The Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) in Alirajpur district of Madhya Pradesh will be completing four decades this year in its fight for justice for the Bhil Adivasis. Not only has it been one of the most successful mass organisations in the country in the implementation of the Forest Rights Act for its members but it has also organised them into doing communitarian ecosystem restoration by leveraging their traditional labour pooling customs. The biggest achievement of the KMCS has been the conservation of forests, soil and water over 12500 hectares in 62 villages. The forests are either very dense (over 70% canopy cover) or medium dense (between 40% and 70% canopy cover) with one village Bada Amba having as much as 64% of its area under dense forests and overall the proportion of forest area to total land area of these villages is 24%. Analysis of Remote Sensing Data over a period of 33 years between 1990 and 2023 was carried out by the School of Climate Change and Sustainability, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, for these 62 KMCS villages and compared with 62 control villages in the district which did not have communitarian protection. The results are summarised in the map attached in which the green areas are those in which there has been increase in vegetation and the red areas are those in which there has been decrease in vegetation. The green circles are the KMCS villages where there has been communitarian ecosystem restoration work and the purple circles are the villages in which there has not been any communitarian ecosystem restoration work. Clearly, the vegetation has increased in KMCS villages as compared to the control villages.
A more detailed analysis of LandSat data with higher resolution of 900 square meter pixel size was also carried out and that shows that even in the control villages there has been increase in vegetation over the three decades from the 1990s even though there are no dense forests there as there are in the KMCS villages. So overall there has been an impact of the KMCS in the whole of Alirajpur district as people have been inspired to protect trees. This is an extremely important achievement from the perspective of Climate Change Mitigation.Incidentally, 13000 hectares of forests were submerged by the Sardar Sarovar dam and as per the detailed project report, the Government should have done compensatory afforestation on four times that area. However, even after spending a few hundred crores, there is nothing to show. whereas the KMCS through communitarian collective action has done almost the same amount of conservation as the forests submerged.Anaarkali - The Saga of Bhil Adivasi Indigenous People
A non Adivasi person's respectful celebration of the struggles of the Bhil indigenous people of India against the depredations of modern development - mostly exhilarating but sometimes depressing stories of a people who believe in drinking life to the leas.
Anarcho-environmentalism allegorised
The name Anaarkali in the present context has many meanings - Anaar symbolises the anarchism of the Bhils and kali which means flower bud in Hindi stands for their traditional environmentalism. Anaar in Hindi can also mean the fruit pomegranate which is said to be a panacea for many ills as in the Hindi idiom - "Ek anar sou bimar - One pomegranate for a hundred ill people"! - which describes a situation in which there is only one remedy available for giving to a hundred ill people and so the problem is who to give it to. Thus this name indicates that anarcho-environmentalism is the only cure for the many diseases of modern development! Similarly kali can also imply a budding anarcho-environmentalist movement. Finally according to a legend that is considered to be apocryphal by historians Anarkali was the lover of Prince Salim who was later to become the Mughal emperor Jehangir. Emperor Akbar did not approve of this romance of his son and ordered Anarkali to be bricked in alive into a wall in Lahore in Pakistan but she escaped. Allegorically this means that anarcho-environmentalists can succeed in bringing about the escape of humankind from the self-destructive love of modern development that it is enamoured of at the moment and they will do this by simultaneously supporting women's struggles for their rights.
Monday, April 7, 2025
Sunday, January 5, 2025
The Need for State Funded Proportional Representation Based Elections
Introduction
Ideally
the Indian electoral system should be based on proportional representation to
accommodate the vast diversity in the socio-economic characteristics of the
population. In this system political parties are allotted seats in the
legislature and parliament in proportion to the votes that they get and so even
small local parties who can get votes higher than a specified threshold can
find representation in the legislature and parliament. A threshold voting
percentage, as low as 3 per cent of the total valid votes polled is required to
prevent frivolous legislative participation and too much fragmentation. Those
parties getting this threshold vote will also be recompensed in proportion of
the votes gained for the election campaign expenses on the production of proper
bills. There is thus scope for a
thousand schools of thought to contend and bring to fruition a much more
vibrant and diverse democratic culture in India than has obtained so far.
Instead
the first past the post (FPTP) system was adopted in which the candidate
getting the most number of the valid votes cast in a constituency is declared
elected. This latter system was to the advantage of the Indian National
Congress party at the time of independence as it got to rule unhampered on its
own without the pulls and pressures of coalition governance that a system of
proportional representation usually gives rise to and would certainly have in
the diverse Indian context. So the first past the post electoral system of the
British and American democracies, which the British had introduced to suit
their own agenda of keeping the unruly masses at bay, was retained after
independence giving the Congress an undue monopoly of power in the crucial
first decade and a half of governance under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.
