No Democracy, No Bourgeoisie: An Open Letter to Indian Capitalists
There will be business after Modi too. Now is the time to rethink.
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Dear Indian Bourgeoisie,
It is no secret that you have, by and large, trusted the successive National Democratic Alliance (NDA) governments to do what is good for you, which also means doing what is good for the economy and for India as a whole. This trust of a fairly large class has withstood policies like demonetisation and recurring allegations of economic mismanagement and crony capitalism.
Then, in early September, the Prime Minister announced a GDP growth of 7.8 percent, and your class sent a cold response—with your wallets. Trust in the government’s numbers and its vision for the economy has seemingly tumbled, as we can see in the tumbling of the stock market.
Modi came promising that the government has no business in business. As you would know, the talk is less walked and even less talked now. Election after election, there is a spiralling into 'Revditva' as much as there is towards Hindutva. The government’s cold feet in the face of changing global equations have not helped, either.
Institutional incompetence, especially in education, has made it difficult for innovation and free enterprise. The government even overreaches into the private domain, seeking to control who eats what, and who lives with whom, making the country look bad in front of ourselves and others. The Modi government increasingly looks like it has no business in governance.
You have generally been forgiving of the volatility injected by Modi’s policies even when you could not cope up with it. But it has been noted that, over time, you have become hesitant to invest in India, despite the Modi government’s tall claims of business friendliness.
Some of you have responded with exile of yourself and your capital. But this option is available only to individuals. It cannot be a strategy for the capitalist class as a whole.
Wreckage of the Right to Vote
The same unpredictability that stops you from investing in India is now stripping random citizens of their votes. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has been marked by a callousness and indifference that has led to the stripping of a total of 13 crore votes. Granted, many of the deletions would have been legitimate.
But even a 1 percent error rate takes the right to vote away from 13 lakh citizens, and the error rate is seemingly far, far higher. The Election Commission of India has arguably admitted guilt as well, by shifting course when an uproar broke out.
You might have noticed that the debate is turning towards whether the incumbent party won the elections through electoral fraud, or whether the deletions changed the result. This is a red herring. Arbitrary, or even careless, deletion of voters is a crime in itself; a crime against democracy. It does not need to be followed by a victory for the party which oversaw it.
The ruling party has to bear responsibility for the wreckage of the right to vote, especially when it was done at such a massive scale without procedural justice. There are only two possibilities: either they approved of this violation of due process, or they were too inept to stop it. Neither scenario looks good for the government or the ruling party.
This assault on the electorate is the latest of many unrealistic, utopian Hindutva policies adopted by this government. The thing about utopians is that they persist with their utopia till we get an actual dystopia. It used to be a joke about Stalin that if the people disagreed with him, he would elect a new people. The good old Soviet dissident joke is sadly no longer a joke in India.
The bourgeoisie has a duty to defend bourgeois democracy, as citizens and as a class. History gives no assurance that it will. The bourgeoisie has been as capable of wrecking democracy as of founding it. The German bourgeoisie lost its nerve and settled with the Prussian crown during the turmoil of 1848.
Less than a century later, in November 1932, a group of German industrialists petitioned Hindenburg to put Hitler in the chancellery. Similar capitulations were made to the anti-democratic movements in Italy and Spain, almost resulting in the ruin of entire Europe.
Oblivious to this possible inversion, capitalists have time and again sold democracy for perceived short-term interests, inevitably to have it come back and bite them.
Bourgeois Defenders of Democracy
On the other hand, there are positive inspirations for you to draw from. In 1944, eight industrialists, JRD Tata, GD Birla, and Purshotamdas Thakurdas among them, drew up the Bombay Plan, a blueprint for the economy of a country that did not yet exist. Gandhi, their patron (or was it the other way around?), was a guest at Birla House in Delhi, in the lawns of which he was to be shot dead years later.
