Food vs. Profit: Mass fightback in India

On November 26, in the largest protest in human history, hundreds of millions of workers in India staged a general strike against a government plan for “free market” deregulation of agriculture. For weeks, tens of thousands of poor farmers have taken to the streets. Fighters blocked national highways and trains, dodged tear gas canisters, and clashed with riot gear-clad police. They burned effigies of the prime minister, anti-Muslim racist and state terrorist Narendra Modi, who rammed through the new laws as part of a fascist drive to prepare for inter-imperialist war.
India’s agriculture system is dramatic proof of why the capitalist profit system must be smashed. Sixty percent of India’s 1.3 billion people eke out their livelihoods by farming, most of them on plots not much larger than a soccer field. The country ranks first in the world in milk production and second in rice, wheat, vegetables, and fruits, yet 190 million people are undernourished (fao.org). Pressed by debts and bankruptcies, farmers routinely resort to suicide—more than 10 per day in the western state of Maharashtra alone (ruralindiaonline.org).
By removing price supports and the guaranteed distribution of farmers’ goods, the new laws will accelerate corporate takeovers: “With these protections … cast off, there is little left to stop Big Ag companies within India from swallowing market share” (Slate, 12/9). Millions of small farmers and farmworkers may be pushed into starvation; millions more will be funneled into urban factory and service jobs, where they generate a higher return on investment for the bosses.
While the mass protests showcase the boldness and solidarity our class will need to defeat capitalism, these narrow reform demands are a deadly trap for workers.  Settling for anything less than communist revolution will only strengthen the bosses. The horrific inequalities in India make it clear that capitalism can never serve workers’ needs. Only a worker-run society can provide what our class truly needs and deserves.
Modi lines up behind U.S. rulers
Modi’s latest moves toward fascist control reflect a growing worldwide instability and sharpening inter-imperialist competition between the U.S. and China (see CHALLENGE, 12/17). As the U.S. declines as a world power, its ruling class needs India as a strategic ally against neighboring China and nearby Russia (Foreign Affairs, 11/10). India has amassed 150 nuclear warheads (armscontrol.org, August 2020), and its huge population could supply masses of troops in a conventional ground war.  
For the last five months, India and China have stationed at least 100,000 troops in a stare-down over a disputed region in the Himalayas (Foreign Affairs, 10/6). In June, after Chinese soldiers killed 30 Indian soldiers at this flashpoint, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence declared that the U.S. would “continue to stand firm with our allies in the region, like India.” More recently, India opted out of joining the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a huge slap in the face to the Chinese ruling class (Economic Times, 11/5). Relations between the world’s two most populated countries are at their lowest point in four decades (South China Morning Post, 12/9). And there’s no telling when a regional clash could be the spark that sets off World War III. On December 15, the New York Post reported that a U.S. Army command based in Alaska would train with the Indian Army in 2022—in the Himalayas.
India bosses, we charge you with genocide!
With a vastly under-reported 10 million infections and 144,000 Covid-19 deaths in India, Modi and his murderous band of bosses have grossly failed to protect workers. The working class everywhere is suffering from the disease of capitalism, and those who have the least under this system will always endure the harshest attacks. Hundreds of millions in India work and live without basic sanitation. Inferior for-profit healthcare, shoddy housing, and starvation-level wages conspire to put workers in danger. These are the real “preexisting conditions” that pave the way for transmission, infection, and death in a pandemic. Even after Covid-19 is contained, capitalism will remain to sicken us by the billions.
With its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) down by nearly a quarter, India is in an economic depression. Since March, an estimated 140 million people have lost their jobs (New York Times, 11/27). Just as Donald Trump blames immigrants as U.S. capitalism flounders, Modi has attempted to distract India’s working class from his blunders by scapegoating Muslim workers. The nation’s health ministry repeatedly blamed an Islamic group for spreading the virus, triggering a wave of racist violence. Muslim workers have been run out of their neighborhoods, assaulted with bats, and threatened with lynching (NYT, 4/12).
This racist campaign is nothing new. In August 2019, in a brazen land grab, Modi’s government canceled the “autonomous” status of the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. It flooded the region with troops, shut down the internet, and jailed opposition leaders. Next, Modi’s hyper-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) established a national registry in the eastern state of Assam, forcing workers to prove that they’d arrived in India before the mid-1970s. More than two million people, mostly Muslims, have since been stripped of their citizenship (Time, 12/20/19). These racist measures prompted mass fightback by millions of workers, who flooded the cities’ streets and battled police.
Fight for communism
India has a rich history of class struggle and revolutionary movements. Tragically, workers have been betrayed again and again by fake-“communist” parties that sell out to the bosses and help exploit the working class (see page 5). Progressive Labor Party stands with the working class of India as it fights against the blood-sucking bosses and their brutal oppression. The next step is for workers to shift their prodigious energy from organizing mass reform protests to building a society organized by and for workers—a communist society.
Under capitalism, farming, like everything else, is about making money, not feeding people. PLP believes that reforming capitalism is impossible. The workers’ need for food production—for survival—is in direct contradiction with the bosses’ need for maximum profit. Capitalists always place their narrow interests over people’s lives, whether it’s Modi, AMLO, Xi Jinping, or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Our solution lies outside the capitalist system. We must look to one another. We need an egalitarian society without racism or sexism or inter-imperialist war, where workers will share abundance and scarcity alike. Join the PLP and fight for communism! Power to the working class!