History
of FPTP in India
The first
elections to the Lok Sabha held in 1951 saw the Congress winning just forty
five percent of the total valid votes but as much as seventy five percent of
the seats. Similarly in the second elections in 1957 the Congress won forty
eight percent of the total valid votes and seventy five percent of the seats.
In the third general elections of 1962 the Congress won forty five percent of
the total valid votes and got seventy three percent of the seats (ECI, 2005).
The second largest party by way of votes won in all these three elections was
the Socialist Party but due to the fact that their support base was spread much
thinner than the Congress' they could not win seats in proportion to their
votes. In 1951 the Socialists got ten and a half percent of the total valid
votes but only two and a half percent of the seats. This is to be contrasted
with the Communist Party of India, which won only three and a half percent of
the votes and a similar percentage of the seats because their mass base was of
a concentrated nature. Interestingly Ambedkar's political party, The All India
Scheduled Castes Federation, also failed to do well at the hustings in the
first elections in 1951 with the great man himself losing from the Bombay City
North constituency despite having done so much for the Dalits. Similarly in
1957 the Socialists once again got ten and a half percent of the votes but only
three and a half percent of the seats while the Communists got nearly nine
percent of the votes and five and a half percent of the seats. In the 1962
elections the two separate Socialist Parties together got nine and a half
percent of the votes and only three and a half percent of the seats while the
Communists got almost ten percent of the votes and five and a half percent of
the seats.
Thus, a
clever and unnatural choice of electoral system gave the Congress party
thumping majorities to do as it pleased with little effective parliamentary
opposition to its policies. The significance of this disproportion between
votes and seats becomes crystal clear if we compare it with the relation
between the percentage of votes and seats won for the same three groups above
in the general elections of 2004 by which time fractured mandates and coalition
politics had become the order of the day. The Congress, the Nationalist
Congress Party and the Trinamool Congress Party, which have their roots in the
old Congress, together won thirty percent of the votes and twenty nine percent
of the seats. The various splinter groups of the Socialists together won eleven
and a half percent of the votes and sixteen percent of the seats. The
Communists and their allies won eight percent of the votes and eleven percent
of the seats (ECI, op cit). The tables had been turned. The Congress is
continually being spread thin while the smaller parties, concentrated as they
are in localised niches are garnering more seats in proportion to the votes
won. The BJP, which too, harbours similar grandiose political visions as the
Congress in its heydays, now benefits from this FPTP system. While it got only 38
percent of the votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections it yet secured as much as
66 percent of the seats.
FPTP
and Corrupt Electoral Practices
The adoption
of the first past the post election system is only a short step from letting
the influence of money power and unethical political practice dominate the
electoral strategies of parties. The conservative elements who formed the
majority within the Congress in the pre-independence days had a free hand in
the preparations for the elections to the provincial assemblies in 1936 and
they generally selected candidates from local businessmen, contractors and
landlords who were able to donate funds to the party and also spend lavishly on
their own campaigns. Defections were also engineered from non-Congress parties
in areas where the party was not strong with the dangling of the usual sops
(Das, 2001). This strategy was immensely successful and helped the Congress to
come to power everywhere it contested. Nehru made a few deprecating noises
within the party forums regarding the infiltration of unscrupulous elements but
went along with this wholesale subversion of democratic and ethical norms by
the conservative leadership of the party so as to gain support from them for
his overall leadership.
Nehru in
fact was busy cleverly "burning the candle at both ends" to the
appreciative delight of the Conservatives in the Congress led by Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel after whom the Sardar Sarovar dam is named (Patel, 1936). He
played the mentor to the then young Marxist firebrands led by Jayaprakash
Narayan and gave them much greater importance than the mass following they
commanded. Presiding over the crucial Lucknow Annual Convention of the Congress
party in 1936, held against the backdrop of the British beginning to devolve
power to the Indians and the emerging possibility of independence, he not only
espoused socialism as the solution to India's and the world's problems but also
nominated three members of the Congress Socialist Party which had been formed
earlier with his blessings in 1934 to the Congress Working Committee (Sinha,
1984). In this way he both countered the Conservatives and also co-opted these
firebrands into the leadership and deflected them from pursuing subversive mass
mobilisational work. However, once their purpose of buttressing Nehru's
position vis-a-vis the Conservatives within the Congress was served the
Socialists found themselves rejected in the same way as the Gandhians after
independence. They severed their connections with the Congress and formed the
independent Socialist Party in 1948. Following exemplary democratic principles
they also resigned their seats in the legislative assembly of the United
Provinces and sought re-election. The Congress then used its art of winning by hook
or by crook developed earlier during the 1936 elections to defeat the
Socialists and push them into the political wilderness (Brass & Robinson
eds, 1989).