Jamnalal Bajaj, whom Gandhi referred to famously as his fifth son, was a fervent supporter of both the Swaraj cause and of internal social reforms. There are further examples of Ambalal Sarabhai and Chidambaram Pillai.
These individuals and their stories are fairly well known, just as well known as the general fact that the Indian bourgeoisie came of age inside the independence movement, and its claim to speak for the nation is borrowed from the same source as the republic’s.
Abroad too, there have been honourable efforts by capitalists to further democracy. Harry Oppenheimer, a Jewish diamond magnate from South Africa, was a consistent financier of the anti-apartheid movement. In 1978, as Brazil was slacking under a military dictatorship, a group of eight prominent industrialists from Brazil came out with a landmark manifesto, known as the Document of the Eight, that called for the restoration of democracy.
Contrary to popular perception, the support of the traditional bourgeoisie of the United States of America tilted towards the Democratic Party rather than for Donald Trump, an instinct that looks vindicated now, and one which was lacking among the NRIs who supported Trump thinking he would serve their interests.
We don’t want to tell you that only democracy produces capitalists or capitalism. Without democracy too, there can be successful capitalists. But there will not be a free bourgeois class which is relatively autonomous from the state, and which can do business freely and without fear.
Moreover, there is a real risk that the anger against BJP’s democratic backsliding will turn against Indian capitalism, driven by the perception of a lack of support from Indian capital for Indian democracy. It is both unnecessary and avoidable.
Look for evidence in the non-BJP states. Both the Communist ruled Kerala and Congress ruled states have even welcomed Adani, despite all their soundbites against Modi’s favourite crony capitalists. The weakened rupee has led you to diversify into dollar-linked assets. A weakened Modi should make you diversify in politics as well.
Towards a High-Trust Society
In Trust, Francis Fukuyama argued that prosperity favours high-trust societies over low-trust ones. In high-trust societies such as Japan, Germany and the United States, strangers cooperate, so firms grow beyond the family.
In low-trust societies, trust ends where kinship ends, and enterprise stays inside the household. Indian business knows this arrangement well. The family house is its dominant form.
For Fukuyama, trust is a cultural inheritance, but we think states manufacture it. Courts that enforce contracts, regulators who do not take instructions by phone, statistics that can be believed, and elections that count honestly are the machinery of trust.
Remove them and every deal needs a personal guarantee, and personal guarantees need proximity to power. That is a low-trust economy. It taxes everyone outside the circle of favour, and in time it taxes those inside it as well, because favour is revocable.
If Indian capital wants to scale, list, borrow, and acquire abroad, it needs a high-trust India. Only a democracy that binds its own government can supply one. Indian businesses need freedom from political dependence. It has nothing to gain from an all-powerful presidential Prime Minister.
As the history of both capitalism and democracy has amply demonstrated, capitalists are the biggest beneficiaries of a functioning bourgeois democracy. But they are not the first to defend it, especially when threatened by enemies of open society. This work is now outsourced to the youth in India. Seen this way, what is happening in the country is not only an effort to preserve democracy, but also a way to expand trust.
Dear Indian capitalists, you have nothing to gain from the destruction of the pillars of Indian democracy. And, without the peace, stability, and prospects of prosperity that Indian democracy offers, you may have everything to lose.
It is imprudent for you to settle for a tumultuous India that does not trust its key political institutions. This will certainly cost you dearly. But even more importantly, it is your moral duty too, and not just of workers, peasants, and students, to protect the global commons of Indian democracy.
In 1914, Indian passengers of the Komagata Maru were barred from Vancouver despite being British subjects. They understood the hard way that a people without a free nation will not be respected abroad.
Without a free democracy behind them, Indian capitalists too will be treated as global pariahs. You don’t want to end up like Putin’s capitalists, unfree at home and condemned abroad, right?
In good faith,
(Kuriakose Mathew teaches politics and international relations at the School of Liberal Arts and Management Studies, P P Savani University, Surat. His research focuses on democratic forces in transitional polities. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the authors' own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)