VI
I now come to the third, and
perhaps the most significant, implication of the new phase of world
capitalism, and this has to do with its socio-political effects on the
third world. There are two effects in particular that deserve notice.
The first is the attenuation of democracy that necessarily occurs in
a country caught in the vortex of globalised finance; and the second
is the fracturing in a multitude of ways of the unty of the nation that
had come into being in the course of the earlier anti-imperialist struggle.
These two processes complement one another.
Since a country caught in
the vortex of globalised finance must ensure that it retains "investors'
confidence" at all times, it necessarily has to take measures that
please international finance even if these affect the people adversely.
This per se is a negation of the very essence of democracy, and
is immanent in the situation, not a result of any particular malevolence.
The real question is: how can this essential negation of democracy occur
even when formal institutions of democracy remain in place?
A whole array of measures
are adopted for the purpose, ranging from taking economic policy-making
outside the purview of elected governments, to making elections themselves
infrequent, inconsequential, and inexpressive of popular will. Some
of these measures are unfolding today before our very eyes in our own
country.
Our parliament has before
it a proposed legislation that puts a statutory ceiling on the fiscal
deficit. Since there are no floors on the magnitude of tax revenue,
since there are no floors on the magnitude of social expenditure, since
there are no floors on the magnitude of anti-poverty expenditure, what
this entails is a legitimisation of cuts in expenditures of these kinds,
and of the sale of public sector assets "for a song" in the
name of closing the deficit, even though such sale, while appearing
to close the deficit actually closes no deficit. What is more, the Committee
on whose recommendations this piece of legislation is supposedly introduced
has several other recommendations which no doubt would take effect in
due course; one such recommendation is for a "high-powered committee"
to oversee economic policy making. In other words, economic policy-making
is to be taken out of the hands of elected governments and handed over
to a bunch of so-called "experts" consisting no doubt of either
aspirants for slots in the IMF and World Bank bureaucracy or superannuated
ex-employees of these institutions. In the same vein there is the proposal
that the Reserve Bank should be made autonomous of government "interference"!
Since the Reserve Bank is responsible for formulating the monetary policy
and the exchange rate policy of the country which in turn profoundly
affect the entire macroeconomics of an economy, this amounts in effect
to taking economic policy entirely out of the purview of the elected
government of the country. And this is sought to be achieved through
legislation passed by the parliament itself!
But that is not enough. To
make things further safe, there are proposals for a fixed term for the
legislature, for Ayub Khan-style "basic democracy" and for
a Presidential form of government. And a committee of persons handpicked
by the government, which enjoys no legal or moral standing whatsoever,
is working towards rewriting the Constitution of the country!
I now come to the second effect,
namely the fracturing of the unity of the nation forged in the course
of the anti-imperialist struggle. This too is happening in our own country
before our very eyes. The most obvious instrument of it in our case
is Hindu communal-fascism which seeks to substitute a Hindu Rashtra
for the nation-State that emerged out of the anti-imperialist struggle.
By detaching the concept of the nation from the context of the anti-imperialist
struggle, by pitting one section of the people against another in the
name of religion, by contributing threfore to the emergence of rival
communal-fascist movements, it serves, notwithstanding all its talk
of "swadeshi", to weaken the anti-imperialist consciousness
[7]
, and to subvert the anti-imperialist struggle,
even as its government carries out with ruthless determination, at the
behest of international finance capital, the process of annexation
of the economy by such capital. Communal fascism in short plays the
role of ushering in the hegemony of international finance capital over
the domestic economy.
Communal-fascism however is
only one of the ways of the fracturing of the nation. There are a variety
of other ways, at least one of which deserves attention here. And this
has to do with secessionism. Accentuated fiscal crisis of the central
government in a federal polity inevitably gets "passed downwards",
making the centre starve the states of funds. The latter therefore increasingly
look outside the country, in fact to international finance capital,
for a bail-out from the crisis, which encourages secessionism, promotes
a break-up of the federation into smaller autonomous units, and, in
the process lets loose fascisms of another kind, based on ethnic groups.
The example of the erstwhile Yugoslavia comes readily to mind. The portents
in our case too appear ominous: indeed one of the "discussion papers"
released by the Constitution Review Committee reportedly talks of giving
Treaty-making powers to state governments.
The erosion of democracy and
the fracturing of the nation-State forged in the context of the anti-imperialist
struggle constitute, in themselves, a reversal of development. But even
if we take the term development in its narrower and more usual interpretation,
as meaning only material development, the constriction of democracy
and the fracturing of the nation into a host of conflicting entities,
constitute an additional reason for the stifling of such development.
The diffusion of development in the new phase of imperialism remains
a chimera for this reason too, apart from the reasons we have discussed
already. This means not only that the struggle for development must
take the form of a struggle for liberation from this new phase of imperialism,
but also that the latter is indissolubly linked to the struggle for
the preservation of democracy and of the unity of the nation that emerged
from the earlier anti-imperialist movement spearheaded by persons like
Dr. Ansari.
