Comprador Indian State Gears Up for Massive War on its Own People
Posted under:
Comprador Indian State Gears Up for Massive War on its Own People
(llco.org)
For some months now the comprador Indian state, already up to its neck in extreme and bloody paramilitary and pig repression – police as well as government-backed Salwa Judum death squads have been running amok in rural areas – has been about to engage over 100,000 troops against lower-caste adivasi (indigeneous or “tribal” people)-populated regions of Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa and West Bengal states. Its aim is to combat the Maoist Naxalite movement’s armed resistance to superexploitation.
A brief reprieve for the Indian masses was announced on Monday October 12, 2009 when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that armed forces would not be deployed just yet. True Maoists and serious analysts of Indian affairs agree that this is but a respite for the downtrodden Indian peasantry and rural proletariat. The Indian state has and will continue to use brute force against any challenge to imperialist control of India’s economy and polity. Make no mistake: it is the imperialists in the U$ military who are pulling the strings of the Indian army in this latest “counter-insurgency” operation, part of the ongoing Third World War against the people of the Third World. It is the same experts and advisers running torture camps in Iraq, bombing missions in Pakistan and death squads in Colombia who are responsible for Indian state aggression against some of the world’s poorest and most downtrodden people.
India’s rural population is being bled dry by Indian comprador capitalism linked to western mining, forestry, industrial and financial interests. In recent decades, the precious little security India’s rural poor had in the form of forests, land, rivers, privately-held land and common pastures have been taken away as the Indian state scrapped the very few protectionist measures intended to safeguard its own economic growth and opened the economy up to imperialist “neo-liberal” restructuring.
Since India achieved formal independence from the Brutish Empire, it has not sought to develop its economy in the interests of its own people, but has continued in new forms the old colonial policy of enriching an elite bourgeoisie with ties to western business interests at the expense of its superexploited workforce. As a result of the cynical subservience of the Indian ruling class to imperialism,
“77% of the Indian population in 2004-2005 had a per capita daily consumption expenditure of less than Rs. 20; that is less than 50 cents by the current nominal exchange rate between the rupee and the US dollar and about $2 in purchasing power parity terms. According to the 2001 Census, even 62 years after political independence, only about 42 percent of Indian households have access to electricity. About 80 percent of the households do not have access to safe drinking water; that is a staggering 800 million people lacking access to potable water… 93 percent of the workforce, the overwhelming majority of the working people in India, are what the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) called “informal workers”; these workers lack any employment security, work security and social security. About 58 percent of them work in the agricultural sector and the rest is engaged in manufacturing and services. Wages are very low and working conditions extremely onerous, leading to persistent and deep poverty, which has been increasing over the last decade and a half in absolute terms: the number of what the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) called the “poor and vulnerable” increased from 811 million in 1999-00 to 836 million in 2004-05. Since majority of the working people still work in the agricultural sector, the economic stagnation in agriculture is a major cause for the continued poverty of the vast majority of the people. Since the Indian state did not undertake land reforms in any meaningful sense, the distribution of land remains extremely skewed to this day. Close to 60 percent of rural households are effectively landless; and extreme economic vulnerability and despair among the small and marginal peasantry has resulted in the largest wave of suicides in history: between 1997 and 2007, 182,936 farmers committed suicide. This is the economic setting of the current conflict.” (2)
Naturally, many of India’s rural people have fought back, bravely and heroically, against the comprador state. The Maoist movement that has grown as a response to the onerous depredations imposed by force upon the Indian masses has struck a blow for freedom and has therefore been targeted by freedom’s natural enemies: the imperialists and their lackeys. Since it is not in their class interests to provide effective political power and a decent standard of living for their poorest “citizens”, the Indian state has responded in the most reactionary way. It believes that popular resistance to comprador capitalism can be quelled using repression. As a recent statement of concern and protest signed by Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky and others correctly notes: “Kill the poor and not the poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government”. (2)
Leading Light Communists consider that the Indian government is pursuing a policy of divide and rule in its propaganda. It seeks to whip up religious and caste-based chauvinism against the adivasis so as to distract from the miserable and eminently transformable conditions of the exploited majority in the country. In contrast, the Leading Lights call for maximum solidarity with the oppressed Indian proletariat in their righteous armed struggle against imperialist terror. Indian state oppression must be resisted through a united front of the downtrodden masses against Indian comprador capitalism and semi-feudalism.
Victory to the Indian Workers and Peasants!
Death To Imperialism!
Lal salaam!
Notes
(1) (2) Monthly Review, ‘The Impending Indian Government Offensive against the Adivasi Inhabited Hilly Regions: Statement of Concern and Protest by Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky and Others’, October 14 2009, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/india141009.html
Deja un comentario / Leave a comment / Mag-iwan ng komento / Hinterlasse einen Kommentar / Αφήστε ένα σχόλιο
Leading Light Essentials
