Progress and setbacks in tropical Asia
India, a country with twice the population of Europe, has been to the polls. As it is a capitalist country seething with harsh social inequality, our media have been crowing about the good sense of this, ‘the largest democracy in the world’.
Democracy? Almost half of the farmers in this nuclear power are without electricity, and hundreds of millions of workers survive on less than one euro a day while the number of Indian billionaires gets larger every year.
We clearly have different ideas of democracy…
India’s citizens have thus been to the polls, and we may draw a few conclusions from the results:
1) The right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) –
ultra-free market and fiercely anti-Muslim to the extent of conducting pogroms
– was rejected by voters, obtaining only 116 seats (out of 543): thirty-two
fewer than in 2004.
2) The Congress Party, a sort of Indian-style social democracy, benefited from
the right-wing extremists’ loss of credit; its secular views won it 206
seats, and the United Progressive Alliance, which it led, gained a total of
262 seats, just short of a majority in the lower house of Parliament: the legitimate
fear of an ethnic or religious civil war carried more weight with public opinion
than the ruling centre-left party’s support for US strategy in Asia and
its special measures for capitalists.
3) This tactical voting explains why the Indian communists and their allies
(80 seats) made no gains and sometimes even suffered losses, unsettled by growing
unemployment (and economic growth declining from +9% in 2007 to + 5% today)
and the return of many migrants from their jobs in the Gulf states.
This lacklustre business will not end with the ‘victory of India’s good sense’, as the French daily Le Monde put it. With a recession that is hitting Indian workers hard, and with active trade unions and communist parties, the future government of the centre – pro-free market and pro-US – will not be able to do exactly it wants.
Another country in the region has just witnessed a crucial event: Sri Lanka’s coalition government (including communists) has at last, by force of arms, crushed the rebellion of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). This separatist movement – whose manifesto is limited to a Tamil state covering the north of the island and part of India and physically cleared of non-Tamils and opponents – has for thirty years possessed an army well equipped with artillery, planes and ships thanks to funds from Western powers and money extorted from the diaspora in the USA, France, Britain, etc. An ideal means of bringing pressure to bear on nearby China and progressive India, this movement has in recent months been abandoned by its sponsors in Washington under Obama’s new policy: hence its defeat, which is an appreciable victory for the progressive movement in the Far East.
Kouchner’s pseudo-humanitarian nonsense will make not the slightest difference: the former ‘French doctor’, in his new vocation as champion of NATO, has been doing his utmost to guarantee the Tigers’ survival among the Western diaspora; it’s an old habit of his ever since the time of De Gaulle when he supported the Biafran rebels against the central state of Nigeria. What is more surprising and shows ignorance, to put it mildly, is for the General Secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF) to persist in saying that ‘the military victory by government forces offers no real answer’ and that combatants must negotiate ‘a just political solution’!
Taking this standpoint, we should have called for negotiations with the killers of Claude Érignac [prefect of Corsica, shot in February 1998] rather than condemning their crime, thus giving them democratic legitimacy, although they are no more representative of Corsicans than the Tigers are of Tamils. Why not also support the rebels in the Niger Delta who want all the oil revenue for themselves? Should we also have negotiated the future of Germany with Hitler in 1945 just because the conquest of Berlin could lead to deaths?
Francis Arzalier