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A Very Indian Neoliberalism
Achin Vanaik
The Telgraph, 28 August 2003
The Supreme Court's recent decision to deny public sector workers the
right to strike on any grounds whatsoever and to justify this extraordinary
act in the name of protecting public interest is nothing less than
shocking.
Equally disturbing, it must be said, is how that part of the Indian
media with national reach and influence has, with a few honourable
exceptions, welcomed this decision. The growing elitism and conservatism of our
judiciary has become obvious in one judgement after the other, from
that on Hindutva to the more recent one on the two-child norm in relation to
panchayati office. The members of the judiciary like those in other
professions cannot but be shaped by the wider ideological climate in
which the middle classes and elites operate. Today that ideological common
sense is shaped by neoliberalism.
Although neoliberalism is primarily an ideology about economic
organisation, by its very nature - its elevation of the market
mechanism as the supreme regulator - it cannot but have profound effects on
political and social life as well. The state's welfare and social roles are to be
greatly reduced where it cannot be fully eliminated while its policing
functions are to greatly enhanced. Thus the transition from a welfarist
or welfarist-concerned state to a 'competitive' state requires
privatization of public services as far as possible and their transformation into
privately available commodities. Education and health care, for
example, should no longer be seen, even as an ideal, as universally accessible
entities made available through the state, but should become available
to the private consumer with the state left, at most, to play the
mopping-up role of providing resource-constrained facilities to a much smaller
'targeted' community of the poorest who can't afford privately
available consumption in these areas. This is in fact exactly what is happening
in India and elsewhere and means that the principle of public service is
being systematically weakened. This reality is then covered up in the name of
promoting consumer freedom of choice and convenience.
Neoliberalism means a further institutionalization of society's biases
in favour of the rich, the powerful. It means promoting the growth of much
greater economic and social inequalities and then justifying this in
the name of private freedom and efficiency. In the fifties, sixties and
seventies (the era when Keynesian thinking about welfarism and
developmentalism was dominant) it was considered self-evident that such
inequalities were antithetical to preserving and deepening political
democracy. In the eighties, nineties and today, these inequalities have
been rationalized away as the inevitable consequence of growing freedom
in the economy and society. Neoliberalism means treating individuals
primarily as consumers and emphasising the importance of enhancing consumer
rights and empowerment while at the same time weakening the rights of
individuals either as producers or as citizens since citizenship rights must by
their very nature be universally accessible.
This is precisely what the Supreme Court has done through its decision.
Just as there is a growing trend in India to weaken the meaning and
practice of democracy by reinterpreting it as equivalent to
majoritarianism; just as the attack on the very principle of minority
rights (not just abuses in its application) is becoming increasingly
acceptable; similarly we are also witnessing the erosion of the domain
of citizenship and producer rights, rights of association, protest and
dissent. On the one hand the public sector is being systematically
dismantled to widespread elite applause thereby reducing the domain of
'public service' through public provision of goods and services, on the
other hand the powers, limited as they are, of workers who keep this
domainof public provision going, are being taken away in the name of
respecting 'public service'. Consumer empowerment unlike citizenship empowerment
is crucially and inescapably contingent on possession of purchasing power,
i.e. money and wealth.
No society that respects democracy or wishes to make it more meaningful
should justify the erosion of citizenship rights in the name of
consumer empowerment and convenience. Nor should it forget that producers are
not just private owners of capital whose rights must be respected -
indeed, neoliberalism is all for greatly enhancing the powers of capital
vis-a-vis labour. But workers are also key producers with their own producer
rights that need to be respected. Indeed, in most societies including ours,
the powers of labour with respect to employers, be they the state or
private, are so limited that the only real power they have to defend their
interests is the negative one of strike. Capital, by contrast, has far more
powers including their ability to cause public inconvenience and suffering
(though never seen as such) by carrying out investment strikes (denying output
and employment), which they do regularly.
A strike after all, is basically a withdrawal of one's productive input
in order to change prevailing working conditions. When private employers
refuse to invest unless conditions are favourable, the response of
governments and the media is not to criticize or condemn them, let
alone to want to deny them this capacity, but to bend over backwards to give
them what they want. This is the case even though employers have so many
other powers to hire and fire, decide production runs and content, shift
facilities, etc. that workers simply do not have. As for the state
behaving as employer, public investment, it is declared in these neoliberal
times, must be reduced in favour of private investment, for the good of the
public!
But neoliberalism alone is not the full explanation. It is the marriage
of this neoliberalism with the peculiarities of the Indian polity that
explains why, apart from India, no genuinely democratic society
anywhere in the world has gone so far, or ever even threatened to go so far, in
issuing a blanket legal denial of this kind. In the US and UK, the two main
bastions of neoliberal economic thinking and practice, not even the
most conservative of governments or judiciaries would contemplate taking
such a step. In Western Europe, precisely because the organisational and
political power and influence of the working class movement has been so much
greater than in UK and US, that it has contributed to the creation of a
political system whose democratic characteristics are also far superior to those
of the Anglo-Saxon model of politics.
India is the one example of a stable and enduring democracy that
emerged in an overwhelmingly agrarian society and not after a substantial process
of industrialisation in which much of the public became workers, got
organized, and through that very process fought for and succeeded in
getting fundamental rights institutionalised for ordinary working
people, be these the right to vote or those of organisation, protest and
dissent. In those societies the historical, emotional and ideological
connections between respect for worker rights and respect for democracy are much
deeper than in India. Here, given the relative historical weakness of the
labour movement, from independence onwards, there has always existed a
basically tripartite relationship between capital, labour and the state
(including its legal apparatus) in which the state was the most powerful entity
and held the crucial mediating ground.
As long as state managers and the ideology of the Indian elite (e.g. in
the Nehruvian era) remained progressive and welfarist, it could both
promote the interests of capital and yet insist on a degree of real democratic
and legal protection of worker and citizen rights. Once this elite and
those who manage the state apparatuses have become prisoners of the new
ideology of neoliberalism then it becomes all the more easy to do what cannot be
done in other democracies. What can one say about the state of Indian
democracy when both the BJP and the Congress, the two largest parties,
each with strong and organised labour constituencies, have been so
wishy-washy and mealy-mouthed in their response to this shameful Supreme Court
judgement?
Copyright 2003 The Telegraph
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