IPada pemilu tahun 2004, para pemilih di India menolak kekuasaan keras sayap kanan atas negara bagian tersebut. Aliansi Demokratik Nasional yang dipimpin Partai Bharatiya Janata (BJP) kalah dari Aliansi Progresif Bersatu yang dipimpin Kongres, meskipun Aliansi Progresif Bersatu yang dipimpin Kongres juga kekurangan mayoritas di majelis rendah Parlemen dengan 545 kursi. Untuk mendapatkan mayoritas, UPA beralih ke partai-partai regional dan Front Kiri. Dibentuk selama tiga dekade terakhir, Front Kiri terdiri dari empat partai, dua di antaranya adalah Partai Komunis (CPIM dan CPI) dan dua lainnya adalah formasi politik kiri-tengah. Dengan enam puluh satu kursi di parlemen, kaum Kiri mampu memberikan UPA mayoritas.
Pressure mounted on the Left to join the Persekutuan. Experience in earlier united front governments (in the late 1960s) has taught the Left not to join a government in a position of the junior partner. In 1996, when things seemed to hang in the balance, the various regional parties came to the Left and asked the Front to sign on, even to have a Communist be the Prime Minister; the Left at that time refused. In this case, there was no expectation that the Left would join the government, not only because of this long-standing policy to prevent being subordinate, but also because the Congress is itself a very unstable party that is now quite firmly controlled by a section who are pro-capitalist and who flog the line that India must now take its place alongside the US as a world power. The Congress leadership’s dismissal of imperialism and the cavalier disregard for the policies of neoliberalism made any formal alliance with the Left impossible.
Program Minimum Umum.
Sebaliknya, Front Kiri mengusulkan formulasi baru: UPA dan Kiri merancang Program Minimum Bersama (CMP), sebuah kesepakatan tentang apa yang mungkin dan apa yang harus mungkin; untuk memantau CMP ini, kedua belah pihak membentuk Komite Koordinasi; dan dengan adanya unsur-unsur ini, enam puluh satu Anggota Parlemen Kiri memilih untuk mendukung pemerintahan UPA “dari luar.” Front Kiri ingin menjadi pengawas pemerintahan baru, bukan anjing piaraan mereka (dalam ungkapan penuh warna dari anggota Politbiro CPM, Sitaram Yechury).
Common Minimum Program, CMP, bukanlah dokumen pasca-kapitalis yang revolusioner. Sebaliknya, mereka menyusun agenda sosial demokrat secara luas. Di bidang ekonomi, CMP menyerukan peningkatan pengeluaran pemerintah untuk memberikan bantuan kepada masyarakat, terutama masyarakat miskin di pedesaan. Pemberdayaan perempuan harus didukung sepenuhnya, di segala bidang. CMP berjanji untuk memastikan tingkat pertumbuhan ekonomi sebesar 7-8% “dengan cara yang menciptakan lapangan kerja sehingga setiap keluarga terjamin akan penghidupan yang aman dan layak.” Bagi kaum pro-kapitalis di Kongres, penekanan pada pertumbuhan sangatlah penting, begitu pula tujuannya “untuk melepaskan energi kreatif para wirausahawan, pebisnis, ilmuwan, insinyur, dan semua profesional serta kekuatan produktif masyarakat lainnya.” Buruh diberi kesejahteraan, sedangkan profesional diberi energi. Namun, kelompok sayap kiri tetap melanjutkan CMP, terutama karena adanya perasaan nasional bahwa fundamentalisme agama harus dikesampingkan. Adalah salah untuk menggolongkan masuknya pemerintahan UPA sebagai sesuatu yang revolusioner, atau mengatakan bahwa Kongres mempunyai “mandat sayap kiri” (seperti yang dikatakan David Harvey dalam bukunya Sejarah Singkat Neoliberalisme). Dengan penuh semangat, Kongres menerima banyak saran dari kaum Kiri untuk mewujudkan mandat yang terpecah menjadi pemerintahan yang stabil. Karena menyadari bahwa mereka belum mempunyai kekuasaan untuk menentukan jalannya pemerintahan India, kaum Kiri terlalu berkompromi dengan UPA dan menerima agenda sosial demokrat dalam pemerintahan. Ini bukanlah kompromi yang dipaksakan, namun kompromi sukarela.
