,
the view that the Congress leadership’s
objection to “identitarian” politics
or “balkanisation” sprang from the
perception that it amounted to a violation
of anti-imperialist nationalism). 2
At any rate, the general point remains:
notwithstanding every single remark of
Gandhi and Nehru that Anderson quotes,
showing them to be trapped within a
Hindu mindset, they remained committed
to the first kind of nationalism, i e, an
overarching anti-imperialist nationalism.
And it is this which made it so difficult
for the Left to establish its centrality in
the anti-colonial struggle.
The fact that the Congress leadership
under Gandhi deliberately prevented the
anti-colonial struggle from becoming so
militant that the central influence in it
could pass on to more radical elements is
underscored by Anderson while discussing
Gandhi’s withdrawal of the noncooperation
movement after Chauri
Chaura. This has been the standard
understanding of the Left, the stuff, as it
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SEPTEMBER 7, 2013 vol xlviii no 36 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

were, of Party classes. I have myself heard
B T Ranadive expound it on several occasions.
But this way of insulating the
anti-colonial struggle from the influence
of more radical elements would not have
worked if the Congress leadership itself
had been suspect on its anti-colonialism,
if it had not been a votary of the first
kind of nationalism that transcended the
confines of its own upper caste Hinduness,
within which Anderson accuses
it of being trapped. B T Ranadive was
recognising precisely this when he said
that one of the reasons for the lack of
success of the communists in India was
that they had to contend with leaders
like Gandhi and Nehru, who, by inference,
were not merely the narrow
personalities that Anderson portrays
them to be. 3 (B T Ranadive also thought
that the achievement of the Indian
communists lay in the fact that despite
having to confront leaders like Gandhi
and Nehru, they held their ground and
emerged as a significant, even though
not central, force.) 4
Sharp Discontinuities
The basic difference between then and
now is that the Congress Party has now
abandoned all allegiance to an antiimperialist
nationalism. It has done so
not because of its Hindu mindset but because
of the nature of evolution of world
capitalism that has led to the globalisation
of capital, especially of finance. This
has brought in its train a number of
developments: the unviability from the
point of view of the Indian bourgeoisie
of the earlier trajectory of capitalist development,
within a dirigiste regime, in
relative autonomy from imperialism; 5 its
consequent progressive integration with
globalised capital and, towards this end,
the adoption of a neo-liberal regime; a
change in the nature of the State, paralleling
this change in economic regime,
which has entailed its closer enmeshing
with big capital and international fin ance,
and its withdrawal of support and protection
from petty producers and the
peasantry; the precipitation, as a result,
of a crisis in petty production, in particular
an agrarian crisis that has led to
large-scale peasant suicides (which curiously
do not find a mention in Anderson);
the unleashing with much greater fury
than before of a process of primitive accumulation
of capital; a vast increase in
inequalities in income and wealth; and,
during the years of bubble-sustained
boom in metropolitan capitalism, a high
growth rate in the Indian economy that
has brought palpable economic benefits
to wide sections of the urban middle
class who have thereby become votaries
of neo-liberalism (a situation that, in
consequence of the world capitalist
crisis, is already changing in economic
terms and is likely to change in political
terms as well).
Thus instead of the continuity flowing
from the Hindu character of the Congress
leadership of the national movement,
which is what Anderson suggests, we
actually have sharp discontinuities flowing
from the changing nature of world
capitalism, which also portend not a
future like the past, but major changes
in India as well. The growth of communalism
then has to be located not as the
inevitable further development of the
Hinduism already latent in the freedom
struggle, but in the weakening of the
overarching anti-imperialist nationalism,
the “Karachi tendency”, that provided such
a strong counterpoint to Hindu communalism
all these years. (This weakening
had already occurred before the 1991
“reforms” were introduced, and provided
the setting for their introduction.)
Of course there have been other contributing
factors: the Islamophobia in
the metropolitan countries, especially in
the US, to which the newly-flourishing
middle class looks up; the fact that this
middle class is unmoved by any antiimperialism
(it is on the contrary enamoured
of capitalist globalisation); and
the fact that, being predominantly
Hindu, it combines the traditional upper
caste Hindu contempt for the lower
castes, including the Muslims, with the
contempt of the nouveau riche for the
poor that one typically encounters under
capitalism. All these however have to be
seen as part of the new development,
following from the changing nature of
world capitalism, and not as a mere fallout
of the earlier national movement.
With the Congress abandoning antiimperialist
nationalism, and the BJP
REVIEW ARTICLE
abandoning for tactical reasons after
an initial thrust (when it even set up a
commission to amend the Constitution)
any overt moves towards a Hindu Rashtra,
the difference between the two parties
has narrowed; and neo-liberalism is where
they all converge. (Modi’s emergence as
potential prime minister may be adduced
as being contrary to such a reading; but
it signifies less an aggressive move
towards Hindu Rashtra, and more an attempt
at direct corporate control over
the State.)
