Interview with Jairus Banaji

lines magazine co-editors, Cenan Pirani and Ahilan Kadirgamar interviewed activist intellectual Jairus Banaji in December 2006.  Jairus Banaji is known for his interventions in various Marxist debates, his work on Indian labour and activism challenging Hindutva.  The interview delves into the political culture of the Left in India during the seventies, the concerns of Indian labour during the last three decades, the kind of interventions that are possible by small collectives such as the Union Research Group, the response that is necessary to Hindutva and the Right in general, and the need for greater political imagination and rethinking of the Left.

Q:  How did your politicisation begin, and what was the intellectual climate in which you were politicised?

I suppose it starts back in Britian in the late 1960s, with the general radicalization of students against the background of the war in Vietnam, revolutionary movements in Latin America and the student upsurge in Europe and elsewhere. These were processes that converged to bring about a general political radicalization in the late 1960s. I was in Oxford as an undergraduate and joined one of the far left organizations at that time, which was called ‘International Socialism’, it was a Trotskyist group that disagreed with the standard Trotskyist understanding of the Soviet Union and Soviet society, and argued that what you had in the Eastern Bloc was a form of capitalism, a form of state capitalism.  So the group used to be called ‘State Caps’ and I suppose I also subscribed to that view.  I thought it made more sense than seeing these societies as surviving workers’ states which had internally degenerated, which I thought was a purely metaphorical analysis. 

When Rohini and I went back to India in 1972, we found a very different kind of political culture on the campuses there.  I joined JNU in late 1972 to do history there and essentially it was a very political campus, but ‘political’ in the Indian sense meant that all the major political parties in the country had a strong student representation and student organizations, so there was nothing like an autonomous or independent politics.  And it became obvious that what one needed to create was a tradition of independent political thinking in the campus.  So we started with a study circle, it was important for people to know what had happened to the Marxist movement in the 20th century and to know about the history of the labour movement in general. We began with that and we built up a circle which was quite effective on the campus - in a sense it provided an alternative pole of attraction for the left. Most of the leftwing students were aligned with the party left, the AISF and the SFI linked to the CPI and the CPM respectively, but there were others who were looking for something else because they weren’t satisfied with the kind of political culture which was very tightly controlled by party leaderships. The circle we formed in JNU became a pole of attraction for some of the best students in JNU and others from Delhi university who had an M-L past. And that legacy and tradition survived.  When some of us left Delhi, when I relocated to Bombay with Rohini in 1974, there was still an independent left on the campus which survived into the late 1970s and early 1980s.  And so in Delhi, the interventions in JNU among students and intellectuals were very political in the sense that these were debates about the history of the left, the political past of the left, and why the left was in crisis in the 1970s, and we encountered strong opposition from the CPM students.

It was when we moved to Bombay, which was at that time a predominantly industrial centre, that the whole meaning of working-class politics took on a different character entirely. Delhi is not mainly an industrial centre, it is a centre for administration and cultural and intellectual life.  Bombay was essentially an economic and industrial city with vast industrial areas which are more like suburbs surrounding the city.  Initially in Bombay, the same sort of debates that we had had in Delhi surfaced here as well.  The same pattern was being developed of creating study circles discussing Marxist theory etc. By then we were arguing for something we called a ‘platform’, which meant the need for a complete theoretical renovation within the socialist movement.  That socialism would not make significant advances in the modern world unless it went back to basic theory and then tried to use that theory in some way to shed light on the modern world.  That means it was essentially a process of developing theory rather than believing everything had been sorted out by then – nothing had been sorted out.  There were debates across the board, there was an ambiguity about almost everything; about the nature of capitalism, even whether you had capitalism in countries like India.  All of those were unresolved questions for the left. But rather than having a genuine debate, there was a breakdown in communication on the left, and this simply fragmented the left’s understanding of these issues.  Each group would come up with it own line and analysis that was oblivious of everything else that was being said except for the purposes of polemic.  There was no process of creative intellectual dialogue within the left at the time.  So when we spoke about the platform, we were thinking about a complete renovation of Marxist theory in terms of the nature of contemporary reality, trying to understand capitalism in its contemporary form, the nature of the working class, the nature of the labour movement, and so on.  That involved intensive theoretical study among ourselves, which we did in Bombay for about two and a half years, quite intensive discussions.

