India is a pretty grim place for the vast majority of its millions. It is good to note that they — at least some of them — retain a wry sense of humour. Which they demonstrate by using the above punning title for the radio station “Voice of India” and thereby show they know only too well that Mrs. Ghandi, with her Congress buddies, exercises a pervasive influence on the affairs of the sub-continent.
Her second name is as confusing as her first. She is not related to the Mahatma, “the naked fakir” as he was called in the days of the British Raj. He conducted the “Civil Disobedience” campaigns which helped to establish the movement which eventually brought the joys of independence to India. But when the goal was achieved and the British got out after the war (they couldn’t get out fast enough. The great diamond of the British crown was by then a hopeless burden, and Attlee’s government got out so fast that they almost made sure that there would be the most appalling massacres of Sikhs, Moslems, etc. to celebrate the coming of “freedom”), when this took place, Ghandi himself did not take over the reins. He was by then thoroughly disillusioned himself, and was shortly to be murdered. The boss of the show was then and up to his death (natural causes, this time), Pandit Nehru, Ghandi’s lieutenant, a wealthy darling of the British left and father of Indira, who in the fullness of time, inherited his wealth and power. And, of course, his impudent nerve in calling himself a socialist.
When we see how slowly the majority of workers the world over learn the facts of capitalist life and the need to end the system and establish a worldwide classless society in its place, we can take comfort in the fact that there must be magic in the very name of Socialism. Even if it is used up to now only to cloak the hideous reality of capitalism, there are many rulers who realize that the time has come to pay lip-service. (It’s true that the other side of the coin is that many workers, seeing what passes for Socialism or Communism, must shy away from the very idea. You can’t win ’em all.) One thing sure, is that many countries which masquerade as Socialist seem to prove their point by the most naked repression of the working class. A few years ago, when the Polish dockers in Danzig and Stettin were faced with sharp rises in prices of necessary commodities and decided that they simply had to go on strike, they were mown down by Communist tanks. More recently, when the workers of Cairo, realizing that after they had performed their deeds of heroism in the teeth of the wicked Israelis they were still living at the bottom of the social pyramid, decided to demonstrate in the streets, their guardian of Egyptian “socialism” President Sadat followed suit, sent the troops in and flung hundreds of workers in gaol. And Indira Ghandi shows that she is of the same vicious stuff. Despite the alleged gentleness of the Indian nature, and despite the fact that she had learnt her “socialism” and her "democracy” from her leftist father who in turn had learned it at Harrow — no starving peasant he — when the railwaymen found that the pressures were too great and the prices too high (it’s the same the whole world over) and decided to strike, Madam Prime Minister lost no time in using troops to flatten the strikers and bang those who fancied standing out into prison.
It should be noted that Mrs. Ghandi took this step in a country which is nominally a democracy and where freedoms including the right to strike are supposed to be taken for granted. In proper police states, there is no such pretence. The place for strikers is not the picket lines but the gaol or the cemetery. So after a long campaign for the glories of Ghandi’s Swaraj (home rule), and after much sacrifice in achieving it, the Indian workers, like so many others who have not appreciated the socialist warning about the trap that is nationalism, find that their own beloved native rulers treat them as badly as the hated imperialists (or even worse).
But perhaps the way the masses are now treated in India by their rulers can be best illustrated in all its horror by a matter concerned with cricket. A certain love of this game is one of the legacies which the British left behind them. When Test matches are played there are enormous crowds and thousands watching TV in shop windows, though it may well be that most of the millions in the villages, eking out subsistence, neither know nor care about cricket. But a worker in a dreadful town like Calcutta will find the prospect of a day watching a game played by white-flannelled players on green grass the equivalent of a package fortnight in Majorca. It is also relevant to mention that in the latest Test team there was only one player (and he the son of a groundsman) who was a normal worker. The rest were upper-class university types who could afford to belong to clubs and pay for clothes, bats etc.
During the winter India were playing a touring side from the West Indies. And at the same time large areas of the country were suffering from famine so that thousands were literally starving. This latter problem was up for debate in the Lokh Sabbah when something happened. The MPs in a body refused to consider the debate until they had got their allocation of Test match tickets (this is one of the perks with the job). One MP was quoted as saying: “We come for Test match tickets and you offer us famine.” The sheer brutality of this attitude is probably unparalleled anywhere as a public utterance. Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” is nothing at all — and she never even said it. But these MPs are elected ostensibly to look after the interests of the masses whom they allegedly represent. And the salaries that these heirs of Ghandi draw are incredible in any circumstances but utterly unbelievable in the context of peasants having an income of less than £100 a year to keep their families (some as little as £20 a year). The MPs draw £20,000 a year — plus Test match tickets. Imagination boggles at what Indira must get. Not that she needs the money. She’s all right, Pandit.
This is the pattern in all the countries where the glories of Independence have been won. The grab-all tactics of the Kenyan socialist Kenyatta and his family ought to be a scandal — but it is commonplace throughout black Africa. And as in India, the masses of workers who were duped into the struggle for nationalism, are rewarded with the merest pittance while their native rulers wax fat. Possibly with the issue of nationalism out of the way, the workers will begin to see a little light and think about the real issue, which is their class position in society.
L. E. Weidberg
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