Given this
corrupt pre-independence history of the Congress right from the first general
elections in 1951, money power, muscle power and the state machinery were used
to vitiate the sanctity of the electoral process in such a way that there was
little chance of an ethical person being able to win elections. Both the
Socialists and the Communists lost out because of this in most areas except in
a few niches where they were in such great mass strength that they could
effectively counter the electoral mal practices of the Congress. Losing out on
state power in a poor post-colonial country like India with an underdeveloped
economy and civil society and an over-developed state apparatus (Bardhan, 1999)
meant losing out on everything as the state was the main collector and
commander of resources and distributor of largesse. Control of state power also
provided the Congress with the opportunity to get massive financial
contributions from the industrialists - the nascent Indian capitalist class in
exchange for policies and programmes favourable to them. This further reduced
the chances of the Socialists or the Communists of winning elections. Even when
the Communists despite mountainous hurdles did manage to cobble together a
government in Kerala, the first democratically elected Communist government in
the world, Nehru threw all political scruples to the wind and dismissed the
government in 1959 to impose Central rule in the state. Defections were
engineered with the dangling of sops to win away elected representatives and
their supporters. Thus there was a continuous exodus of workers and leaders
from among the Socialists and Communists to the Congress (Sinha, op cit).
The net
result was that both the Socialists and Communists got effectively sidelined in
the Nehru era and parliament lost its capacity to act as a check on governance,
which increasingly became of a strong centrist nature shedding even the little
formal federalism that had been provided for in the Constitution. The extent of
the Congress hegemony can be gauged from the fact that the first no-confidence
motion against Nehru's government was moved only in the year 1963, all of
sixteen years after independence. Nehru became the supreme leader as head of
both the government and the Congress party ruthlessly removing those who tried
to stand up to him in opposition by overt and covert means and consciously
promoting weak politicians without much mass following as the chief ministers
in the states (Das, op cit). A
patron-client relationship was set up beginning with Nehru at the top and a
whole sycophantic pyramid going down to the lowest workers at the grassroots
level all trying to dispense state favours. Indira Gandhi, who followed Nehru
as Prime Minister after a brief interlude after his death, pursued these
corrupt practices and perfected them into an art. Finally, the mass movement
led by Jayaprakash Narayan, which reached the verge of forcing a general election,
challenged this covert subversion of democracy by the Congress party. Indira
Gandhi then went to the extent of declaring an internal emergency and overtly
curtailing democratic freedoms in 1975.
Betrayal
of the Sampoorna Kranti Movement Ideals
The long
incarceration in jail during the emergency must have given the opposition
leaders of all hues an opportunity to review the reasons for their electoral
marginalisation and they probably realised that winning elections and being
able to cut and distribute the developmental cake were crucial to effective
operation in the Indian democratic system as it had evolved under the Congress.
So when the parliamentary Socialists and Communists finally made their way to
power at the centre and in the states following the historic elections of 1977
after the internal emergency was lifted they too began treading the corrupt
trail blazed by the Congress. Winning elections and staying in power became the
driving goal and ideology began taking a back seat as Jayaprakash Narayan's
ideas of total revolution too were floated down the Ganges with his funeral
ashes (Sinha, op cit). Nowadays most political parties, and there are many to
accord with the varied diversity of the people across the spectrum from the
left to the right and from the bottom of the social order to the top, that take
part in elections, have recourse to unfair electoral practices prior to winning
and dubious parliamentary practices after that. Indeed the Bahujan Samaj Party
of the dalits, which had given a clarion call for cleansing the dirty politics
of the "Manuvadi" upper castes when it first began participating in
elections, too has gone the corrupt way of the other parties. Most parties have
also duplicated the patron-client relationship on which the Congress is based
and are top down parties centred around single leaders or a small group of
leaders. No wonder then that hardened criminals who have both power and pelf in
the local settings have begun winning elections in embarrassingly large numbers
and dictating what little is left of party policy. Since winning elections and
staying in power have become ends in themselves rather than being the means for
social transformation and people oriented governance, both electoral and
legislative practice have been reduced to being a theatre of the absurd with
bizarre goings on these days. The BJP, backed by the organisational muscle of
the RSS and the backing of the capitalists has now excelled in manipulating the
FPTP to gain an upper hand.