The new feature of political engagement then was that we also became involved with workers. And though that contact began during the Emergency, it consolidated and reached a more stable form after the Emergency.  We started with an idea we borrowed from the British left, which was that of “workers’ enquiries”.  We thought we should try and establish contact around a “workers’ enquiry”.  Meaning we would try and get workers to enquire collectively into the problems they were facing and come up with solutions and give the whole process a more collective and rational form.  But effectively what was being done was that we were establishing contact with the industrial areas and finding out about the situation in these places. 

 

Q: Was there much rethinking about the state after the Emergency?

The Emergency is an important watershed in a very different sense, it’s paradoxical, the Emergency is a watershed in the evolution of the right wing in India. Obviously the Emergency did involve a wholesale attack on people’s democratic and human rights and there was a great deal of coercion and intimidation under the Emergency. People were thrown into jail, strikes were banned, and so on. But it was a disaster in a different sense, in that it gave the Right wing the chance to cast itself in a more popular guise. Because a lot of right-wing cadre, from the RSS especially, were in jail at the time, and whatever it was that went on in those jails, it was something that gave birth to a very different kind of political culture on the Right by the late 1970s. When they came out of jail, when the Emergency ended, in the election that followed immediately afterwards they came out much more confident. In some sense they felt they were the ones who had brought down the Emergency, which is partly correct, because the Emergency was brought down by a coalition of political forces opposed to Congress. And of course the fact is that people were fed up with a regime of intimidation, they voted against it, they voted against Congress. So the more enduring sense in which the Emergency was a total political disaster was that it marked a watershed in the evolution of the Right wing in India. They came out of this period with a great deal more confidence and we begin to see them reaping this harvest over the next ten years, because they became a mass political force in the 80s.  That is when Hindutva begins to emerge as an appropriate ideology for a mass-based right-wing party.

We’re not yet in the period of economic liberalisation, that comes in 1991.  But certainly by the 1980s managements are being encouraged by the state to do their best, to make their establishments as profitable as possible.  For instance, the state encouraged sub-contracting and relocation of capital to so-called ‘backward areas’.  It was government that led capital into the whole general area of subcontracting.  It’s not as if managements came up with the decision to subcontract on their own steam. Government provided incentives so that it became attractive for companies to subcontract, in all kinds of industries, and India saw a huge ancillarisation wave. This would also affect the stability of employment, it meant that the demand for labour in the large establishments was much less now, because they could always get something produced 200 miles away and send it straight to the market.

And come the 90s, with liberalisation and the new economic policies, the unions lose ground even faster. Because now it is possible for companies to rationalise not just local establishments but to rationalise the corporate structure as a whole.  They can buy other companies if they want to, they can shut down, etc.

 

Q: How did this climate of Indian Labour affect your work?

Well, the Union Research Group began around 1979, at the tail end of the second big strike wave. I mentioned earlier that there were these two major strike waves in the 1970s, we began more or less at the tail end of the second one of these.  And we found that the first thing we had to do was negotiate access to the plants themselves.  That it would be impossible to do any meaningful work if we were too afraid to go into the factories.  It was largely a process of bluffing your way in. I’d say the break came when one of the unions asked us to do some research for them on pay. It was for the Hoechst employees’ union, workers in the German pharmaceutical major. They said, we don’t know where our pay stands in relation to other companies in the industry. Are we better off, are we not better off, where exactly do we stand in the league table?  And I used that as a pretext to be able to get into almost every major factory in the Bombay pharmaceutical industry and every major company. 

