Workers World, Vol. 17, No. 28, July 4, 1975
The assumption of emergency powers by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the arrest of thousands of right-wing reactionary elements (as well as some leftists) is a momentous event which is bound to shake Indian society to its very foundations. It will set in motion as never before all political forces in the country. It will not only accelerate the political struggle but raise to a new pitch all the social and class contradictions which are tearing the country apart.
India has reached a fork on the historic road. From now on the choice that will be posed with increasing urgency will be – fascism or the socialist revolution?
A Bonapartist regime
The assumption by the Gandhi government of extraordinary powers and the suspension of constitutional guarantees in order to combat what basically amounted to a scarcely veiled “cold takeover” by the right puts the Gandhi government more than ever in the role of a Bonapartist arbiter which for the moment is striking out heavily against the right-wing while preparations are in the making (with or without Indira Gandhi) to strike at the left.
The invocation of special extraordinary powers is a symptom of the deep class antagonisms, crying out for resolution, which are reaching the surface of the political structure after having grown more and more acute over a period of many years. One has only to consider that India has an unemployment rate of 30 percent and that even back in the 1950s the average indebtedness of the Indian peasant to the landlords and grain merchants amounted to 2 years’ annual income.
“Stability” meant repression
The right-wing of the bourgeoisie has shown a determination to resolve the contradictions by force in favor of “restoring stability,” on the basis of the suppression of the workers’ movement, the peasantry, especially the landless peasantry, and the restless petty bourgeoisie, particularly those among the unemployed. It is no secret that 70 percent of India’s population is illiterate, that 80 percent of the population is in rural areas, that there are millions of landless peasants, that half the population lives below subsistence levels, and that 28 years after independence the gross national product of India is barely $50 billion, covering a population of 584 million, which amounts to an annual per capita income of $91.
India, of course, has undergone a great deal of industrialization. The working class has grown. But the oligarchy, as it is sometimes called (which covers about 75 big families), controls more than 60 percent of the basic capital of India. The peasantry has been liberated from feudalism all right, but in a way which has utilized all the vestige of feudalism to make capitalist farming more oppressive. All the talk about socialism being built in India has only meant increased concentration of power in the hands of the new and more powerful bourgeoisie. The latter divide the surplus value, derived from the hides of the workers, which they got from the public sector of industry, the so-called socialist sector, as well as from the private sector of industry. Either way, the workers are mercilessly exploited and robbed. Wretchedness and misery are their daily lot. Escape from production leads only to a more unstable and precarious condition.
In the rural areas, where the bulk of the population lives, the so-called trinity – merchants, money-lenders, and landlords – reign supreme, fleece the poor peasants, and keep them in a state of subjection and actual starvation, especially the landless peasants.
Global implications
Although India has been independent since 1947, it is by no means free from dependence on imperialism, least of all the U.S. A superficial examination of the recent developments in India as reflected in the capitalist press here might lead the unwary to conclude the U.S. was an idle bystander, dispassionately observing events.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The hue and cry raised by the press about the “danger to democracy” involved in Gandhi’s suppression of the rightist politicians is in strange contrast to their silence when Gandhi brutally suppressed the railroad strike in 1974 and imprisoned thousands without even the shadow or color of law. The railroad workers were detained en masse without counsel, many brutally beaten, while the union leaders were being held as hostages in jail and the strike itself ruthlessly and mercilessly suppressed.
The concern for “democracy” shown now by the bourgeois press here for the rightists and fascists did not extend to this violent disregard of the democratic rights of the railroad workers. (Nor has the concern for Indian democracy been extended to American “Indians” – Native Americans – who are being hunted this very day like wild animals in the territory of Pine Ridge, where the U.S. by a treaty more than a century old has no jurisdiction to enter, let alone break in with unmitigated violence and brutality as it is doing now.)
The hand of the U.S. in India’s affairs began precisely at the time India finally achieved independence. The economic penetration of U.S. imperialism accelerated with the tempo of a person wearing seven league boots. By 1951 Washington felt confident enough to attempt to dictate foreign policy in New Delhi. The first objective of U.S. diplomacy was to develop a sharp cleavage with the newly founded People’s Republic of China. The medium which the U.S. utilized was agricultural surpluses – food – a weapon as lethal as any. It is startling to recall that the basis of the negotiations between India and the U.S. in those early days was a demand by Washington that the Nehru government do no less than alter its foreign policy in relation to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with whom it had just normalized diplomatic relations.
The present generation of Americans believes that the root of hostility between the U.S. and India was based merely around Pakistan. But it goes deeper than that. The most important objective even earlier was to create tension between India and the PRC and poison their relationship. Although the Nehru government would not accede to publicly altering its policy in relation to China in order to obtain U.S. food, the U.S. achieved its objective without any written commitment or public pronouncement.
U.S. forced struggle with China
Therein lies the root of the struggle between India and China, at least to a very large extent. The U.S. subsequently kept delivering food, mostly grains, to India under public law 480 which was regularly renewed from year to year. Under this agreement the U.S. accumulated close to 22 billion rupees, local Indian currency, which used mostly to foster the development of American-Indian economic relations by building up the strength of U.S. multi-national corporations and helping the so-called private sector of the Indian economy while trying to sabotage the public sector.