The
Marginalisation of People’s Movements by FPTP
It does
not require much perspicacity to see that given this corrupt milieu it is next
to impossible to win elections at levels higher than that of the panchayats,
and there too with much difficulty, while remaining true to ethical canons and
priniciples of equity and sustainability. This is why the environmentalist mass
movements have been unable to make any electoral headway at the legislative and
parliamentary levels apart from some stray MLAs here or there and the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi and to some extent
in Punjab. They have been able to win some seats in panchayats but since these
have little financial or political powers, this does not help in influencing
policy at the state or national level. A vicious circle of marginalisation
results from this. There is a tendency among the masses to vote for those
parties who they feel will be able to win and make an impact on governance.
That is why the marginal "bin pende ka lota" image of the
environmentalists has resulted in electoral formations set up by them falling
flat and becoming even more marginalised. A major problem always is the
mobilisation of resources to do political work in general and election
campaigning in particular.
Therefore,
there is a dire need to launch a campaign for a switch from the FPTP electoral
system to the proportional representation system supported by state funding of
elections which will considerably increase the chances of people’s movements
being able to enter the legislatures and parliament. Even if these movements
have small bases in diverse disjointed locations, cumulatively a federation
like the National Alliance of People’s Movements can garner enough votes across
the country to cross the minimum threshold of votes. Since the members of these
movements and other voters will also know that their votes will not go waste
they will also vote in larger numbers for these movements.
References
Bardhan, P
(1999): The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford University
Press, Delhi.
Brass, P &
Robinson, F eds (1989): The Indian National Congress and Indian Society
1885-1985: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Dominance, South Asia
Books, Delhi.
Das, S (2001): The
Nehru Years in Indian Politics: From a Historical Hindsight, Edinburgh
Papers in South Asian Studies Number 16, Centre for South Asian Studies, School
of Social & Political Studies, University of Edinburgh.
ECI (2005): Performance
of National Parties Vis-a-Vis Others in General Elections, Election
Commission of India website accessed on 12th September 2005 at url
http://www.eci.gov.in/Election Results_fs.htm
Nehru,
J L (1975): Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, First Series Vol VII,
Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, Delhi.
----------
(1983): Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series Vol I, Oxford
University Press, Delhi.
Patel,
V (1936): All India Congress Committee Papers, Nehru Memorial Library
and Museum, New Delhi, File-G-85(1).
Sinha, S (1984):
Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement: An Overview, in Reddy, G K C ed Fifty
Years of Socialist Movement in India: Retrospect and Prospect, Samata Era
Publication, New Delhi.
------ (2005): Chunav
Niti, Ranniti Va Anubhav (Election Ethics, Strategy and Experience), (in
Hindi) Samayik Varta, Vol. 28 No. 11
Universal Basic Income as a means to a Revolutionary Transformation
Current late capitalist domination has so atomised the working class that we now no longer have a proletariat, a class for itself but only a precariat with little or no class consciousness as a prelude to organising for a revolutionary transformation to a more socio-economically just dispensation. Under the circumstances just fighting for better working conditions and wages will not only be difficult but will not achieve a progress towards revolutionary transformation. Consequently, there is a need to fight for a universal basic income as well as will be argued in this note.
1.
Primitive Accumulation
Karl Marx had
in Das Kapital defined primitive accumulation as a pre-capitalist phenomenon
that led to the initial accumulation of capital on the one hand and the
creation of wage labour on the other hand, resulting in the establishment of
capitalism in England in the eighteenth century (Marx, 2016). Marx, critiquing
Adam Smith’s earlier assertion that the process was a peaceful one in which
some labourers through their hard work had accumulated capital (Smith, 2018), contended
with evidence that peasants were driven off the land, on which they were serfs
or petty producers and even the commons were enclosed, through extra-economic
means such as arbitrary violence and laws enacted by the state. However, Marx
himself said that while this was at that time a one-off process in England, it
was not so in the colonies where petty agricultural producers continued to be
there in large numbers providing rent to the colonisers, who sent the surplus
so extracted back to the imperialist countries for expansion of capitalist
production there. Rosa Luxemburg, too, argued that the existence of a
non-capitalist space was necessary for the realization of the surplus component
of the value of a capitalist commodity as well as for primitive accumulation
from exploitation of labour and natural resources from the colonial periphery
for the continuance of capitalist development as capitalism internally would
not be stable (Luxemburg, 2003).