This discontinuity between then and
now, arising from the changing nature
of world capitalism, permeates every
phenomenon. Even the coercion deplo yed
against people in particular regions in
India has to be broken up into different
constituents. The insistence through
armed intervention upon the territorial
integrity of an India inherited from
the “colonial masters” has, contrary to
what Anderson suggests, little to do
with Hinduism. Third world nationalism
everywhere has been highly “territorial”.
This is so in China whose treatment of
Tibet and Xinjiang is symptomatic of this
“territoriality”, in Vietnam which even
fought a war with China arising from a
terri torial dispute, and in Indonesia
which made it a point to occupy West
Irian and also had a conflict with Malaysia
(though in the latter case, because of
the presence of British imperialism, establishing
“territoriality” as the cause of
the dispute becomes difficult). India
falls into this pattern, and the Hinduism
of its leadership during the freedom
struggle is not germane to the issue as
an explanatory factor.
But over and above this form of “territoriality”,
there is an additional recent
factor, namely, the encroachment on the
lands and habitats of the tribal population
of central India which is a fallout
of neo-liberalism, of the neo-liberal
Indian state’s determination to open up
the area, rich in minerals, for corporate
capital, both Indian and foreign. To
lump these different instances of aggrandisement
as the consequence of
upper caste Hindu domination over the
national movement, with no reference
either to the “territoriality” of all third
world nationalisms or to the nature of
Economic & Political Weekly EPW SEPTEMBER 7, 2013 vol xlviii no 36 33

REVIEW ARTICLE
contemporary capitalism, does not
stand scrutiny.
One particular aspect of this discontinuity
is often glossed over. Official
spokespersons in India justify neo-liberalism
with the argument that the high
growth rate it has produced has brought
down the extent of poverty. Many who
do not accept this argue nonetheless
that capitalist development being capitalist
development, it matters little
whether it is of the “dirigiste” or the
“neo-liberal” variety. Neither of these arguments
however is valid. The most basic
and reliable index of well-being, far
more reliable than what the deflation of
consumption expenditure by some price
index can ever give, is the amount of
foodgrains that is directly and indirectly
consumed (for people whose consumption
lies below a certain threshold). 6 If
we look at macro-level data for India,
where the consumption of the bulk of
the people certainly falls below this
threshold, then we find that per capita
availability of foodgrains (which is the
closest approximation we have to total
direct consumption, household and nonhousehold)
was around 200 kilograms
per year in “British India” at the beginning
of the 20th century; it fell drastically
to 136.8 in 1945-46, just on the eve
of Independence. It increased during the
dirigiste period reaching roughly 180
kilograms for the Indian Union as a
whole by the end of the 1980s, i e, just
prior to the “reforms”. It then plateaued
for a while in the neo-liberal period
before falling drastically once again to
reach 160 kilograms for the triennium
ending 2008-09 (since then it is likely to
have fallen further). 7 Neo-liberalism has
on this elementary criterion affected the
well-being of the people adversely, while
the dirigiste period had an opposite
effect. True, we know little about the
distribution of this total foodgrains
availability across the population; but
this, if anything is likely to strengthen
these conclusions further. And poverty
estimates arrived at on the basis of the
official calorie “norms” using official
data show a marked increase in the proportion
of people falling below these
“norms” both in urban and in rural India
in the neo-liberal period. 8 The discontinuity
has thus extended to people’s wellbeing
as well, which is an important reason
why it must not be ignored through
an analysis, such as Anderson’s, that
abstracts from the contours of India’s
capitalist development.
Anti-Imperialist Nationalism
Anderson’s suggestion to the Left is
not to get hegemonised by the “Indian
ideology” but to develop a degree of
“insolence”. In fact, the Indian Left
has been remarkably “insolent” in this
respect throughout its history, to the
point of saying “yeh azadi jhoothi hai”
(this freedom is bogus) at the time of
independence. His assertion that “all
shades of political opinion in India, from
RSS to CPM, unite in formal reverence to
a national icon” (Gandhi), is simply
wrong for the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) if the term “reverence” is
meant to cover theoretical assessment as
well. I have talked of B T Ranadive’s
position earlier; E M S Namboodiripad’s
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SEPTEMBER 7, 2013 vol xlviii no 36 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

REVIEW ARTICLE
The Mahatma and the Ism (recently republished)
takes a broadly similar position.
Some intellectuals with the party
no doubt have suggested that the party
should have a more favourable assessment
of Gandhi, but its erstwhile General
Secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet had
reje cted this suggestion and restated the
party’s earlier position on Gandhi in its
weekly People’s Democracy.
There is however an issue with the
Left’s assessment of Gandhi that needs
discussion, though Anderson may not
appreciate it since his work is not anchored
in any perspective on world capitalism.
The Left, if it is to remain true to
its class position, must fight the hegemony
of international capital and the
neo-liberal economic regime through
which this hegemony is exercised. For
this it has to put forward an alternative
agenda before the people and mobilise
them for a common struggle around it.