The accumulation of such a vast amount of rupees, which could be used domestically as a powerful economic weapon in India, in the long run forged a powerful American faction of the Indian bourgeoisie which, to this date, is one of the principal elements in the struggle.
The Indian ambassador to the U.S. is one of the leaders of the pro-U.S. faction. Nevertheless, India in recent years has developed extensive relations with the Soviet Union. Needless to say, many of the rightist parties of India prefer collaboration with the U.S. to the USSR if for no other reason than as a domestic ploy against the working class movement in India.
Nevertheless, for all its economic leverage in India, the present major foreign policy goal of the U.S. to turn the Indian government around from what it deems a pro-Soviet position, has eluded it.
Premature prediction?
Scarcely 36 hours after a judge of the high court of Allahabad found Prime Minister Gandhi guilty of a minor violation of the Indian election law in the parliamentary elections 4 years ago, the New York Times in an unusual editorial on June 15th jubilantly exclaimed, “Mrs. Gandhi’s days in office appear to be numbered.”
The prediction was premature. But more significant is the arrogant and vicious tone of this mouthpiece of high finance in making a prognostication without giving its readers any basis whatever in its own news columns for such a prediction. Obviously it was based on inside information – on intelligence, on the same CIA it is supposed to be exposing.
We need not go so far as did the Indian weekly leftist magazine, Blitz, to say that the court proceedings against Gandhi were a CIA plot in toto. However, it’s significant that even before this accusation by the Indian magazine reached the U.S. press, none other than the CIA secret police chief, William Colby, took to television to pointedly deny this allegation, which nobody in the U.S. had up to this time seen in the U.S. had up to this time seen in print or heard from the media. And it is no mere coincidence that the New Delhi correspondent of NBC News also said that Gandhi’s days were numbered – with even less information than the Time supplied.
Right-wing setback
The courts in a parliamentary system such as India’s are far more accessible as an initial point of departure for a right-wing coup than other arms of the capitalist state. It would have been far easier for the right-wing had they been able to remove Gandhi by so-called court proceedings along. It would have been a classic cold takeover. At the given moment, however, Gandhi retaliated with what amounted to a preemptive strike against a developing rightist coup. In any case, the right has been temporarily disoriented and demobilized. And the U.S. has suffered a setback in its diplomatic struggle to alter the foreign policy of India and install a regime to its liking.
It is to be remembered that, as Indira Gandhi herself had said in connection with the Chile coup, she didn’t know “whether she was accepted” by the U.S. – according to none other than Pat Moynihan, the former U.S. Ambassador to India.
Meaning for the USSR
Superficially, the Gandhi blow against the right-wing is a victory for the USSR. Pravda was one of the first to characterize the emergency decree by Gandhi as progressive and as in the interests of the democratic forces of the country.
The Vietnamese also, although for different reasons, praised the attack against the right-wing.
As a workers’ state existing in a world of states with antagonistic social systems, the USSR has every right to normalize relations with other states and extend such friendly aid and assistance as will serve the interests of the workers everywhere.
The USSR, however, has gone way beyond mere diplomatic relations with India. It has presented India as a socialist state when in fact it is a brutal capitalist state dependent upon imperialism for aid and assistance, one which mercilessly exploits and robs the workers and peasants.
The USSR is heavily involved in the economy of India. It has extended tremendous aid and assistance to build up the public sector of the Indian economy, the so-called socialist sector, which in reality is a form of state capitalism. Moreover, the public sector is the area where the private sector obtains its sustenance and without which the bourgeoisie, which controls both the public and private sector, could not thrive.
Indian “socialism” is the same sort of state capitalism which was built up in the Nasser years in Egypt and which Sadat is doing so much to dismantle in his headlong retreat into the camp of imperialism.
The USSR helped build up the image of “Arab socialism” among progressives. But in reality it was nothing more than state capitalist exploitation. At a later date the bourgeoisie can easily loosen the reigns over the state enterprises and introduce once again a form of “free enterprise” with more “individual initiative,” while at the same time retaining the forms of state capitalism only to strengthen the bourgeois class economically and politically.
The type of coup against Nasserism which brought Sadat to power, and with it a shift towards the U.S., is precisely what has been the objective of the U.S. in India for many years. What the more moderate elements in the State Department really wanted was a change from Indira Gandhi to something like Sadat – away from Moscow and with far less emphasis on the public sector and greater “freedom” for private enterprise for the undisguised, more brutal exploitation of the workers and the peasants. This is a particularly alluring prospect for the liberal establishment here which would like a “cold,” quiet, inexpensive takeover, perhaps in much the same fashion as Nixon was dismissed.
It is precisely that prospect which made the New York Times so excessively jubilant with its outburst that Indira Gandhi’s days were numbered.
The reality of the situation, however, is that in comparison to the coup in Chile, an India coup by the CIA would be one of truly Gargantuan stature, a little too large even for the large appetite of Wall Street imperialism.