The gains and losses of the experiment will take time to fathom. The Left succeeded in blocking what is now the normal inclination of the leaders of the Congress, many of whom ran key ministries in the UPA. The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, has, for his generation, the typical background of a member of the Dunia ketiga intelligentsia. Born in 1932, Dr. Singh earned his advanced degrees at Oxbridge, from where he went to work at the UNCTAD, a key institution of the Dunia ketiga project. Singh was there from 1966 to 1969, when this UN institution was at its heyday under the leadership of its founding Secretary General, Raul Prebisch. From UNCTAD, Singh came to occupy a series of important posts in the Indian government, including Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. Here Singh managed the economy along the lines of import substitution industrialization, when economic dirigisme was the vogue in India. In the midst of all this, Singh was also the Secretary General of the South Commission, whose Report from 1990 stands as rebuke to everything that followed in India, most of it under his watch: from 1991, as Finance Minister Singh led the Indian state into the embrace of the IMF, to inaugurate the “liberalization” era. Alongside Singh, stood P. Chidambaram (now Finance Minister, but then Minister of State for Commerce), Montek Singh Ahluwalia (now Deputy Chair of the Planning Commission, but then Finance Secretary to Manmohan Singh) and C. Rangarajan (now Chair of the Prime Minister’s Economic Council, but then Governor of the Reserve Bank of India). These were the brains of the liberalization scheme, and they are now in charge of the “finance side” of the Congress Party. Their influence cannot be underestimated, and they came to power in 2004 with the very opposite of a “left-wing mandate.” They came to continue the “liberalization reforms” but minus the crony capitalism of the BJP. This is not to say that the UPA government could flout “national” interests: these continued to be in play, for instance, at the WTO Geneva meeting in July 2008, when the Indian team helped scuttle the Doha round (the Minister of Commerce and Industry Kamal Nath rejected the policies of the “survival of the fittest” for the “revival of the weakest,” a populist streak that also has its class angle, since it is at the behest of various agrarian capitalists within India, as well as the farmers’ lobbies).
Selama empat tahun terakhir, kaum Kiri berfungsi sebagai rem terhadap dorongan umum dari Junta Liberalisasi ini (seorang Marxis Jerman, Walter Benjamin, mengatakan bahwa Revolusi adalah rem darurat terhadap kereta kapitalisme yang tak terkendali). Kaum Kiri memblokir privatisasi perusahaan-perusahaan sektor publik yang menguntungkan, dan mencegah privatisasi besar-besaran pada sektor-sektor seperti telekomunikasi, penerbangan sipil, dan perdagangan eceran, serta menghambat masuknya modal keuangan spekulatif ke dalam kekayaan rakyat (yaitu, pada tahun 2013). skema pensiun dan di sektor asuransi). Ini adalah pekerjaan yang berharga. Tapi semuanya tidak bersifat defensif. Partai-partai Kiri bergabung dengan berbagai organisasi masyarakat untuk mendorong dan memenangkan Undang-Undang Jaminan Ketenagakerjaan Pedesaan Nasional, Undang-Undang Hak Hutan Suku, Undang-Undang Hak Atas Informasi, Undang-undang KDRT, undang-undang penghapusan pekerja anak, dan masih banyak lagi (di antaranya yang merupakan pencabutan POTA, undang-undang anti-teroris yang kejam). Kementerian Keuangan mengeluh bahwa Program Minimum Umum tidak terjangkau dan dia melobi untuk membatalkan agenda utama agenda sosial demokrat. Tapi dia tidak bisa menjalani hari itu.
Sekutu Bawahan.