Later, Louis Althusser
argued that primitive accumulation has been an integral part of capitalism
because even after capitalism was well established in Europe and America in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it continued to extract surpluses by
extra-economic means from the colonies and later the nominally independent
nations of the post World War II era (Althusser, 2006). The onset of the
neo-liberal era from the 1990s onwards, led on the one hand to a withdrawal of
welfare benefits and union rights which had been gained by the working class
through hard fought battles in the industrialised capitalist countries of the
West and a dismantling of the socialist apparatuses of the USSR, China and
Eastern Europe on the other. Many Marxian theorists argued that this was a
revival of primitive accumulation within the capitalist system since it
involved the exclusion of a vast number of people from the social commons which
provided free education, health and unemployment benefits combined with the
squeezing of wages through outsourcing of jobs and the handing over of public
enterprises to private capital (Harvey, 2003, De Angelis, 2004). Moreover, tax
breaks and subsidies were given to corporations which led to their increasing
profits further reducing the funds available for maintaining the socio-economic
commons. The huge dominance of finance capital globally and the use of
international financial organisations like the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund to impose cuts in public welfare spending in the developing
countries and the transfer of the surpluses from them to the banks of the
developed countries through debt and interest repayment were also considered to
be extra-economic dispossession of the people of those countries and so a form
of primitive accumulation.
This analysis
has been cogently extended by Prabhat Patnaik to the case of India since the
1990s when neo-liberal policies were introduced in this country (Patnaik,
2017). Patnaik writes –
“The
neo-liberal regime, has increased the tendency to inflict primitive
accumulation upon third world petty producers. In the name of free trade, this
sector, and above all peasant agriculture, is now exposed to world market
fluctuations, which bring ruin to large sections of the peasantry. In the name
of bringing about fiscal rectification, input subsidies to this sector,
including cheap credit, are withdrawn. International agri-business and domestic
big capitalists are able to squeeze the peasantry.
The second
way in which primitive accumulation is carried out is in the name of
‘development’ itself, peasant lands are taken over for a ‘song’ for industrial
and infrastructural projects. Not only is the peasantry, that legally owned
this land, squeezed in the process, but also the entire group of tenants and
agricultural labourers whose rights on the land are not even recognized when
such take-over of land occurs.
The third
way of primitive accumulation is increasing the tax-burden on petty production.
Take the case of the uniform Goods and Services Tax, under which, all products
are taxed, including the products of the petty producers that had not been
taxed earlier, on a par with the products of big capitalists. This has,
needless to say, the effect of squeezing this sector.
The fourth
mechanism of primitive accumulation is through the privatization of essential
services like education and health that the neo-liberal regime effects, which
raises the prices of these services. Since the new service providers belong to
the capitalist sector, such a rise in price is analytically analogous to a rise
in the ‘degree of monopoly’ (Kalecki, 1971), which clearly has the effect of
compressing the real income of the petty production sector and of the workers
of the capitalist sector itself.”
Patnaik,
however, does not mention above the most important means of primitive
accumulation, that of non-payment of statutory minimum wages due to extra
economic pressure exerted on the workers, leading to huge extraction of surplus
value. This is even more of a problem in India than in the developed countries
because the statutory minimum wages are themselves very low in most states in
this country (The statutory minimum wage is 15 Purchasing Power Parity dollars
a day on an average in India as opposed to 120 dollars per day in the USA). Marx
showed that the exchange value of goods and services produced, depended on the
socially necessary labour time required to produce them (Marx op cit). This
social determination of labour time is not simply a function of supply and
demand but is also dependent on negotiation between the working class and the
capitalists. Thus, over time the proportion of the value created that would be
given to the workers in the form of better wages and working conditions, was
decided by contestation through trade unions between the workers and
capitalists and increasing workers’ power resulted in the State also
legislating to provide for regulation of the capitalists. Consequently, the
absence of unionisation in the large informal sector or the roll-back of unionisation
from the formal sector as has happened since the 1990s all over the world and
in India, mean that there is extra-economic extraction of surplus value from
workers within the capitalist system and this is a basic feature of primitive
accumulation.
2.
Labour Situation in India
The fact is
that industrialisation in India has from the beginning been fuelled by
primitive accumulation based on cheap labour resulting from state policies to
prevent unionisation and keep down wages and through dispossession by
displacement (Basu, 2008). Education, health and employment for the masses have
never been provided adequately by the State unlike in the developed countries
and so the vast majority have had to remain unskilled, unhealthy and
underemployed providing a large industrial reserve army who can be cheaply
employed by the capitalists. Attempts by labour to organise and get better
wages and working conditions are met with state repression. The most infamous
example of this in recent times is the state repression of the workers of the
Maruti Suzuki Car factory in Haryana (Deshpande & Haksar, 2023). The State
has enabled this exploitation as labour laws have been implemented only for a
miniscule proportion of the total workforce that is formally unionised. Whereas,
there were 11124 registered trade unions in India, only 2311 of them filed
returns and the total membership of the latter was only 6,181,731 (GoI, 2022). We can safely assume that those trade unions
that are not filing returns are defunct and so given the industrial workforce
in India to be about 130 million or about 25 percent of the total work force
(CEIC, 2023), the effectively organised industrial workforce is just 4.6
percent of the total. Thus, the overwhelming
majority of the workforce, being not only unorganised but also prevented from
organising, are being paid much less than the statutory minimum wages which are
themselves very low.
