While
there will be general agreement that the judgement in Binayak Sen's
case represents a gross miscarriage of justice, most people will
attribute it to the overzealousness of a lower judicial functionary,
or, at the most, to the prevailing atmosphere in the state of Chhattisgarh.
If the trial had been held elsewhere, they would argue, Binayak
would not have got the verdict he did. They are probably right,
just as those who attribute the bringing of sedition charges against
Arundhati Roy and Syed Ali Shah Geelani to the overzealousness of
certain functionaries of the Delhi police, and against Sudhir Dhawle
to the overzealousness of the Maharashtra police, may well be right.
But such overzealousness, whose instances are multiplying alarmingly,
thrives within, and derives sustenance from, a certain ambience;
and this consists in the tendency under the current neo-liberal
dispensation increasingly to see any basic ideological opposition
to the parameters of official policy as anti-national. The tendency
in short is to criminalize ideological dissent. Of course, one must
not cry wolf, but one must not ignore this tendency either; to do
so will be fatal.
No
less a person than the Prime Minister, while speaking to IPS probationers
in the capital the other day, invoked a curious argument against
the Maoists. He did not just make the usual criticism that they
were attempting to overthrow the Constitutional order by violent
means. He went on to add: ''If we don't control Naxalism we have
to say good-bye to our country's ambition to sustain a growth rate
of 10-11 percent per annum'' (Deccan Chronicle, Dec.25). And this,
he clarified, is because central India is where the bulk of the
country's mineral wealth lies. Ten or eleven percent growth rate
in short is elevated to the status of a national goal. Any one who
opposes policies that seek to achieve this goal is therefore acting
against the national interest, and is ipso facto anti-national.
The reification involved in this piece of reasoning, as Karl Marx
would have noted, is astounding. A nation can have objectives like
the eradication of poverty, or the elimination of hunger, or the
removal of illiteracy, or the maintenance of full employment, or
the achievement of an egalitarian order; but the mere rate of augmentation
of the mass of goods and services produced can not possibly be a
national objective. True, some, including the Prime Minister, would
argue that this rate of augmentation holds the key to the achievement
of the national goals just listed, but this is a particular ideological
position; others may have a different position on the relationship
between growth and poverty. To posit the growth rate as a national
objective is to sanctify one particular ideological position above
all others as a nationally accepted one, and hence to decry any
one who opposes it as anti-national. Decrying those who oppose a
particular ideological position as being anti-national is implicitly
to criminalize dissent.
The Prime Minister, let us not forget, was talking not to a group
of his party functionaries but to budding police officers whose
job consists precisely in identifying what constitutes criminal
activity. He was in short articulating an official position. Besides,
given his intellectual eminence, what he says both expresses and
sets the trend for the thinking of the entire establishment. His
remarks therefore have to be taken very seriously.
More than a century and half ago, John Stuart Mill, while theoretically
anticipating a ''stationary state'' (i.e. zero growth economy),
had nonetheless remained unfazed by the prospect: he had declared
that he would not mind a stationary state as long as the working
people were better off in it. Mill had thus implicitly advanced
two propositions: first, the condition of the working people did
not depend upon the rate of growth of the economy, that it could
be better even in a stationary economy than in a growing one; and,
second, what mattered to him, and hence by inference what should
matter to society according to him, was not the rate of growth per
se but the condition of the working people. Both these propositions
of John Stuart Mill, a liberal, are diametrically opposed to what
the official neo-liberal argument advances today and wants to elevate
to a national consensus.
The fact that Mill was right, that high growth may be accompanied
by increasing poverty, is amply demonstrated by the recent Indian
experience itself. Indeed, the empirical evidence for absolute impoverishment
in the recent period of high growth is overwhelming. Let us briefly
look at this evidence. The official criterion for the identification
of poverty (until it was changed recently after the Tendulkar Committee
Report) has been the intake of 2400 calories or less per person
per day in rural India and 2100 calories or less in urban India.
By this criterion, poverty has certainly increased: direct measurement
of calorie intake suggests that 74.5 percent of the rural population
was ''poor'' in 1993-4, and 87 percent in 2004-5; the corresponding
figures were 57 percent and 64 percent respectively for the urban
population. (These figures, based on NSS data, are from Utsa Patnaik,
Economic and Political Weekly, Jan 23-29, 2010, and their veracity
can not be questioned).
Foodgrain absorption figures confirm this conclusion. Per capita
foodgrain absorption (defined as net output minus net exports minus
net increase in stocks) which, in round figures, was 200 kg. per
annum in ''British India'' at the beginning of the twentieth century
declined drastically to less than 150 kg. by the time of independence.
Strenuous efforts by successive governments in independent India
raised it to 180 kg. by the end of the eighties; but there has been
a decline thereafter, marginal at first but precipitous after the
late nineties, so much so that per capita foodgrain absorption in
2008, at 156 kg. by FAO estimates, was lower than in any year after
1953. The period of high growth is precisely the one associated
with reduction in foodgrain absorption, and hence with significant
absolute impoverishment.
But the official position apotheosizing growth as a national goal
and vilifying any opposition to it as anti-national, is not only
a reification, and a vacuity; it is also dangerous, both because
it criminalizes ideological dissent, and because it implicitly justifies
corporate control over the State. If ten or eleven percent growth
is elevated to a national goal, then obviously the agents through
whom this goal is to be achieved, especially in the neo-liberal
era when the public sector and public investment are frowned upon,
namely, the domestic and foreign private corporations and financial
interests, must be kept happy. The State must cater to their caprices,
so that their ''state of confidence'' is kept high, and they undertake
the investments necessary for high growth.
Since the alternative approach, of taxing the corporate and financial
interests and using public investment as the means of raising growth,
has been eschewed, even as growth itself has been apotheosized as
a national goal, the achievement of this goal necessarily requires
appeasing these interests by putting the entire State machinery
at their disposal. It necessarily means corporate control over the
State machinery. And when the Prime Minister talks of the need to
get unhindered access to the mineral wealth of central India as
the means to achieve the ''national goal'' of 10-11 percent growth
rate, he obviously means ensuring unhindered access to this wealth
to corporate interests.
This is precisely what has been happening; and the series of scams
that the nation has watched with stupefaction over the last few
weeks are only one manifestation of the extent of this corporate
control.
Such corporate control inevitably brings forth resistance. All such
resistance necessarily threatens the ''national goal'' of growth,
and hence is labelled anti-national, i.e. criminal. The criminalization
of dissent is immanent therefore in the corporate control over the
State machinery, and the reified view of ''national goals'' is a
justification for such control. Many have rightly attacked the draconian
laws which have been introduced into the statute books in many states
and under which protesters are punished. These laws, which are often
attributed to the authoritarianism of this or that political formation,
really spring from the authoritarianism inherent in the corporate
control over the State. The renowned economist Paul Samuelson, a
political liberal, had reportedly remarked that economic liberalism
can be practiced only under political authoritarianism. Contemporary
India testifies to the truth of this remark.