In terms of foreign policy, matters are also not fully clear in the Common Minimum Program. One sentence is unequivocal, and the Left took it as the bedrock of the understanding: “The UPA government will pursue an independent foreign policy keeping in mind its past traditions. This policy will seek to promote multi-polarity in world relations and oppose all attempts at unilateralism.” Later, the CMP acknowledges that the Congress-led UPA will pursue “closer engagement and relations with the Amerika Serikat,” but it says that this can only happen in the context of maintaining “the independence of India’s foreign policy position on all regional and global issues.” An early draft of the CMP called for the “strategic relations with the Amerika Serikat,” but at the urging of the Left, this was dropped.
In 2003, the Indian Parliament defeated an attempt to send Indian troops to Irak, and early into its tenure, the new External Affairs Minister, Natwar Singh, gave an assurance that India would not commit troops to Irak. At the same time, as a means to build confidence across the India-Pakistan border, the UPA government pursued a “peace pipeline,” a natural gas conduit that would run from Iran, Melalui Pakistan, Untuk India. The existence of such an important pipeline (which would bring Iranian gas to Indian markets, and earn Pakistan hundreds of millions of dollars in transit fees) might knit the livelihoods of these neighbors and consolidate various peace moves that had begun between Islamabad dan New Delhi. But these two initiatives, and others, did not sit well with Washington. The Bush administration wanted relief in Irak, and it wanted to intensify its policy of isolating Iran. But there was no joy, as neither Pakistan maupun India budged on the pipeline and neither wanted its forces in Irak, atau Afganistan.
Tidak bisa bergerak Pakistan, Di mana US leverage is considerable, the Bush team wooed India, where core elements of the Finance section were more receptive to its charms. From the very start of the UPA government, it was clear that the Liberalization Junta wanted to cement a close link with the US, to utilize a bilateral agreement with the US as the platform to bring India onto the “world stage” (viz. a permanent seat in the UN Security Council). When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came to India in 2005, she got what the US wanted from India, and gave little: India got no commitment on its seat in the Security Council, and the US would not go back on its commitment to sell F-16 jets to Pakistan. But more substantially, Rice lobbied against the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, pushed its line on Iran to the Indians, and promised to help meet India’s energy needs to replace the gas. This was the first indication that the nuclear deal would be a quid pro quo for scuttling the peace pipeline and for giving the US political cover in the Third World forums in the line against Iran. At a press conference, Minister Natwar Singh was deeply uncomfortable when discussion came to Iran, hoping that it would fulfill its obligations to the IAEA (“We have good relations with Iran”), as Secretary Rice grimaced. The Liberalization Junta’s eagerness for an entente with the US came at a cost, whose down-payment was the Indian votes against Iran in the IAEA (2005). Natwar Singh’s rear-guard action, to insist that the Iran issue be dealt with as a procedural matter by the IAEA, was rebuked, and he had to resign by year’s end. The nuclear deal was always subordinate to the greater goal, which is to say, to “strategically ally” India pada pengatur terkenal. Pengatur ini menawarkan bantuan hukum kepada traderapabila trader berselisih dengan broker yang terdaftar dengan mereka. US.
From 1947 to 1992, the Indo-US relationship was ambivalent. India played a very important role in the various United Nations forums, pushing for peaceful solutions to conflict as much as possible, as well as for the creation of multi-polarity in the world. With the fall of the Uni Soviet and the collapse of the Dunia ketiga project, the leadership of the Congress, reflecting the new aggressiveness in the national bourgeoisie, made a willful analytical shift. The Congress leaders argued that now that the Cold War had ended, the world had become multi-polar. This was a curious elision of the increased aggressiveness of the US, now as the leader of the G-8, freely bombing small countries like Panama and pushing for a new trade regime through the Uruguay Round of GATT. Influential members of the Congress turned their back on the goal to produce multi-polarity. They declared that multi-polarity was the reality; the significance of this is that it denied the ambitions of US imperialism. The Congress’ new leader, P. V. Narasimha Rao argued that India would form a pact as an equal, not as a junior partner. The US, Rao’s team argued, saw India as a partner in the community of democracies, which is why the Rao government eagerly recognized Israel and signed a military collaboration agreement with the US. The top brass of the US and Indian militaries created executive committees and proceeded to conduct naval, air force and special forces joint exercises. In 1995, Indian officers went to the US armed forces academies to train with their peers through the Indo-US Military Cooperation Agreement. Due to US Congressional prejudices, as it were, the cooperation was briefly halted after India tested nuclear weapons in 1998. But they were quickly re-started, and intensified after 911. The BJP was in power in India, and it cultivated close military ties between the two countries.