Moreover, from
the time of independence the draconian but now repealed colonial Land Acquisition
Act 1894, the Indian Forest Act 1927 and later the post-independence Wildlife Protection
Act 1972 have been used to dispossess millions of peasants, especially
tribespeople, from their land for development projects like dams, steel plants,
mines and industrial areas without adequate compensation or rehabilitation
(Basu, op cit).
A major labour phenomenon
in India has been circular migration, which by definition, is a transitory
phenomenon but it has been a long-standing feature of industrialisation right
from its inception. Incipient industrialisation in the nineteenth century attracted
migrants from rural areas. In the case of the jute mills of Bengal these were
workers mostly from the rural areas in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and also from Odisha
and Andhra Pradesh (De Haan, 2022). The cotton mills of Mumbai also had migrant
workers from Ratnagiri to the south of the city and from Uttar Pradesh
(Chandavarkar, 1994). These workers were men who lived alone and maintained
close relations with their families back in the villages. Industrial or other
urban jobs gave these migrants an opportunity to supplement meagre family
incomes and farm livelihoods but did not result in a permanent transition from
rural to urban life. It was only later in the twentieth century and especially
after independence that the migrant workers settled down in cities as
industrial growth spurted with greater public investment under the Five Year
Plans and the need for permanent skilled labour increased (Joshi, 2008).
However, even
after independence matters did not improve much because the nascent capitalist
class drew up a plan for economic development of India based on primitive
accumulation that is known as the “Bombay Plan” after the industrialists from
Bombay who conceived of it (Thakurdas et al, 1944). This plan envisaged the
rapid development of basic infrastructure through heavy state spending garnered
from exploitation of the labour of the masses and the vast natural resources.
It specifically mentioned that the state must intervene to maintain law and
order and restrict individual freedoms given the possibility of dissent from the
masses against such a policy and the new independent Government in India
followed this path of development.
Consequently,
the new Indian Constitution adopted in 1949 did not give fundamental rights
status to the rights of education, health and employment and instead put them
into the section on Directive Principles of State Policy which are
non-justiciable. In fact, the Constitution was largely a copy of the colonial
Government of India Act of 1935 and mirrored its anti-people provisions. So much
so that G.D. Birla the doyen of the Indian capitalists gloated at the time,
"We have embodied large portions of the 1935 Act, as finally passed, in
the Constitution which we have framed ourselves and which shows that in the
1935 Act was cast the pattern of our future plans" (Birla, 1968). The Five
Year Plans that were implemented from the 1950s, followed the anti-people
guidance of the Bombay Plan. So, right from the time of independence people
have been displaced from their land and have been forced into increasing the
industrial reserve army, mainly as migrant labour. The state has actively
promoted this policy. As a result, the unionisation of labour has always been
weak in India and been restricted to a few big private firms, government
departments and the public sector enterprises leaving the vast majority of
workers at the mercy of primitive accumulation. Unfortunately, the Governments
in the states and the centre which are mandated to enumerate the number and
type of migrant workers as a part of the regulatory provisions of the
Interstate Migrant Workmen Act 1979, do not do so. Therefore, there are no reliable
estimates of migration in India apart from the Census data, which are both
suspect and outdated. The Labour Bureau under the Ministry of Labour and
Employment is conducting a large sample survey covering 1.2 Lakh households but
the results have not been published as yet. According to one estimate there are
140 million migrant workers which amounts to about 27 percent of the total
workforce (Ajeevika Bureau, 2023). Assuming that 25 percent of these migrant
workers are working in industries, this comes to a fairly large number of 35
million and they are overwhelmingly unorganised.
Thus, migratory
labour, continues to be of relevance and constitutes a large part of India’s
urban workforce as was vividly shown by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when
hundreds of thousands of workers returned to their villages from the cities
(Khan and Arokkiaraj, 2021). Migratory labour is preferred by employers because
of their lesser ability to unionise and demand better wages and working
conditions as compared to local labour and so they are the mainstay of
primitive accumulation in India. This process has been further enhanced with
the spread of outsourcing and the gig economy in the neo-liberal era (Madan,
2023).
3.
