Prime Minister’s Speech on 15 th August:

Selling the old lie that capitalism can eliminate poverty

In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has given the call for a “war on poverty” to be unleashed alongside the “war on terrorism”. This is the second time that the Congress Party is advancing this slogan, 35 years after Indira Gandhi unleashed the great fraud of ‘garibi hatao’. The Congress Party seems to think that it can fool the people again and again with the same lie – that capitalism can be made to provide for all.

Following the end of direct colonial rule in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the head of the Congress Party at that time, had declared that every tear from the face of every Indian would be wiped out in independent India. He presented state monopoly capitalism to the people in the name of a ‘socialistic pattern of society’. This was the beginning of the project of defrauding the people and blocking the road to revolution and socialism. By the 1960s, people could see that it was capitalism that was growing, producing enormous wealth at one pole and multiplying poverty at the other pole.

The great fraud on the Indian people, initiated at the time of Nehru, was raised to a higher level when his daughter Indira Gandhi unleashed the slogan of ‘garibi hatao’, as her government nationalised banking in support of capitalist expansion in agriculture in the name of Green Revolution. This expanded the home market for Indian industry and further enhanced the wealth and domination of the big monopoly houses.

Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union the Narasimha Rao regime, in which Manmohan Singh was the finance minister, blamed all the ills of the economy on the ‘socialistic pattern’ and called for liberalisation and privatisation. They claimed that this would accelerate the creation of wealth, which will ‘trickle down’ to the workers and peasants over time. The BJP led governments continued and accelerated this course, in the name of ‘second generation reforms’.

Today it is clear that capitalist reforms have further aggravated the social divide between the exploiters and the exploited. A higher level of integration of Indian and international capital has been achieved. This has led to an acceleration in the rate of capital accumulation in the hands of Indian and foreign capital. At the other pole, unemployment and super-exploitation stare in the face of millions of working families, and incidents of peasant suicides continue to expose the deepening agrarian crisis.

In his speech on 15 th August, 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had to admit that the benefits of capitalist reforms have not trickled down as he had promised 15 years ago. It has led to rapid growth of incomes for some, and to poverty and misery for many. After admitting these facts, he has declared a ‘War on Poverty’ alongside the ‘War on Terrorism’!

The ‘war on poverty’ slogan of Manmohan Singh is in tune with the latest catch phrases being promoted by the World Bank. The approach paper to the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, which was recently released by the UPA Government, and the latest World Bank Report on India, called ‘development policy review’, both talk of ‘inclusive growth’ as the key challenge facing India.

‘Inclusive growth’ is the illusion that policies can be fine tuned to ensure that all classes benefit from capitalist growth. This big lie is the basis for once again fooling the people, and making them accept that there is no alternative to capitalism. And the ‘war on terrorism’ is to ensure that those who dare to resist the capitalist reform program and the imperialist course of the Indian bourgeoisie will be brutally crushed.

As long as the bourgeoisie remains in power and the economy remains capitalist, it will produce wealth at one pole and poverty at the other. Old slogans will be reinvented and recycled by the bourgeoisie, to prolong the life of the capitalist system.

However, life is not a never-ending cycle that repeats itself. The crisis of capitalism is deeper today than it was 35 years ago. The Indian bourgeoisie is bigger than before and is rapidly pursuing its imperialist aims. The experience and consciousness of the victims of this system, the workers and peasants, has also advanced in this period. In their hands lies the key to lift India out of the vicious cycle of bourgeois rule through repeated frauds and through brutal repression.

A new element has already emerged on the Indian political scene, which is the program of the workers and peasants to take political power in their hands and reorient the economy to serve the needs of all. It is this program that can and will eliminate poverty, by putting an end to capitalism and all forms of exploitation of one person by another.