The national bourgeoisie, who control the various big business enterprises and leading sections of the Indian economy, saw great opportunities in the new dispensation. These did not come from the military side of the emergent entente. In 1991, Rao and Singh began a process to transform of the role of the India Negara in and over the economy. Held back by pressure from the Left, the populist parties and people’s movements, the Rao team could not move at a full tilt. “Reforms” came in fits and starts. The government weakened the rules for foreign direct investment (FDI), encouraging capital from the Atlantic states to drift toward India. In 1994, US Commerce Secretary Ron Brown arrived in India with a delegation of US CEOs. They pledged $7 billion for various deals (in telecommunications and energy, largely. The leader in the energy team was Enron, whose Maharashtra power plant deal later ended in disgrace over charges of bribery and cost-gouging). FDI has increased quite dramatically ($162 million in 1990 to as assumed $40 billion in 2008). Large firms in India welcomed this investment, because it allowed them to leverage their already strong position further, and to extend themselves out of the country. Since 2000, for instance, India’s largest business house, the Tata Group, procured nineteen concerns outside India (Seperti Britania’s Jaguar and Land Rover, Afrika Selatan'S Neotel, Korea Selatan’s Daewoo Commercial and most significantly, the UK-based steel giant, Corus). This assertiveness by the national bourgeoisie in India manifested itself in a confidence vis-à-vis the US, seeing it as an economic and so political partner. The national bourgeoisie, including the owners of the large Software firms and the media, derided all talk of imperialism and welcomed the new age. During Rice’s trip to India in 2005, she flattered this section saying, “It is the policy of the Amerika Serikat untuk membantu India become a major world power in the twenty-first century.”
To become a “world power,” in this rendition, is to break down the dirigiste state and to construct a neo-liberal one. The intellectual work for this exercise comes from the IMF, and it was implemented partially by the Rao-Singh team in the early 1990s. For the remainder, which had been blocked by the progressive opposition, the new intellectual framework comes from the US-India CEO-Forum, a group set up by a Bush-Singh meeting in 2005. Of the thirty recommendations in their “US-India Strategic Economic Partnership” document (2006), twenty-one are directed to India, which is charged with the removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers to all products. For all the blather about “mutual benefits of globalization,” the proposals asked for the end to regulation in India, mainly to serve US-based corporations and sections of the Indian national bourgeoisie. Much the same comes out of the Agricultural Knowledge Initiative (AKI), also launched in 2005 by the Bush-Singh meeting. Guided by agro-business executives, the AKI pushes for a revision of India’s patent laws and vitiates protections for small farmers. Both Indian (Dabur and Hindustan Lever) and American (Monsanto and WalMart) firms will benefit at the expense of Indian farmers.
The UPA inherited this dynamic. On the military front, it even extended it. Between 2004 and the present, military exercises between the US dan India have been conducted regularly (the most recent, the Malabar naval exercises, will be held in October 2008). In 2005, as a consequence of these exercises and of the relationship built up between the military leadership of the two states as well as the political ties between the Congress and the Bush administration, the two countries signed a ten-year Defense Framework Agreement. The Agreement had four main points: it ignores the role of the UN in conflict resolution; it brings India into the conversation about missile defense; it makes India a bilateral partner in the defense of the sea lanes around China, thereby going against the idea of an Asian pact of the seas; it encourages India to buy its military hardware from the US. If there ever was a principled moment for the Left to have withdrawn support to the Congress-led UPA, this was it. While the Left opposed the pact consistently, it did not want to bring down the government after only one year; there was much on the agenda, the hard right had not yet been marginalized sufficiently, and it appeared that through careful maneuvering the Coordination Committee might have been able to block the continuation of this entente.