That’s the kind of activity that was going on around 1981-82. In a sense we transformed union culture in Bombay through this very small intervention, just a group of 8 to 10 people, moving around, establishing contacts, creating a network. We actually transformed the culture of unionism in Bombay in the sense that a lot of unions now began to feel the need for information, research and analysis, and for debate in ways that they never suspected before.  It was as though these needs had been latent in their psychology, and what we had done was simply catalyze them.  I remember I left India in 1985, but when I visited again at the end of the 1980s, they were actually coming to us saying they would be willing to set up a training institute for unions. They would finance it and fund it from union funds if we were willing to run it.  But by that stage, the group was in dispersion.  It was as if the URG emerged within a particular moment and responded to a latent need among workers, and then reached a limit in terms of perspectives. 

 

Q: You talked about the emergence of the Right. Let’s hear about your views on Hindutva and your definition of fascism.

Fascism was one of the issues we did study and debate politically in the 1970s. We even brought out a booklet called Three essays on fascism, which contained translations of German writings on fascism that had been published in the 1930s.

Q: What was the trigger to study fascism at that time?

Simply because we analyzed the loose coalition that brought down the Emergency as one which itself displayed strong fascist tendencies and features.  It sounds paradoxical, that a coalition that brings the Emergency to an end should itself contain the seeds of a future political evolution that might be fascist. But that’s how we analyzed what was called the Janata Party at that time. And the RSS, as I said, effectively used the backbone of the JP movement to advance its own position in the country. Jaiprakash Narayan himself came from a socialist tradition, so it was all the more paradoxical that the rank and file was largely controlled by RSS cadre.

That was when we took up the issue of fascism. The one central insight we had come away with, our sense of fascism was that it couldn’t be a significant phenomenon unless it had a mass base of some sort.  Unless it had implanted itself on a sufficiently political scale to make it frightening.  If fascism was simply what the Comintern kept saying it was, a conspiracy of bankers, just a handful of industrialists and bankers sitting around a board room orchestrating some massive political conspiracy, it wouldn’t have been that frightening.  Because it would have no credibility.  What was frightening about fascism was the element of credibility, the fact that it sank roots in such wide layers.  It was important to try and understand why that could happen, that was one issue.  And secondly, much of the debate was about a way of characterizing those social layers in a more precise way.  Is fascism essentially a middle class movement?  Is that some impoverished middle class we’re talking about? And how far does a fascist mass base extend into the working class?

The communalisation of Indian politics and of the Indian state was a political praxis, an agenda. Communal violence is not something that explodes inexorably on the political landscape, like some natural calamity. It flows from the intricate planning of political forces that are seeking to attract and consolidate mass political support through structured cycles of violence.

The RSS is a textbook case of fascist political culture, indeed it actively sought links with fascist parties in the 1930s.  If you read Golwalkar’s We or our nationhood defined, it is immediately evident that he was palpably influenced by the Nazi extermination of the Jews. He even calls that the highest affirmation of German dignity and self-respect!  He uses that as an example of what they should be doing to Muslims in India, or of what can be done to Muslims in India unless Muslims are willing to live in submission and subordination.  Here the ‘Nation’ is identified with a specific religious group, and that group in turn is seen as a racial category. Nation = religion = race. The horrific explosion of violence in Gujarat in 2002 would not have been possible without decades of racist and communal indoctrination of the kind advocated by Golwalkar and his successors in the RSS leadership.

Congress is associated with its own Gujarat, in the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984. That too was a watershed, a major break in the Indian political system, and its upshot, predictably, was that it legitimised violence against minorities. If Congress leaders were capable of instigating pogroms against Sikhs, why couldn’t ‘Hindu’ organisations do the same with their ‘others’?   It is too early to say if Gujarat represents the end of this whole macabre political cycle of communalisation and violence.  Gujarat came as a horrible shock to millions of people in India, they were obviously deeply disturbed that a democracy such as India prides itself on being could allow this sort of thing to happen (the real culprits are still at large), people were clearly shaken and this is why Congress was swept back to power, against the expectations of all the political pundits, analysts, etc.  Even hardcore middle class supporters of the BJP abandoned them in the 2004 lok sabha election.  I’d like to think of that election as a verdict on what had happened in Gujarat.  But it was crucially important that groups like Citizens for Justice and Peace put all their effort into getting the cases going and making sure they were tried in an impartial jurisdiction, transferred from Gujarat to Bombay, for example. The fact that some of the accused in the Best Bakery case were finally convicted is a considerable tribute to those groups, but of course the main criminals who are the politicians who led the whole orgy of violence remain unpunished.

