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The Indian Express
July 18, 2005
MANMOHAN SINGH AND COLONIALISM
Prabhat Patnaik
Why should one concern oneself with what Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh had to say at Oxford on the
occasion of his receiving an honorary D.Litt? Not
just because he is the Prime Minister. True,
what the Prime Minister of India has to say
even on such a
quasi-academic occasion is not without significance.
But then Prime Ministers’ speeches are often drafted
by overworked speech-writers who are liable to make
the most appalling howlers; so one does not get
worked up over speeches made on such
occasions. The reason one has to take Manmohan
Singh’s speech seriously is because, apart
from being the Prime Minister, he also happens
to be the leading neo-liberal intellectual in
the country. His speech is not an example of a faux
pas committed by some speech writer working against a
deadline. It is an indication of neo-liberal thinking
on the subject, and since the thinker is also the
Prime Minister, it is an indication of the shape of
policy which Manmohan Singh and others like him would
like this country to follow.
But
what, it may be asked, is wrong with his speech?
He talked after all of the deleterious economic
impact of colonial rule in India. And as
regards his suggestion that modern
universities, a professional civil service,
research laboratories, “rule of law” and “a
free press”, all of which “we still value and
cherish”, were the result of India’s meeting the
“dominant empire of the day”, hadn’t Karl Marx himself
talked of the dual impact, including a “regenerating”
one, of British rule in India? Indeed Manmohan Singh
himself, or his staff, may well cite Karl Marx in his
defence in the coming days if the furore over his
speech begins to snowball (as the editorial in The
Hindu on July 13 has correctly anticipated). One may
not even be surprised if Marx increasingly gets
dragged, over the coming months and years, into the
defence of the neo-liberal argument as a whole, since
many in the neo-liberal bandwagon, not just here but
in Washington DC as well, had begun their careers as
Marxists of some description. It is imperative, right
at the outset therefore, to rescue Marx from such
possible abuse.
India did not “meet” the dominant empire of the day
(as Mamohan Singh’s quaint phraseology suggests).
India was conquered and colonized, her economy
plundered, and her people as a whole, irrespective of
class status, converted for the first time into
inferior beings in their own country. Now, whenever a
materially superior mode of production subjugates an
inferior one, it simultaneously brings to the latter
advanced methods, technology, and practices. It does
so not out of kindness or compassion or any humane
feelings of sharing but as a fact of historical
inevitability, independent of its own specific will
and consciousness in the matter. The Spanish
conquistadores decimated a large segment of the
Amerindian population when they entered the New
World, but at the same time brought to the
victims the use of gun powder and firearms,
not because they specifically
willed to do so but as a matter of historical
compulsion. When Marx was talking about the
“regeneration” of India having begun under British
rule, he was referring first of all to the fact that
the material premises for India’s advance were being
laid down, though the actual advance on the basis of
these premises could be realized only by the Indian
people themselves after they have thrown off the
colonial yoke; and secondly, he was emphasizing the
fact that British rule was the unconscious agent of
historical change, even while it was “dragging
individuals and people through blood and dirt,
through misery and degradation”.
To
call this role of British rule in being an
unconscious tool of history even as it “drags people
through blood and dirt” an act of “good governance”,
a benign arrangement whose virtues even the
subject people of India had apparently
recognized and articulated during their
freedom struggle, is not just an objectionable
statement, but represents a basic
confusion between the historical and the moral. “Good
governance”, to the understanding of any ordinary
mortal (matters are different for neo-liberals as we
shall see later), presupposes an intention on the
part of the rulers to be “good”, which they
carry out in
practice. But every act of the British that was
historically progressive in India, whether it is the
laying down of the railways, or the founding of
universities or the creation of a politically unified
India under Pax Britannica, was meant to serve
rapacious colonial interests.
The bureaucracy was meant to provide the “steel frame”
of a colonial State whose primary objective was to
siphon off surplus from the Indian economy in the
form of commodities that Britain could make
use of. The universities were meant to provide
the training ground
for recruitment into this bureaucracy, and more
generally into the ranks of an intelligentsia
subservient to colonialism and acquiescing in colonial
exploitation. The railways were meant to bind India
firmly into the colonial division of labour. (Even
Ian Macpherson, a Cambridge economic historian
of no radical inclinations argued many years
ago that the
main purpose behind the building of the railways was
the extraction of raw materials needed by Britain).
And
Marx who was so hopeful about the role of the
railways in the “regeneration” of India, repeatedly
also referred to the railways as being “useless” for
the Indian people.