It was not to be. Over the past three years, the UPA government quite brazenly reached out to the Bush administration on the latter’s terms, all in defiance of the Left. The military relations have consolidated, and so have the economic ties. On the political front, India voted with the US terhadap Iran in the IAEA. The nuclear deal, which also begins its process in 2005, combines the economic, military and political elements of the relationship. On the political front, it is a way to break India’s ties to Iran (sideline the Peace Pipeline, for one, but also to push India, through the US Congress’ Hyde Act to report to the US Congress on its relations with Iran), and it is a way to once more damage the framework of international law (in this case by creating a major exception to the NPT). Given that India does not produce nuclear technology, the deal also provides an incentive to US-based nuclear companies who are eager to dominate the Asian market for nuclear reactors (Jepang dan Tiongkok have become big buyers). The Left conducted a principled and informed dialogue with the UPA from August 2007 to June 2008. The Left’s opposition is not only to the violations of Indian state sovereignty by this treaty, but mainly to the infeudation of India ke US policy of primacy.
Pada tanggal 9 Juli 2008, partai Kiri menarik dukungannya kepada pemerintahan UPA. Tekanan dari kelompok oposisi, di satu sisi sayap kiri, di sisi lain sayap kanan, dan kemudian di tengah berbagai formasi regional, membuat UPA mengupayakan “mosi kepercayaan.” Pada tanggal 21-22 Juli, Parlemen mengadakan debat mengenai kesepakatan nuklir, dan tepat sebelum pemungutan suara terakhir, anggota BJP berlari ke dalam rumah dengan membawa setumpuk uang tunai. Mereka menyatakan bahwa sekutu UPA telah mencoba menyuap mereka agar memilih pemerintah, atau abstain. Terlepas dari suap, negara-negara lain telah setuju untuk memilih bersama pemerintah dengan imbalan kementerian-kementerian yang berharga (seperti Kementerian Batubara, yang merupakan mesin ATM raksasa; menteri dapat menyalurkan kontrak di sana-sini, dan menuai “imbalan” jangka panjang dari pemerintah). pasar ini). Alih-alih menghentikan proses, Ketua malah melanjutkan pemungutan suara, dan pemerintah melanjutkan proses tersebut. Prabhat Patnaik dengan tepat menyebut pemungutan suara di parlemen sebagai sebuah kudeta: “Fakta bahwa parlemen ditundukkan bukan dengan tank tetapi dengan uang tunai untuk memilih, tidak menjadikan hal ini sebagai sebuah kudeta; juga bukan fakta bahwa hal ini dilakukan bukan oleh sekelompok jenderal, melainkan oleh sekelompok birokrat atau mantan birokrat (termasuk perdana menteri), dan oleh orang-orang yang kehidupan politiknya, seperti sekarang, tidak pernah mencakup apapun. kontak dengan orang-orang biasa.” Yang dia maksud adalah Junta Liberalisasi.
In the wreckage of parliament, the UPA government’s Liberalization Junta began to crow that without the Left, the government “will take economic reforms forward.” Meanwhile, as soon as the vote came through, the White House hastened to congratulate Singh, and to pledge to do all it can in the IAEA and at the Nuclear Suppliers Group. While getting the endorsement for the safeguards agreement from the IAEA Board of Governor’s was easy, the NSG has been less pliable. The US has a timeline problem (the Democratic Congress seems to want to hold off on the final passage until they control the Presidency, so that they can take full credit for the deal). The revised text prepared by the US for a waiver for India from the NSG is likely to impose explicit conditions on India in accordance with the Hyde Act, which will be difficult for the Indian government to sell domestically. All this vindicates the strong position taken by the Left on the nuclear deal, particularly in making the point that this deal is not what it seems.
Front Ketiga.