Maybe I should add that a few weeks into the violence in Gujarat we formed a broad organisation called Insaaniyat. This comprised people from a wide range of backgrounds, including the women’s groups, journalists, people in the film industry, university teachers and other kinds of professionals. The idea was to forge a response that was equally broad, tackling the culture of fascism by working with schoolchildren, college students, workers, people in the corporate sector, through cultural events, public meetings, interviews with the press, and so on. Other groups, too, were formed, such as Vikalp, which began to screen films to substantial audiences.
  

Q: And globalization and its relationship to Indo-US relations.  This inflow of international capital, do you see a direct connection between that and the relationship between India and the US that is forming?

No, I don’t. I would have said yes possibly, I might have seen a link, if what we had seen was a massive flow of foreign direct investment into the economy.  But we haven’t seen any such movement, nothing vaguely close to the scale on which China has managed to attract investment.  It is not direct foreign investment that has boosted India’s foreign exchange reserves but remittances and financial flows.  I don’t think there has been any significant penetration of US capital in the Indian economy, nothing that dramatically alters the picture in relation to the earlier presence of US firms.  And on Congress’ tendency to veer to the American sphere of influence, I think that has to be understood autonomously, in terms of Congress’ own political stances and the pro-nuclear policies of the Indian scientific and military establishment.  It has much more to do with Congress political culture and ideology than anything else.  I don’t think the BJP would have taken a substantially different position either.

Liberalisation is simply a means by which markets are opened up to achieve greater integration of capital worldwide. The stronger Indian firms stand to gain from this, witness Ratan Tata’s bid for the international steel major Corus. As time passes, we shall see many more Indian businesses displaying this level of confidence. The big change in India’s case has been in the financial markets and the entry of foreign institutional investors. They stand for a different, more advanced kind of capitalism, one which is far from sympathetic to family control of businesses and which would rather see companies that are widely held. Reversing all this, going back to some earlier state of the economy, supposing that were possible, would only strengthen the dominance of right-wing forces within the country. The nationalism that permeates much of the left’s thinking in India prevents it from seeing that economic isolationism would be a precursor to political fascism in the country.  This doesn’t mean that the state is unimportant or that regulation doesn’t matter. They are crucial, because they are the only instruments of public policy we have. The unions should be campaigning for a workers’ charter, for legislative changes that give workers and their representatives much stronger rights at the level of the company and of corporate decision making. This is not incompatible with internationalisation and may be even turn out to be the crucial premise for its successful and wider acceptance.

 

Q:  What do you think are central issues confronting us today? What is to be done?

As far as the union scene is concerned, the kind of initiative seen in the emergence of the NTUI is one way forward.  We need to build a strong federation of independent unions and they need to abandon the myth that there is a distinction between trade unionism and politics.  And by that I do not mean we should reduce politics to trade unionism, but the unions need to form a more political conception of their role.  During my corporate governance interviews with top management, the director of a leading Indian company told me that all hell would break loose when the unions woke up.  Capital appreciates the power of labour better than many unions do!   So, on the union side, stronger union rights, the revival of collective bargaining, and the continuing federation of unions, but also a leadership with the ability to articulate a political vision of its agenda.  93% of Indian workers are outside the formal sector, outside trade unionism. That has to change. We cannot have a maturing economy that is increasingly integrated into international markets continuing to base itself on a half-literate workforce that is denied ILO rights and pinned close to subsistence wages. And that includes the millions of children who are being forced into wage-labour.  That makes no sense. The division between organized and unorganized must disappear, and that is an issue of public policy and the way the labour market is regulated.

Politically we need a left that is able to confront capitalism on its terrain and rise to the challenges thrown up by contemporary forms of capitalist economy. The left cannot do this as long as it remains submerged in a soft nationalism, and fails to see that it was born in a movement that was profoundly internationalist, and that this internationalism stemmed from its vision of the working class as a class that would abolish itself by abolishing all forms of human oppression.