This paradox, of something vital for the
“regeneration” of a people being at the same time
“useless” for them, illustrates the distinction
between the “historical” and the “moral”. The fact
that railways would help the regeneration of the
Indian people was a historical inevitability; at the
same time it was also a fact that the railways were
built by the British for their own selfish interests
and not for those of the Indian people for whom they
were “useless” when they were built. Not to see this
distinction, to telescope the concept of
“historically progressive” with the concept of
“morally desirable” is the first basic flaw in
Manmohan Singh’s argument. The second basic
flaw consists in glossing over the
“blood and dirt” mentioned by Marx. Precisely because
colonialism was not all about “doing good to the
Indian people”, precisely because even its
historically progressive consequences were the
unintended consequences of a fundamentally rapacious
regime which dragged people through “blood and dirt”,
which unleashed famines killing millions (and
congratulated its functionaries that tax collections
in the famine-stricken districts had been kept up to
the mark), which unleashed de-industrialization and
unemployment on a massive scale, and whose
dispensation squeezed the peasantry to a point where
the agrarian economy witnessed unprecedented
retrogression; precisely for these reasons, to
emphasize essentially its historically “progressive”
consequences (quite apart from the fact that these
consequences themselves are mistakenly interpreted as
following from a benign will) is utterly illegitimate
and callous. To be sure, Manmohan Singh referred to
Angus Madison’s estimates showing a sharp decline in
India’s share of world income over the period of
colonial rule, but that estimate per se says nothing
about exploitation: it is silent for instance on the
question of whether India merely grew more slowly
than the world, or whether India retrogressed
when the rest of the world grew.
Of
course, Manmohan Singh was speaking on an occasion
when a degree of diplomacy had to be exercised and
hence a litany of complaints against colonialism did
not have to be provided. But diplomacy cannot excuse
glossing over exploitation; and if mention of the
latter had to be eschewed then there was no need for
giving colonialism certificates for “good governance”
either.. Indeed Karl Marx’s writings on British
colonialism, imbued as they are with a deep sense of
history, are nonetheless full of a deep sympathy for
the suffering of the Indian people, which one fails
alas to find in Manmohan Singh’s speech.
All this, as mentioned in the beginning however, is
not an oversight or a slip of judgement. It is a part
of neo-liberal thinking in which the concept of
“governance” is detached from exploitation. A
ruthlessly exploitative regime according to this
thinking can still earn kudos for “good governance”.
So, when Manmohan Singh praises the colonial regime
for “good governance” he is actually being true to
neo-liberal thought. We have so far seen why Manmohan
Singh’s arguments should not be defended on any
allegedly Marxian grounds. Let us now look at his
argument as a sui generis representation of
neo-liberal thought.
There are two basic premises of neo-liberal thought.
First, no matter what the degree of inequality in
society (which is a euphemism for exploitation), if
the economy grows rapidly enough then the benefits of
this growth are bound to “trickle down” to the lowest
level, from which it follows that the focus of
attention should be on growth and not inequality (read
exploitation). Second, the way to promote growth is
by creating the appropriate conditions for
“enterprise” to flourish. And these include
appropriate infrastructure, a set of
well-defined bourgeois property rights, a
legal system to enforce these rights (“rule of
law”), political unity and stability, freedom
and ease of movement of resources and capital,
an efficient bureaucracy providing the right setting,
and above all free markets. All this is captured
under the rubric of “good governance”. It is a
part of the logic of this thinking that “good
governance” is detached from the fact of
exploitation. Even a regime under which there
is rapacious exploitation can be legitimately
congratulated for providing “good
governance” and the case would be made that with such
“good governance” the edge of exploitation would bet
blunted anyway.
Now,
there can be little doubt that the colonial
regime built railways, introduced posts and telegraph,
created a bourgeois legal system, created private
property in land and other assets, and introduced
free markets to a point where no country in
the world can
claim to have witnessed over any period in its history
as much of a regime of free trade and free markets as
colonial India prior to the first world war (matters
changed a little in the inter-war years under the
triple impact of the Great Depression, the rising
National Movement, and the declining position of
Britain in the world economy). It did so for its own
purposes, to further the exploitation of the Indian
people. But to a neo-liberal it must represent “good
governance” Indeed Manmohan
Singh’s argument in a curious way
supports what the left has been saying all these
years. We say that neo-liberalism is a means of
recolonization of the economy, of opening up our
country to intensified exploitation by imperialism
and its local collaborators under a new
international
regime, which is reminiscent of the old colonial
order. Manmohan Singh vicariously agrees with this:
we oppose neo-liberalism because it recreates
the horrors of colonialism; he denies
(implicitly) the horrors of colonialism
because he supports neo-liberalism. His
Oxford speech should serve to convince all who are
skeptical that the struggle against neo-liberalism is
but a continuation of our struggle for freedom. |