Why the BJP doesn’t care about job losses and unemployment.

5 years and 2 months into the reign of the BJP Govt and the only stark observation that has hit an avid observer is how the criticisms of jobs and arrested to declining development of the economy is simply water off the duck’s back to the BJP. After nearly half a decade of what seems to the normal observer as failures at Economics, one must wonder whether it is not a failure but actually a solid ideology at work here.

One need only look at our northern neighbour, China, here. What was once described as an Economy on a revisionist and doomed track has clearly demonstrated itself as being anything but an economy that is doomed to failure. This criticism from the Left, almost 20-30 years ago is now slowly being modified to make it appear that the very clearly Capitalist mode of production that is practiced in China is, Capitalism being used to further Socialism – this is up for debate and knowing the Chinese, one will never really know the truth; however, we do see the results and that appears to ratify the theory of Capitalism used to further Socialism. Of course, why the Global Left isn’t comfortable calling China, “Capitalism with a Human face” is intriguing. But, if we can free ourselves of nomenclature and ideological burdens, then we see economics for what it is. The takeaway from China in all that has been said is that there is a method to what might, at times, seems like madness.

In the Indian context, there have been three phases, thus far, of economic ideology: the planned market economy, the neoliberal model, and now the Post-Neoliberal Indian model. Clearly, the only good period for the economy has been the neoliberal period with its massive growth spurt and couple this with the fact that there was some form of a social security net, there was some trickle down that lifted the masses but almost permanently disabled a Revolutionary Left movement from ever being a viable alternative. That side project being completed, of eliminating the biggest threat to the Bourgeois democracy, the subsequent years of development could now focus on ensuring the accumulation of wealth to the Bourgeoisie. It was toward the end of 2014, that this project started crumbling and inevitably, with a stagnation of incomes and opportunities. The post-2014 scenario was when the new paradigm shift began. What was this shift? The shift clearly is to seemingly modernise existing industry to shift away from Production to Services, from Agriculture to Industry, and finally to transform Labour into a Service sector scavenger rather than a value producer.  

This would tie in very well with the 5-year long slump in Job creation for the Nation and the Government not really giving a damn about it. The ideological bent of the economists in govt here is to change the Indian worker from one that works in a factory to one that is either working in a start-up industry, tech, or in the so-called Gig economy. The government clearly also realises that such a transition is one that takes decades to implement and will inevitably run into a phase of high unemployment in the interim; as jobs in the new economy, firstly, don’t really exist and secondly, the industry itself is not big enough or aligned to high employment. This is of course a problem of Neoliberal economic ideology, where the reality and material conditions of the world are ignored, and the focus is more on a Utopian end objective. It is even further incompetence on the part of a Govt to continue to follow a Neoliberal model that has already been proven to be a failed economic system world over.

In some other innocuous ways, we also see the policy of the destruction of the Indian Baniya Class or the Petty Bourgeois class along with the Hindu Middle Class. This would seem counterintuitive as these are the sponsors and core support bases of the Hindu fascist right; however, both these sections of society are also those who have stopped India from achieving any form of progress. The Petty Bourgeois in India were supremely powerful in influencing policy and trade decisions in India. Ironically, this proved to be a certain barrier against the worst effects of Globalised American Imperialism. This is a problem for the Corporations and the highest echelons of the Bourgeoisie. Thus, with the BJP as a party that is now run almost exclusively by corporate funds and not petty bourgeoisie funds, has thus trained its guns on its erstwhile baniya support base. Retail FDI was one danger that was taken too lightly by everyone and today, it is no mystery that the likes of Amazon and Walmart have a good ability to end Baniya hegemony of Indian business in a decade.

The Hindu Middle Class is much more complicated. This class has traditionally been very opinionated, are getting larger in number and are not supine enough to allow being ridden roughshod over. Thus, the attack… on the middle class incomes, employment, welfare, and infrastructure began. Labour unions and worker collectivisation is almost a crime in many states in India thus ensuring that the Middle Class cannot be heard when they scream. This was not done in 2014 but rather way before when liberalization began. The entire ideology of the middle class thus changed to pander to an alienated, class-unconscious, numbed population. 2014’s fascist turn of the Hindu Middle Class was an exercise in the shift from Class consciousness to Reactionary, Ethno-Religious Nationalism. De-jargonised, this basically meant that the urban, Hindu Middle class was now chugging on the opium of bigotry, casteism, bloodlust, to ensure that no matter how much they were economically whipped to death, they stood by the very govt that was whipping them. This movement will continue and it will achieve a critical velocity after which it cannot slow down. The middle class will then start to eat into its own and fracture and fragment, become sectarian to the point where they weed out the infidels among them.

The big question is where does all this end? If one was to sketch out a picture it will  be one of where the Lower Classes in agriculture have all migrated to the cities for sustenance thus forming an army of the Unemployed to ensure that wages are perpetually low, agriculture will be corporatized, industrial might will not only be in the hands of the few but it will also be in the hands of foreign capital, unemployment will mostly remain at the levels you observe today because 10 years of any aberrant phenomena become a material reality in India, and eventually the so called Indian growth story will eventually die off like it has for nearly every developing country. The misery of today will stagnate where we have the growth of an African sub-Saharan nation or a member of east European nations, but without the labour mobility.