Some state investment summits do hold promise
Kerala’s Communists had blocked capitalist growth after freeing the people from pre-capitalist shackles that impeded growth, and now they seem to have realized their error
Some state investment summits do hold promise
Assorted state governments have been holding investment summits, where chief ministers declare their unstinted support to new business ventures, assorted businessmen turn up to declare their investment plans for the state, and sign memoranda of understanding, hope for a paradigm shift in the local business-smothering culture floats at the venue of the summit, like an evanescent puff of perfume, the assembled scribes write up positive stories, and then, once the photographs have been taken, and the motorcades carrying visiting dignitaries have wound their way to the airport, everyone departs the site of synthetic euphoria, climbing down to their habitual elevations above the mean sea level, back to the principal occupation of humdrum survival.
It is easy to be cynical about these investment summits. Perhaps, it is time to cut them some slack, even those of West Bengal, which had sent the Tatas’ Nano car venture packing from the state, or of Kerala, with its history of ideological disdain for capitalism, and proclivity for sporadic, politically enforced bouts of state-wide paralysis of life and activity, meant to lodge some protest or the other.
Towards the end of its 34-year-long continuous rule of West Bengal, in 2007 and 2008, the Left Front had realized that the government had to do something to create jobs for the people -- not that the people loved the Communists’ revolutionary slogans and songs any less, but that they valued livelihoods more. The government decided to acquire 40 sq km of farmland in Nandigram to set up a special economic zone (SEZ) for chemicals, and 4 sq km of land in Singur to set up the Tatas’ prestigious small car project.
Steeped as they had been a culture of rule by diktat, the idea of taking the people whose land would be taken over for industrial projects into confidence did not enter the Communist leaders’ haloed heads. When land is not just the primary but the only source of livelihood, for a farmer to lose land is to lose his and his family’s future. Without offering any certainty as to future livelihoods, the government proceeded to use the power of the state to forcibly take over of land from farmers. This led to huge and sustained protests that ultimately scuppered the Bengal Communists’ foray into development as temporary detour from the march to revolution.
It is remarkable the Left parties that ran the government lacked any kind of emancipatory imagination, to generate solutions such as leasing the land from the farmers, instead of stripping them of ownership, so that lease rentals would provide a steady stream of income, and once the project got completed, the farmers could realise the appreciation in land values by selling the land to the project at a premium.
The Communists were voted out of power, and the leader of the farmers’ protest movement, Mamata Banerjee, formed the next government. Now Banerjee’s government holds these investment summits. The government has had the sense to prepare land parcels for industrial projects in assorted industrial parks spread over the southern districts.
Kerala’s industry-friendly metamorphosis is even more striking, and credible to boot. Thanks to social reform movements at the dawn of the 20th century and subsequent organisaion of the people by the Communists, including through sustained agitations to implement land reforms, and to recognize and realise their democratic rights as citizens, Kerala has been ready for modern economic growth since the 1960s.
While most Indians remained de facto subjects, as they had been in the erstwhile colonial regime, even after becoming citizens de jure, the people of Kerala trod the land as empowered individuals who expected their government to deliver meaningful education, healthcare and general governance.
In the 1940s, the literacy levels among the castes that constituted agricultural workers in Travancore, one of the three regions that were merged to form Kerala in 1956, equalled the literacy levels of the general population of United Provinces in the North. Since then, the gap in social development between Kerala and the rest of India has widened.
In 1960, Kerala had social development indicators roughly equal to those of South Korea. South Korea embraced capitalist development, albeit under authoritarian rule till the late 1980s, and has grown into a technologically advanced, rich country. Kerala’s Communists had total hegemony over the state’s social agenda, and all other political parties were iterations — some more wholesome, some less — of the Communists. Communists saw capitalism as a crisis-prone, exploitative, anti-people system whose proper place was the Arabian Sea, rather than their own strip of tropical beauty.
Unfortunately, all industrial growth, even if led by the state, would necessarily be capitalist, in an economy in which direct producers sold their labour power for a wage. Enmity towards capitalism translated into enmity towards the growth of enterprise and industry, even as Communist-led governments sought to invite private investment to take advantage of the state’s natural resources, like rubber, for making tyres, and bamboo, for rayon.
Trade unions insisted on bonus and wage hikes unrelated to the viability of the enterprise, and rivalry among the unions affiliated to different political parties discouraged accommodation of economic reality. So, in spite of having a workforce that has been literate for generations, has trained in a reasonably efficient school system, is capable of critical thinking, and eminently amenable to being skilled and reskilled, Kerala never witnessed the kind of prosperity that South Korea was able to build.
The Kerala Communists ideological opposition held the state back from realizing the potential for capitalist prosperity the Communists themselves had created through democratisation. Other parties nourished the process via competing on a shared playing field. The Communist disdain for capitalism survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China as a full-fledged capitalist economy, albeit with a totalitarian party at the helm, as living proof of the gains to be reaped from broad-based participation in globalised growth.
This is what appears to have changed. While their official party programme perseveres with sterile Stalinism, democratic competition has forced their practice to accept reality. All economic growth is capitalist growth. The people of Kerala have been partaking of, and enriching, capitalist growth in other countries. The Communists seem to have realized that what is good for expat Keralites working abroad can be made better at home, by promoting capitalist growth in Kerala.
Five decades of social stagnation, since the completion of land reforms and organizing people in all walks of life into unions that enforce their rights, has led to social decay and schism.. Only a paradigm shift in culture and ideology, involving the collective embrace of entrepreneurship, innovation and prosperity, can take Kerala’s society forward. To stagnate further is to erode the gains the state has made in democratization.
If this realization motivates the state’s investment summit, it would, indeed, lead to tangible gains, for the state, and for India.