Since the struggles of the working class
across countries are not coordinated,
and of the peasantry even less so, the
forging of a worker-peasant alliance
against the neo-liberal agenda will necessarily
have to be at the level of the
country rather than at the global level;
and its progress will necessarily have to
depend upon a transitional programme
that entails a “delinking” from the
current capitalist globalisation. The
agenda, in short, will necessarily have
to be a national agenda that resuscitates
anti-imperialist nationalism which the
Congress earlier professed but no
longer does, and which will have to be
championed in the new situation by
the Left.
The European Left, for historical reasons
(the experience of two world wars), has
a hostility towards any form of “nationalism”
which is one reason in my view
for its current theoretical cul-de-sac. It
cannot put before the people of any
country a credible alternative economic
agenda opposed to that of finance capital,
since any such alternative, unless implemented
simultaneously at a pan-European
level (which is not feasible) must entail a
delinking of the country in question from
the European Union, which its aversion
to “nationalism” cannot countenance.
There is also a genuine problem it faces,
namely, the European countries are
individually too small for any such
national agenda (or even any pan-national
agenda confined only to a few countries)
to be either a viable or a credible one.
In India, however, the size of the
country, the diversity of its resource base
(with the exception of oil, for which,
however, it can always make arrangements
that allow it to escape imperialist
arm-twisting), and the long experience of
dirigiste development, make the formulation
of a national agenda, which is
necessary for effecting a worker-peasant
alliance against the current neo-liberal
dispensation, a viable option as well. To
be sure such an agenda will be opposed
by big capital, but that is precisely why it
can provide a means for transition towards
an order transcending capitalism.
If the Left is to propose such an antiimperialist
national agenda, then it must
relate itself, howsoever critically, to the
anti-imperialist nationalism of the earlier,
colonial, period, of which in any case it
was itself an integral component, 9 and
claim a certain continuity with it. Being
“insolent” in the manner suggested by
Anderson is scarcely the way to recover
that element of continuity.
Prabhat Patnaik (prabhatptnk@yahoo.co.in) is
Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic
Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi.
He thanks Sashi Kumar, Rajendra Prasad,
Utsa Patnaik and Akeel Bilgrami for comments
on an earlier draft of this review.
Notes
1 The colonial document was: Fifth Report of the
Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India
Company, 1812; and Hegel’s exact words were:
“The Hindoos Have No History” (Hegel 1956: 163),
quoted in Habib (1995). For a discussion of
Hegel’s and Marx’s ideas on Indian history,
see Irfan Habib “Marx’s Perception of India” in
Habib (1995).
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2 See in this context S Gopal’s discussion of
Nehru’s rejection of Mountbatten’s “Plan
Balkan” in Gopal (1975: 346-51).
3 B T Ranadive’s remarks, in answer to a question
by Bipan Chandra, are quoted in Irfan
Habib’s interview to Parvathi Menon, “A Historian’s
Task” in Patnaik (2011, p 335).
4 Many historians, including Anderson, note the
haste with which the British government
“Transferred Power” to an independent Indian
government, but one possible reason for it has
remained largely unexplored, namely, the
desire to restrict the spread to India of the
Communist-led post-war revolutionary upsurge
that was occurring elsewhere in east and
south-east Asia. The Telangana and Tebhaga
movements portended such a spread, which
the colonial state at that time lacked the
strength to confront. Its weakness inter alia
was exposed by the Naval Mutiny of 1946.
5 The collapse of the Soviet Union of course has
been an important contributory factor to this
unviability, but this collapse itself is not unrelated
to the emergence of globalised finance.
6 See Krishna Ram (2013).
7 All figures other than the last one are from
Utsa Patnaik’s essay “The Republic of Hunger”
which is contained in U Patnaik (2007). The
last figure is from U Patnaik (2013). Since animal
feed is deducted in calculating net availability,
these figures do not cover indirect consumption
of foodgrains via animal products.
But since this deduction is just a fixed percentage,
one can infer a decline in total, i e, direct
plus indirect, consumption.
8 U Patnaik (2013).
9 See Irfan Habib’s “The Left and the National
Movement” in Habib (2011).
References
Gopal, S (1975): Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography,
Volume One: 1889-1947 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press).
Habib, I (1995): Essays in Indian History (New
Delhi: Tulika Books).
– (2011): The National Movement: Studies in
Ideology and History (New Delhi: Tulika
Books).
Hegel, G W F (1956): The Philosophy of History,
translated by J Sibree, New York.
Kalecki, M (1972): Essays on the Economic Growth
of the Socialist and the Mixed Economy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Krishna, Ram (2013): “Cereal Consumption as a
Proxy for Real Income”, Economic & Political
Weekly, 20 July.
Patnaik, P, ed. (2011): Excursus in History: Essays
on Some Ideas of Irfan Habib (New Delhi:
Tulika Books).
Patnaik, U (2007): The Republic of Hunger and Other
Essays (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective).
– (2013): “Poverty Trends in India 1993-94 to
2009-10”, unpublished paper.
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