The defeat of the BJP-led government, which had held office in New Delhi since 1998, came as a surprise to all Indian political parties as well as capitalist politicians and pundits abroad. The government had called early elections in anticipation of winning the vote on the crest of the decade-old “software-led economic boom.” The electoral results underscored the contrast between the “India Shining” promised by the BJP in its campaign, and the social catastrophe facing the majority of India’s 1.05 billion people.

While the Congress Party won the largest number of seats in the national vote, the Congress-led government in the southern state of Karnataka was defeated by the BJP in assembly elections. Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, is a center of the boom in the software industry.

In another southern state, Kerala, Communist Party of India (Marxist) candidates took the seats held by most Congress Party members of parliament.

Days after the vote, Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi, who led the demagogic party campaign appealing to the hundreds of millions of workers and farmers who have gained nothing from the “software-led boom,” withdrew her name from consideration for the position of prime minister. The stock market in India had plummeted on the news that Gandhi would become premier.

Instead, Congress picked Manmohan Singh. The first Sikh to become India’s prime minister, Singh had served as finance minister in the early 1990s, leading government attacks on social programs and the privatization offensive that opened up India to further penetration and exploitation by foreign finance capital. Immediately after he was picked, Wall Street and financiers around the world breathed a sigh of relief and the Bombay stock exchange rebounded.  
 
Social catastrophe for toilers
The economic and social devastation facing the toilers in India is the result of decades of colonial and imperialist exploitation. Through the debt bondage imposed by Washington, London, and other imperialist powers much of the wealth created by the workers and farmers of India has been siphoned into the coffers of imperialist banks and other financial institutions.

Today 60 percent of India’s population lives in rural areas in some 650,000 villages. Only 10 percent of the villages are connected to a road, reports the Financial Times, and fewer than half have clean water and electricity. Facing serious drought conditions and the price squeeze of the capitalist market that favors the wealthy, many farmers cannot afford to buy seed. The average life expectancy is 63—compared to 77 in the United States—and 40 percent of the population is illiterate.

The official unemployment rate of 8 percent grossly understates the reality of the vast poverty for India’s working people in city and country. While as many as 1 million positions have been created in the last decade for software engineers, customer service agents, and claims processors, this has only a limited impact on a workforce of more than 400 million. When the state-owned railways recently announced openings for 20,000 khalasis—the lowest category of laborer—more than 5.5 million workers put in applications in the hope of finding steady work.

The BJP, a right-wing Hindu nationalist party, led a coalition government for the last six years. It appealed to the insecurities and prejudices of the middle class. The party’s recent campaign pointed in a more “centrist” direction—focusing on “development and moderation,” a shift from its agenda of Hindu nationalism. But the BJP is responsible for a political campaign that led to the destruction of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya by a mob in 1992. More than 3,000 were killed in the anti-Muslim riots that followed. As prime minister, BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee had called for constructing a Hindu temple on the site where the Muslim mosque was leveled. In 2002, in the BJP-ruled state of Gujarat, some 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in response to the killing of 58 Hindu train passengers by a mob alleged to be Muslims.

Its campaign slogan of India Shining targeted the growing middle class and placed its hopes on an expanding economy. The ruling party trumpeted the “achievements” of opening India to investments by computer technology-related industries and contracting services to U.S. and other imperialist monopolies such as airlines reservations or accounting. The BJP began moving away from its nationalist stance, talking of Hindu-Muslim unity. Party leaders even donned Muslim headgear.

The election results came as a surprise to those who see the new “white-collar” employees as the motor force of Indian society rather than the hundreds of millions of workers and peasants who along with nature produce all the country’s wealth, and who are subjected in their majority to unlivable wages and conditions.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is among those who writes glowing reports about India’s economy. He was “stunned,” he wrote in a May 20 opinion piece, by the defeat of the BJP government. Friedman wrote that the “broad globalization strategy that India opted for in the early 1990s has succeeded in unlocking the country’s incredible brainpower and stimulating sustained growth.” The moves both ruling parties have made to further open their economy to imperialist investment were “the best antipoverty program,” wrote Friedman.

Like other big-business commentators, Friedman is blind to the rising discontent among workers and farmers facing economic ruin, which was behind Congress’s electoral victory.  
 
Congress: pillar of capitalist rule
The Congress Party has ruled India for most of its 57 years since winning independence and continues to wrap itself in the aura of the struggle against British rule. From its inception, Congress served as the party of the Indian bourgeoisie designed to prevent the independence movement from gaining working-class leadership and to maintain capitalist rule, perpetuating the country’s domination by imperialism and superexploitation by finance capital for decades since formal independence. It has carried out this duty with the help of the Stalinist Communist Parties that have historically entered into “popular front” coalitions with Congress (see article on page 6).

After London was forced to grant independence in 1947—in the face of massive resistance that involved the mobilization of working people in the major cities, including a mutiny in the colonial navy that spread to Bombay, Madras, and Karachi—British imperialism was able to deal a blow to the independence struggle through the partition of the country.

With the collusion of the bourgeois leadership of the Congress Party, who feared the mobilizations of the toiling masses, and the Muslim League, the country was divided into India, whose population is largely Hindu, and predominantly Muslim Pakistan.

New prime minister Manmohan Singh has repeated Sonia Gandhi’s pledge to bring economic development “with a human face.” Unlike Gandhi, however, Singh is liked by Wall Street and London’s “The City.”

“The markets should relax a little,” said an editorial in the May 22 Economist, published in London. “In 1991, when Congress last took office, it was in an almost identical position to the one if finds itself in now: short of a majority, and forced to depend on the support of Communists from outside its coalition. Then, as now, Mr. Singh as the chief reformer…. That government started to privatize, opened India to foreign investment and began to deregulate the country’s appalling infrastructure. Over the past six years, the ruling BJP merely continued Congress’s work, with plenty of backtracking.”  
 
Treachery of Stalinist parties
The Congress Party will preside over a coalition government that needs the backing of the country’s two Communist Parties, which together won more than 60 seats. They will support the Congress-led government in parliament without formally joining it or accepting posts in the cabinet. Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet was also surprised by the workers’ rejection of the ruling coalition. “This scale of anger was not expected by us,” he said. “The question before us now is to bring together all the forces that worked against the BJP.” A statement by the Communist Party of India greeted the Congress Party victory as a strengthening of “the secular-democratic character of the country.”

The “progressive” demagogy of the Stalinist parties notwithstanding, this is how one of the mouthpieces of British imperialism sees it. “As for the Communists, they should be judged by what they do, not what they say,” commented the May 22 editorial in the Economist.

“In West Bengal, where Communists run the state government, 15 state-owned enterprises are being sold off, and IT [Information Technology] companies have been designated as ‘strategic,’ meaning that their workers are banned from striking. Despite dismissing Congress economic policy as no better than the Hindu nationalists of the BJP, the Communists have worked with Congress before, and should have no difficulty doing so again.”  
 
 
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