Characteristics of Late Capitalism
The
working class globally and in India received a major blow from the 1990s
onwards as computerisation and the internet made it possible to outsource
manufacturing to anywhere in the world where labour supply was high and state
regulation was low and consequently wages too were low, so as to facilitate
primitive accumulation. Not only did manufacturing shift out of the western
capitalist countries but even in countries like India it shifted out of
traditional manufacturing centres and even in those, contractual labour was
used in large numbers. Moreover, in India, to further avoid the possibilities
of the unionisation of workers, local recruitment of workers was reduced and
migrant workers were brought in. This huge migrant work force is invisible
simply because there are no records of their migration with the government or
the employer industries as they are employed informally by contractors. They
did become visible for some time during the initial Covid Pandemic in 2020 but
they have once again become invisible.
This
is a global phenomenon and so it is not possible for workers to fight for their
rights locally beyond a point. Simply because a company that does not adopt
these practices of primitive accumulation will go out of business as it will
not be able to compete with others which are practising primitive accumulation
elsewhere. States too are wary of regulating the capitalists because they will
just pack up and leave as it is very easy to relocate manufacturing with the
new technologies that are available. India, in fact, has seen a progressive
whittling down of workers’ rights so as to increase the ease of doing business
for capitalists (Jenkins, 2004).
Thus,
the situation has changed drastically as there is no more a proletariat – a
working class that is assured of its jobs and only has to fight for better
working conditions and wages. Instead, what exists now is a precariat – a
working class that is not assured of employment in addition to suffering from
bad working conditions and wages due to extra-economic pressures. Organisation
work requires money which traditionally used to come from the contributions of
the workers who were assured of their jobs. However, now with workers not being
assured of their jobs and mostly working on contract as migrants, not only are
they unable to make contributions to their unions but they are also fearful of
losing whatever low paying jobs they have by unionising. The new Labour Codes
that have been legislated by the Union Government and whose implementation is
presently stalled, not only do away with many protections that were there in
the earlier laws but in the case of the unorganised sector and migrant workers,
leave them high and dry without any social protection (WPC, 2020).
Expectedly
Industry associations like Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry (FICCI), Conference of Indian Industries (CII) and Associated Chambers
of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) have welcomed the reforms resulting from
the new Labour Codes, since they facilitate industrialists to further casualise
the workforce in their factories and reduce the workers’ collective bargaining
powers and dilute the state’s regulatory institutions. The removal of the protective
framework of labour rights and entitlements will result in further
informalisation of the already small organised workforce in the country and
reduce the possibilities of formalisation of the informal workers and
especially migrants (Shyam Sundar & Sapkal, 2020). Thus, the whole project of organising workers in trade
unions has been rendered very difficult. It has become even more utopian than
it used to be earlier to propose the formation of a class for itself organised
into a party of the working class seeking to overthrow the capitalist order
beginning with the formation of trade unions.
Matters
have been compounded by the fact that consumerism is being aggressively
promoted among the workers also and so they are more interested in working long
hours to earn more money to satisfy their consumerist desires rather than
organise to improve their wages and limit primitive accumulation. Moreover, whatever
little organisation there is, is being diabolically deflected into sectarian
conflicts between different castes and religious communities further dividing
the working class and preventing mobilisation for workers’ rights.
4.
Universal Basic Income
This increasing tendency of primitive
accumulation is difficult to roll back in the present milieu of late capitalist
dominance in which neither are states prepared to uphold workers’ rights and
nor are the workers in a position to agitate for them on a sustained basis. This precarity of the working class can
be countered only by ensuring that they have a universal basic income (UBI)
from the state given that welfare measures like free education and health that
form part of the social commons have been cut back in recent decades (Gentilini
et al, 2020). The state has to step in and provide a life long universal basic income to all adults so
as to both provide a dignified life to workers and shore up the demand in the
economy. The eternal problem for capitalism is that even after primitive
accumulation and even more so because of it, crises of over production will beset it from time to time
as there is not enough demand for the goods and services that are produced due
to the poverty of the vast majority (Marx, op cit). For instance, in India the
per capita annual income is dismally low at $ 2400 and 70 percent of the
population earn less than this and so there is always a recessionary trend
despite high overall growth in GDP which gets aggravated from time to time, as
is currently the case, with high inflation. From the 1930s onwards, capitalist
states have adopted welfare measures, the social commons, to counter this.
However, these have been progressively dismantled over the last three decades
of neo-liberal economic policies. Consequently, the social commons have to be
restored through a new welfare measure like UBI. This will also enable the working class to organise for
their rights as they will have some funds instead of being on the economic edge
as they are now. As opposed to the utopian programmes of organising the
fragmented working class to become a class for itself, the fight for an UBI
holds more promise though it too is utopian given the present capitalist
control of the world.