Sementara itu, kaum Kiri sedang sibuk membentuk “front ketiga”, selain Kongres dan BJP. Dari tahun 1947 hingga tahun 1970an, Kongres mendominasi politik India. Retakan dalam hegemoni membuka era politik koalisi. Karena tidak ingin bersekutu secara permanen dengan Kongres atau BJP, kaum Kiri telah mencoba, selama bertahun-tahun, untuk membentuk “front ketiga,” tidak hanya di arena pemilu, namun yang terpenting adalah memperluas dunia perjuangan dan imajinasi politik. Eksperimen-eksperimen awal pada tahun 1989 dan 1996, sebagian besar merupakan aliansi demi kenyamanan, yang pertama untuk mencegah Kongres mengambil alih jabatan (sehingga Front Nasional menerima dukungan eksternal baik dari sayap kanan maupun kiri) dan yang kedua untuk mencegah sayap kanan mengambil alih jabatan. (sehingga Kongres secara eksternal mendukung gabungan Front Kiri-Front Nasional yang terpecah belah). Dalam banyak hal, bagi kaum Kiri, upaya yang dilakukan bukanlah untuk menciptakan kombinasi pemilu yang sempurna, namun untuk menemukan cara untuk bekerja sama dengan berbagai partai regional dan partai sosial demokrat dalam perjuangan bersama untuk membentuk landasan prinsip yang bersatu. Sejarah tidak bergerak sesuai dengan kecepatan keadilan.
It remains clear that large sections of the population have faith in the various regional, social democratic and even bourgeois-landlord parties. For whatever reason, these parties continue to outpoll the Left in elections, except in three states (Bengal Barat, Kerala and Tripura). It would be suicidal for the Left to avoid these parties, to take a sectarian position in regions where the Left organizations are weak. Therefore, it remains important to work with parties and organizations in struggles of common interest, to create new opportunities and new dynamics. The objective basis for a third front exists: in the 2004 election the combined percentage of the votes won by the Congress and the BJP was 48.69. The regional and social democratic parties, therefore, now have a large mandate if they are able to find a common agenda, and disabuse each other of the view that either the Congress or the BJP will operate in the people’s interest.
Bahwa kaum Kiri mendukung aliansi Kongres di panggung nasional adalah hal yang signifikan; pengalaman ini memungkinkan kaum Kiri untuk menampilkan serangkaian strategi nasional alternatif (untuk sekularisme, untuk kesejahteraan sosial, untuk memperkuat negara yang mengatur, untuk hak-hak perempuan, untuk martabat sosial secara umum), dan untuk menunjukkan keterbatasan dari kaum borjuis-tuan tanah. Para Pihak. Kelompok Kiri juga mampu menunjukkan kesamaan apa yang dimiliki Kongres dan BJP, dan bagaimana kesamaan tersebut merugikan masyarakat luas. Partai-partai utama berusaha semaksimal mungkin untuk mengisolasi kaum Kiri ketika mereka menarik dukungannya terhadap UPA, namun hal ini pun tidak terjadi. Melalui beberapa manuver yang cekatan, Front Kiri menjangkau Partai Bahujan Samaj (BSP), yang awalnya merupakan partai Dalit (kasta tertindas) dan kini berpretensi menjadi partai nasional. BSP memiliki sejarah aliansi dengan Kongres dan BJP; namun alih-alih dimanfaatkan oleh partai-partai ini, mereka justru dengan cerdik memanfaatkan mereka untuk memperluas basisnya di India Utara, dan menggantikan mereka sebagai salah satu partai utama di kawasan paling penting ini (“Sabuk Hindi”, di mana kaum Kiri tidak mampu melakukan hal tersebut. terobosan). Masih harus dilihat seberapa efektif kemunculan front ini, dan apakah kemampuan BSP untuk melompati sekutu-sekutunya akan berarti kaum Kiri akan menjadi batu loncatan, atau apakah keduanya akan mendapatkan keuntungan dalam menciptakan dinamika politik baru di negara ini.
Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinitas Perguruan tinggi, Hartford, CT Buku barunya adalah Bangsa-Bangsa yang Lebih Gelap: Sejarah Rakyat di Dunia Ketiga, NY: The New Press, 2007. He can be reached at: [email dilindungi]
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