There was an obvious irony in shifting the 2004 World Social Forum from Porto Alegre, home of the participatory budget, to an indifferent Mumbai, the city most starkly symbolizing the impact of neoliberalism in India. Mumbai’s booming stockmarket and Indian gdp growth figures of around 8 per cent for 2003–04 are constantly cited as evidence of a new Shining India, the feel-good slogan that has been rapidly internalized, courtesy of incessant media repetition, by the Indian ‘middle class’.footnote¹ Annual software exports have now reached the $16bn mark, and the country has $100bn in foreign reserves. The Central government is pushing ahead with its privatization programme, selling off stakes in the big profit-makers—companies such as the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation and Gas Authority of India—while starving potentially healthy enterprises such as Air India and Indian Airlines of necessary investment until failing balance sheets can be used to justify privatization.

In fact, the gdp growth figures have been lifted largely by the spectacular monsoons of 2003, which dramatically raised agricultural output. Averaged over five years, the growth rate remains around 5.8 per cent, the level the Indian economy has sustained for the last two decades, while foreign investment has not yet surpassed the 1997 peak of $4bn. Social and regional inequalities have worsened, with the consumption expenditure of the urban top two deciles rising by a historically unprecedented 30 per cent in the six-year period 1997–2002, the material basis for claims of ‘Shining India’. By contrast, the rural top two deciles had a consumption rise of 10 per cent but the remaining rural population—the vast majority of Indians—witnessed a consumption decline.footnote² More striking still is the relatively jobless character of current growth patterns, even compared to the 1980s. The number of unemployed was nearly 35 million in 2002, and is expected to be over 40 million in 2007. The employment elasticity of output has fallen from 0.52 for the period 1983–94, to 0.16 for 1993–2000. There were 740,000 applicants for 20,000 posts in the lowest, Group d category on the Indian railways last year—essentially, gangmen’s jobs. Among the applicants were mbas, post-graduates and engineers. The outsourcing of us white-collar work to Indian call centres, etc., currently exercising American voters, accounts for a tiny drop in this ocean. There were approximately four hundred call centres in India in 2003, employing around 100,000 people; 40 per cent of their business is domestic.footnote³ It is here that the political weak spot of Indian neoliberalism resides: in the not-too-distant prospect of a substantial layer of youth from the low-to-middling echelons of the ‘middle class’, mainly educated in provincial colleges, becoming disillusioned with the heady promises of a neoliberal project that currently still retains its appeal.

Politically, the last two years have seen a qualitative move to the right in India. The nightmarish anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat in the spring of 2002, perpetrated with the full complicity of the state government under bjp Chief Minister Narendra Modi, have proved a terrible watershed. On 27 February 2002 activists from the Sangh Parivar—the Hindutva family of organizations, whose main components are the cadre-based Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), the bjp and the lumpen storm-troopers of the Bajrang Dal (Lord Hanuman’s Troops)—were returning to Gujarat by train from a ‘March on Ayodhya’ when the molestation of a Muslim girl on the platform of Godhra station provoked an attack by an angry Muslim mob. One of the train carriages was torched and fifty-eight people died in the flames. The assault served as the awaited trigger for a carefully pre-planned, state-backed ‘retaliatory’ pogrom, in which orchestrated violence against the Muslim population spread throughout Gujarat, lasting for over a month. More than 2,000 Muslims were butchered and around 150,000 driven out of their homes. There was looting, property destruction, sadistic beatings, injuries and rape on a massive scale.footnote⁴

This was not only the worst case of sustained communal violence since Partition, but the first time that a state government had been so deeply involved in preparing and carrying out such a massacre.footnote⁵ What marked it as a turning point was not so much that the direct perpetrators got away with their criminal behaviour—this has happened often enough before—but that the Sangh and the bjp got away with it politically. During the month-long pogrom there was strong condemnation of the Modi government’s role not only from opposition parties but even from the bjp’s allies in the ruling coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (nda). Massive extra-parliamentary mobilization by the opposition at national and regional levels, inside and outside Gujarat, could have broken the coalition government. This never happened. The Congress, which should have led such a campaign, had neither the courage nor the anti-communal commitment to do so.

As a result, Prime Minister Vajpayee was free to make the agenda-setting speech at a bjp gathering in Goa, at the end of May 2002, that can in retrospect be seen as the official proclamation of the Indian polity’s rightward shift. Vajpayee defended the pogrom as an unavoidable reaction to the Godhra incident. He categorically rejected the demand from his nda allies to remove Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat, effectively challenging them to make their choice—either to pull down his government and precipitate early elections or fall quietly into line. He also made an international pitch, linking the bjp’s stand to that of the us Administration, by declaring Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism the world’s principal danger. The nda coalition thus remained intact, with the bjp’s authority within it greatly strengthened. Modi called early polls in Gujarat in December 2002, campaigning on an openly communal platform which not merely justified but celebrated the pogrom—a tactic that the Congress was scared to oppose directly, instead highlighting the Modi government’s ‘general performance failure’. For the first time ever, the bjp obtained a two-thirds majority in the provincial assembly, due to a massive gain in votes and seats in Central Gujarat where most of the violence had been concentrated. The result only further deadened the enfeebled anti-communal reflexes of the Congress.

The provincial assembly elections of December 2003 in the key Hindi heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi were a further boost to the bjp. Here Hindutva was not the major factor behind the debacle of the Congress, but it nevertheless contributed to the bjp’s success. The governing party gained absolute majorities in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the Congress had previously been in power and was expected to do reasonably well, holding on to two if not all three of these states. It ended up retaining only Delhi, on a very low turnout—53 per cent, compared to 67–71 per cent for the others. Suddenly, the most sober assessments of the coming general elections, now advanced to April 2004, suggest that the bjp-led nda coalition has easily the strongest chance of coming back to power. Although the nda parties, bjp included, would seem to have reached their electoral peak in terms of seats secured during the last general elections of 1999—with the bjp tally reaching a plateau of around 180 Lok Sabha seats, out of 542—the coalition’s ranks could well expand further through the wholesale defection of some of the pre-poll Congress allies.footnote⁶

The 2004 elections could prove a turning point not because the bjp makes a qualitative leap in its share of the vote but because the Congress may collapse as a national party. Programmatically, it is in all key respects a softer version of the bjp, although without either its powerful cadre base (courtesy of the rss), its aggressive policy of using major personnel changes to transform governing structures or its determination to remodel India as a pure ‘Hindu nation’, the monocultural Hindu Rashtra. Socially, the Congress is now losing its last, hitherto stable base, the Central Indian Adivasis—‘original inhabitants’or indigenous people—to the bjp.footnote⁷ For a full five decades after Independence, every single breakaway from the Congress quickly faded into oblivion, even those with leaders whose national stature had been forged in the great pre-1947 freedom struggle. Since 1997 two such breakaways, the Trinamul Congress of West Bengal and the National Congress Party of Maharashtra, have stabilized as major regional parties not in the least afraid to hobnob with the bjp.