Blow against the right
What has therefore happened is that Gandhi struck back in sort of preemptive fashion, but in the process has set the stage for a more decisive struggle at a later date.
Hers is a transitional regime. The assumption of special powers and her hints that these are not only against the right marks her regime as Bonapartist in character that must ultimately give way at the next stage of the struggle.
The Soviet leaders must now be all too aware that, the struggle having surfaced, their position has become more tenuous. Their alliance with the Indian bourgeoisie will become more incompatible with the interests of the Soviet Union the more the rightist tendencies surface.
Even if the situation should go no further than the mere installation of an Indian Sadat (it could even be in the person of Indira Gandhi), it would constitute a tremendous setback for the USSR and would isolate it diplomatically to a great degree.
The basis for this is that the USSR is not only interest in India for the purpose of counteracting imperialist domination. The USSR, or rather the Soviet bureaucracy, is also deeply interest in counteracting the influence of the People’s Republic of China, and when one considers their long ideological struggle which has turned into a state-to-state struggle of a venomous character, a Sadat-type government in India would be a giant diplomatic blow to the USSR.
On the other hand, the PRC would regard it, if it has not already done so, as a blessing. It has denounced the Gandhi coup against the right-wing, which from a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist point of view is pure and simple opportunism. It is one thing to point out the repressive character of the Gandhi regime as far as the workers and peasants are concerned; it is another thing to denounce the repression against the right from the point of view of bourgeois politics.
China’s position
This is a case of the Chinese leadership, in utter disregard and disdain for the class which it continually preaches to, adopting a bourgeois position purely out of factional considerations vis-à-vis the USSR. Of course there has been an accumulation of issues between China and India in which India acted aggressively, as it did, for instance, in 1958 and 1962. But due to the Soviet leaders’ support of India against China, because of the narrow vision and crass opportunism of the Soviet bureaucracy, it can only be expected that the PRC leaders, rather than taking a revolutionary position in a situation such as presently exists in India, would take an opportunist one merely out of spite for the Soviet bureaucracy.
The Gandhi regime can only be of a transitional character, as we have said. The working class parties of India are bound to be completely shaken up by this development. This development is for them both a challenge and an opportunity. India now has three communist parties: the Communist Party of India (CPI), which generally follows the Soviet line; the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), which is regarded to the left of the former and more independent; and the new party founded in 1969 called the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which is an outgrowth of the Naxalite movement and has followed the line of Mao Tse-tung.
The fragility of the bourgeois parliamentary regime in India, and the specter of a military or fascist dictatorship, is not something that has come as a bolt from the blue in India.
Swedish journalists 6 or 7 years ago interviewed E.M.S. Namboodiripad, one of the founders of the original Communist Party and a leader in the state of Kerala where the CPIM has had a dominating role in the coalition government of the state several times. Namboodiripad said, “Imagine, for example, that the whole parliamentary system of the state (of Kerala) and (New) Delhi were to be abolished. Where would we be then? Where would our power be? Our power is the formal power of bourgeois democracy and its elections. The instant the system dissolves, we will no longer exist. On the other hand, if it remains in force thanks to the military, then Indira Gandhi won’t be there either. She can easily be overthrown. It happened in Pakistan. The military is the essential state power. Looked at scientifically, we don’t have the power.”
Namboodiripad is a moderate among the communists of the CPIM and a leader in the government. Yet he was obliged to state, “When you get right down to it, Marx and especially Lenin emphasize the fact that bourgeois democracy is just a special kind (form) of bourgeois dictatorship. Whenever the ruling classes see that the working class is using the bourgeois democratic system to further its class interests in order to weaken and defeat the ruling class, they throw away their democratic masks and show their true faces. We harbor no illusions that we can in this way carry out a basic social revolution.” (Quotes from Face to Face, Fascism and Revolution in India, by Lasse and Lisa Berg, p. 194-4.)
An astonishingly accurate assessment – but one that sounds as though it is coming from a mere observer, not the head of a communist party! It is one thing to understand and state a political proposition based on Marxist analysis. It is another thing to act upon it.
It is difficult to believe that the millions of communists, the hundreds of thousands of communist cadres on the Indian subcontinent, cannot see that India has at last arrived at a turning point, that the Indira Gandhi government has been the Indian version of the social democratic Bruening regime of the Weimar Republic of pre-Nazi Germany.
A turning point similar to German Weimar
Her preemptive strike against the rightists has transformed Gandhi’s rule into a version of the Von Pappen and Von Schleicher Bonapartist type which relied for its survival on the military and the police.
Thus the Bruening regime, the Von Pappen regime which succeeded him, and that of Von Schleicher were all successive steps leading to the Hitlerite dictatorship. It is a lesson which no communist, no working class leader or progressive generally, can overlook in the light of the present situation in India.
The difference between India today and Germany then is that, numerous though the so-called middle class of India may be, practically all observers are unanimous that the overwhelming majority of both workers and peasants as well as the lower petty bourgeoisie would be most responsive to strong determined revolutionary efforts to overturn the social system in favor of a genuine socialist society.
Last updated: 11 May 2026