For the past two decades, the working class and people of India have been fed with western bourgeois prescriptions on how the economy ought to be managed.  One of these prescriptions is that banks must not be required to lend to priority sectors like agriculture and small scale industry.  They must be free to deploy funds wherever they please so as to maximise their profits.  This is the advice of the World Bank and IMF, which has been eagerly embraced by successive governments at the centre. 

Today, the western model of financial sector reform stands exposed as a model that serves the speculators and profiteers at the expense of the productive sectors of economy.  It serves a miniscule minority to amass wealth at the expense of the toiling majority.  By following this model, India has become more vulnerable to the manipulations of international financial monopolies and imperialist states.  Even bourgeois economists admit that the only reason India is not as badly affected as, say Indonesia, is because the deregulation and privatisation of the financial sector is not yet complete in our country.

The obvious lesson which emerges from these facts is the need to halt and reverse the dangerous course of financial sector ‘reform’ in the image of the western capitalist countries.  However, those in charge of the government are refusing to draw this lesson.  On the contrary, they want to stick to the same path.  They are taking measures to allow even more space for foreign speculators, in the name of arresting the flight of capital out of the Indian stock market.  Just like in the US and Europe, the government in India is also concerned mainly about protecting corporate profits, not about protecting the livelihood of the working masses.

State monopoly and control over banking and insurance served the ruling bourgeois class in our country very well during the seventies and eighties – to protect the surplus generated by Indian labour from being plundered by foreign capital.  The bourgeoisie has given up that policy since the nineties, and embraced the prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF.  The reason is that this suits the interests of the Tatas, Reliance and other monopoly houses, who have become big enough to plunder other countries.

The crisis of 2008 and the response of those in power point to the need to re-establish state monopoly and control over the financial sector in India, but with a difference. The difference is that the state itself cannot remain an instrument of capitalist and imperialist plunder. What is needed is a state that acts in the interest of the working people – a
state that is committed to provide them with prosperity and protection.

The task of managing the social surplus cannot and must not be left in the hands of parties like Congress and BJP, which do the bidding of the capitalist monopoly houses. The working class and toiling majority must gain control over the enormous natural and human resources, and prevent them from being plundered by Indian and foreign capitalists.  State monopoly and control over finances will then serve to fulfil the needs of the majority, rather than to enrich a minority of profiteers.

What is urgently needed is for the working class to lead the majority of toiling people in a political front to defeat Congress and BJP, and any other party or alliance that wants to stick to the dangerous path of globalisation through privatisation and liberalisation.