Political Changes
Do political changes in the new regimes signify the abandonment or even the modification of the economic model of capital accumulation and participation in the international division of labor to which these political regimes gave birth or nurturance? Many people entertain hopes of political democratization. Some even have hopes (or illusions) that a new era of economic democratization is in the owing. It is said that the wage rate has been reduced so much that the time must be arriving to raise it again, both for the sake of the wage earners and in the interest of producers of agricultural and industrial commodities for the internal market. These people therefore expect political democratization to be accompanied by economic democratization through the abandonment or radical modification of the economic model of recent years.
In India Prime Minister Desai and his socialist Minister of Industries, George Fernandes (who had been imprisoned by the previous government for his labor union and strike leadership), certainly did not deliver anything of the kind during the Janata government. The 1977 budget, announced soon after the election, "broke no new ground" and was "in the same mould" as that of the previous government. The budget and the "new" industrial policy announced in early 1978 presented only "confused goals, ineffective tools, to little purpose," and there was little to distinguish them from their predecessors. In agriculture, where the Janata party had particular strength, peasants were even more exploited and politically repressed by local landlords with police support than they had been before. The return of Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister is hardly more promising. The elected Communist Party of India of CPI (M) government of Jyoti Basu in West Bengal (55 million population) became engaged in "putting up a moderate front" and "tight-rope walking". And "the business community was assured that the government would not allow a rash of labour troubles to break out". National and foreign industry found it easy to work with the state Chief Minister Basu and his renowned Communist Finance Minister, Ashok Mitra (as they did with the socialist union leader Fernandez). As Ashok Rudra pointed out, the government had "two courses of action open to it. It could choose the course of encouraging class struggle . . . [with the] clear understanding that such course of action cannot possibly be pursued for any length of time, however." Or it could have chosen to follow the second course, which was "to stick on to the state government power for as long as possible just for the sake of it . . . That means using the administrative services for the purposes for which they are meant — namely protecting and promoting capitalist and landlord class interest." The CPI(M) government in West Bengal has certainly followed the second course of action, and the bourgeois press there and elsewhere has been "full of praise for the newly discovered virtues of Leftist ministers" and "an enthusiastic defender and supporter of the Left Front government."