The resources for the UBI will come
from a tax on all financial instruments and transactions that there are, most
importantly the huge international trade in currencies which is not being taxed
at all at present. The trade in currencies is more than twenty times the value
of the trade in goods and services and is totally speculative in nature. It
goes on 24 x 7 across the world and its profits come from exploitation of
labour through primitive accumulation. So on the one hand labour is not being
paid a living wage and on the other currency trading which is profiting from
this is not being taxed at all in a blatant show of power by late capitalism.
Therefore,
the working class movements the world over and in India will have to bolster
their local battles for better wages and working conditions with a wider battle
to put pressure on the state to provide a universal basic income so as to
restore the social commons that has been whittled away. This will considerably
reduce the precarity of the working class and allow it to once again organise
not only for better working conditions and wages but also for a revolutionary
transformation to a more just and inclusive socio-economy.
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Friday, January 3, 2025
Propagating Heirloom Seeds
Kansari nu Vadavno, the Bhil Adivasi women's organisation led by Subhadra Khaperde has been reviving the cultivation of the traditional indigenous seeds of Western Madhya Pradesh over the past eight years. These women farmers have not only succeeded in cultivating over thirty varieties of traditional seeds ranging from millets, rice, wheat, pulses, oilseeds and fibre to vegetables, but have also spread them across the country by participating in organic seed festivals. Bicchibai and Gendabai two stalwart farmers of the organisation are participating in the latest Organic Seed Festival in Indore with their cornucopia of seeds and are holding forth before farmers, consumers and the media about the importance of this campaign to save the agro-biodiversity and so the food security of Western Madhya Pradesh.
Monday, November 11, 2024
The Used Water Debacle
A few years ago I did a study for the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) on the status of Water management in the city of Jaipur (https://lnkd.in/dqwkV4yM
I had also said that the only solution was to implement building level rainwater harvesting/recharge and used water treatment and reuse.
I find now on a visit to Jaipur that all my dark predictions have unfortunately come true.
The biggest STP at Delawas of 215 MLD capacity is dysfunctional and is releasing the sewage water untreated into the Dravyavati River. The smaller STPs along the river built to treat the used water from the intercepted drains are also dysfunctional. Consequently, the Dravyavati River is not only stinking to high heaven but is also emitting the green house gas methane in large quantities.
To add insult to injury, farmers downstream are using this highly polluted water of the Dravyavati River to produce food crops.
Friday, October 25, 2024
The Crisis of Smallholder Agriculture
The biggest concern at present should be about the severe constraints that the small and marginal farmers, who constitute 85% of all farming households and 50% of the total population of India, face. These farmers put in a huge amount of back breaking family labour into their farming. This labour is grossly underpaid at about Rs 100 per day as revealed from surveys that we have conducted in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh. Whereas the latest statutory minimum daily wage in the state is Rs 335 for unskilled, Rs368 for semiskilled, Rs 421 for skilled and Rs 471 for highly skilled. Farming is a highly skilled operation and so the farmers should be paid Rs 471 in the interests of equity. Especially because the analysis of the consumption expenditure surveys that we simultaneously carry out show that the respondents are suffering from chronic hunger. One can easily imagine what raising the household labour wage to Rs 471 per day will do to the farmgate price of agricultural produce. When we paid a wage of Rs 220 per day (the statutory minimum wage for unskilled labour in MP last year) and also a fifty percent profit over and above their operating costs to the farmers with whom we work in our organic farming project (https://kansariorganics.in/) the farmgate price of our organic wheat shot up to Rs 27 per kg as opposed to the Rs 17 prevailing in the market for chemical wheat and the Rs 20 offered under the MP government's MSP scheme (which is anyway available to a limited number of farmers). After adding on the costs of the subsidy we provided to the farmers for organic composting and bio-enzyme rich liquid making and cleaning and grading the price of our wheat in Indore is Rs 35 per kg whereas the chemical wheat of similar quality sells at Rs 25 per kg. Few people are prepared to buy our wheat at this premium despite its being the cheapest authentic organic wheat available in this country because we are not charging any profits or management costs which are met by grant funding. This in turn means that there is a need for direct transfers to farmers by the government to compensate them properly as the market will not do so. Since the chemical agriculture being practised now is both economically and ecologically unsustainable this cash transfer should be given to farmers to switch the country from chemical monoculture to organic biodiverse agriculture combined with huge investments in communitarian ecosystem conservation and restoration, compost and bio-enzyme rich liquid making on a very large scale to replace chemical fertilisers and decentralized renewable energy production from gasification of agricultural and forest biomass.