Kavita Krishnan is the national secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association and a former president of the All India Students' Association. She is also a central committee member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) and editor of Liberation magazine. Krishnan will be an international guest at the World at a Crossroads conference in Sydney, April 10-12. For more information, or to register, visit World at a Crossroads.
Green Left Weeky's Jay Fletcher spoke with Krishnan on the crises of war and economic collapse, and the response of India's rulers.
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As the global economic crisis gains pace, what are the potential impacts on an underdeveloped economy like India?
India's ruling class had prided itself on the economy's "high growth" trajectory in the 2003-08 period, with India's businessmen figuring in lists of the world's richest and buying up overseas firms.
With the current global crisis, there has been a steep fall in the growth rate. The sharemarket has crashed and major businesses are making losses.
The immediate blow has fallen on thousands of workers who have lost their jobs, especially in export-oriented sectors like textiles, garments and diamond polishing. A very high number of workers in the diamond industry have committed suicide recently.
The growth did not benefit the large majority of Indian people. It relied mainly on the inflow of speculative capital from overseas — creating bubbles in the share market and real estate sectors. The agricultural sector was in severe crisis.
Industries that did well were mostly capital-intensive and did not provide many jobs. Agriculture, where most of the Indian workforce is employed, was starved of investment.
Multinational corporations had the seed and fertiliser markets in a stranglehold, and the opening up of agriculture forced Indian farmers to compete with heavily-subsidised Western counterparts. It also put them at the mercy of international price fluctuations. This put farmers in a debt trap and caused a flood of farmers' suicides.
The government passed laws facilitating a corporate grab of fertile land — doing agricultural workers out of jobs and poor peasants out of land. Prices soared steeply, caused by futures trading in agricultural commodities, and hikes in fuel and transport costs.
Economic policies dictated by international funding agencies, like the International Monetary Fund, meant privatisation and commercialisation of education, health — even water.
The global economic crisis has been invited onto Indian soil by the policies imposed by the Indian ruling class. In times of crisis, foreign capital has fled the country in a rush, leaving the Indian economy bleeding.
The government's response has been to view the crisis as a crisis of the private corporate sector. It has therefore taken measures to make bank funds, tax concessions and export subsidies available to the corporate elite, and has virtually made restrictions on foreign direct investment redundant in most sectors.
These are detrimental to the poor and make India more vulnerable to the impact of the crisis, since they will increase foreign control in sensitive sectors of the economy, decrease tax revenues and divert bank credit from where it's most needed. They are also recommending wage and job cuts for the working population.
The government is forcing India's poor to bear the burden of the crisis — while cushioning the fall for India's corporate elite.
There is simmering protest among the Indian people. Even before the present crisis, there were many ongoing movements against corporate land grabs, job cuts, and privatisation of health and education. In March, there was a sustained strike by health workers across the country against measures to privatise health care and contract out jobs in the health sector.
The CPI-ML certainly will do all it can to mobilise the poor — urban and rural workers — to demand that the government take up measures to protect the poor in times of the economic crisis. We think the way out of the crisis is to increase public investment, create employment, boost public demand and undertake policies based on priorities of Indian people, rather than the corporate elite.
You have described India's relationship with the US as fostering a callous contempt for the world's poor and dragging India along a pro-imperialist path. What is the situation with the new administration of Barack Obama?
In India, illusions that Obama's regime might take an anti-war stance have been exposed by the US policy of intensifying the "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Indian ruling class's slavish pro-US policy is unlikely to undergo any significant change.
For the people's movements and the left in India, however, the current eroded credibility and challenged hegemony of the US presents an opportunity to intensify the struggle for a disengagement from the "strategic partnership" with the US.
We also face the considerable challenge of countering the anti-Pakistan frenzy being whipped up by most ruling class parties in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attack.
Even as Pakistan is being buffeted by repeated terrorist attacks and US air strikes, India is turning down requests for a resumption of dialogue stalled since the Mumbai attack. Instead, the Indian government has welcomed the new US strategy to extend its war into Pakistan and has sought a role in the US campaign as a "responsible power"!
Afghanistan and Pakistan have a strategic geographical position on pipeline and trade routes between the Middle East, Russia, China and the Indian subcontinent. The US military offensive is clearly motivated by the aim of establishing control over this region — an agenda that cannot be in India's national interest.
The CPI-ML, as well as other democratic forces in India, are demanding that the Indian government disentangle itself from the imperialist game-plan and open up dialogue with Pakistan.
The Indian government, along with Israel and the US, has helped arm the Sri Lankan Army, which is carrying out brutal military attacks targeting the Tamil minority. What is India's role this conflict?
Indian government has, criminally, supported the Sri Lankan government. In the past, India has meddled in the conflict in Sri Lanka, playing first one side and then another. The Indian government has notoriously supported genocidal and repressive regimes in India's neighbourhood — including the military dictatorship in Burma, and earlier the Nepalese monarchy.
The CPI-ML, as well as some civil society groups, has raised the demand that India stop military aid to, and initiate diplomatic pressure on, the Sri Lankan government to stop the genocide and look for a political solution to the Tamil national question.