DESPITE images of spinning wheels and his ambitions for national self-sufficiency through the development of cottage industry and promotion of rural economy, Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the independence movement, nonetheless envisioned a capitalist state as the future of India. It was not perhaps to be a capitalist order as cruel and violent and unjust as the British colonialists, or as many wealthy Indians, wished to inflict, but it was capitalist.

By contrast, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s chief aide, wanted to construct a prosperous modern society shaped along socialist lines. Nehru played along with the wishes of his revered mentor only to ditch his philosophy as soon as he was assassinated. Taking power, Nehru commenced to industrialize the economy, mainly through the somewhat frayed model of Soviet central planning.

India, unlike the USSR, was intended to have a mixed economy — much like Western European democracies at the time — but one with a large public sector. Nehru was responsible for laying the foundations of education and economic policies of India as well as its independent foreign policy which resulted in making India what it is today.

Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi increased this public sector by adding banking to its fold. It is difficult to run a system without extensive control over lending and also over capital controls. Her son Rajiv Gandhi maintained the dominant public sector policies along with an independent foreign policy. But economic fashions, stemming from Reagan’s US and Thatcher’s UK, took hold.

The last Congress prime minister, Narasimha Rao, broke from Nehru’s economic policies in the 1990s when he started incorporating more “free market” elements of western capitalism, which, if he thought they really operated as in college textbooks, he deeply misunderstood. Western capitalism has always been about unprotected markets for you and rigged or protected markets for me. A so-called Indian entrepreneurial class was clamouring for a change, whatever the cost to everyone else.

Since the early 1990s, as the economic sector opened up, changes in India’s foreign policy become starkly apparent. At home widespread suicides among small farmers are one sad result of the policy shift. Yet, inasmuch as a strong strain of political and economic independence was embedded in the Congress party culture, it took some time to erode its foundation.

The Indian economic elite has been knocking on the door of the American free market ideology for 15 years. Now Bush junior happily administered the coup de grace to Nehru’s India in the course of inducting the eager country as a loyal member of the American global empire. The ‘Indian street,’ however, did not welcome it and mass protests broke out all over the country. These outcries were sneeringly dismissed in BJP circles as the death throes of a dying breed of slackers and obsolete economic agents. Then the BJP got the surprise of its existence when it was dumped at the last election.

During Bush’s recent visit one witnessed angry demonstrations all across India. Only yards away one noticed during a protest march, one of the most important keepers of the public good and social conscience, Arundhati Roy, who was on the streets of Delhi distributing posters asking Bush to go back not just to the White House but to his ranch in Texas and spend the rest of his life safely clearing bushes or pretending to.

When Bush with his massive force of minders and security arrived, prudent planners decided that it was the better part of valour for Bush not to address the parliament since he likely would face hecklers whom his security guards would not be authorized to remove or arrest — as is the case everywhere he goes to in the United States, where he is kept safe from any sign of dissent or discontent. American civil liberties are not what they used to be.

The traditional venue of the Red Fort was out because it happens to have a large Muslim population in the neighbourhood. So the only place which afforded him the customary cocoon of security was the old fort built by 15th century Sher Shah on the ruins of one which belonged to the Pandvas. It also happened to be the abode available for Muslim refugees who fled their homes in Old Dehli during the communal riots in 1947, and who from there departed for Pakistan. The irony is that the most powerful leader of the world, in order to avoid the Indian masses on Delhi’s streets, found himself in the same refuge. From the fort, Bush left for Pakistan after addressing a selected few.

In the words of Arundhati Roy, who takes the measure of the real values that Bush wants to spread and impose, “what is very, very worrying is that if you look at the record of countries that have cooperated with America, that have entered that embrace, most of them have been incinerated.” She said, “I am not talking about the First World but look at Africa, and Indonesia, Latin America, see what happens.”

Roy omitted to mention Pakistan whose sufferings have been so obvious in the last two decades because of its relationship with the US. Pakistani leaders are quite critical and jealous of this new relationship of India with the US. They do not see what costs India will incur by joining the club

After Rao’s “market-friendly” administration, the BJP government followed his policies with greater, unchecked zeal, with the slogan of “India shining”. As it happened, India boasted several shining cities which were coincidentally well favoured by government policy, not just entrepreneurs, so as to draw in jobs from some service sector industries in the US and Europe. But away from these favoured urban areas small farmers suffered terribly once deprived of pre-globalization protection. The BJP lost the last election precisely in those wider areas where India was supposed to shine.

Only Manmohan Singh, an acolyte of America and of free trade nostrums, now pursues BJP’s rejected policies remorselessly. The closer he comes to the United States the more he destroys the political culture and values of the Congress party, and which among other things, were close to Iran’s interests. Now India supports America against Iran. Singh is heading a coalition with the support of the Left which, in the larger interest of secularism, still supports him although unhappy with his domestic and foreign policies.

Recently commenting on the signing of an agreement between Bush and Manmohan Singh, Hashim Abdul Halim, speaker of the West Bengal assembly and chairman of the Commonwealth parliamentary union, said though it is historical in its own way, it threatens to be danger in further boosting the US and guaranteeing its interference in India’s nuclear programme. He feels that this agreement besides giving an opportunity to the US to interfere in India’s nuclear programme also creates suspicion between India and Pakistan which have been coming closer.

An equal partnership with America is an impossibility. Pakistan should know it. The sad truth is that it must be unequal and that India will have to be subservient to American interests in the area. The only bright side is that America is promoting peace between India and Pakistan, in its own interest that will be good for Pakistan as well if this comes about.

But there is a distinct danger that if the Indian-left can stomach no more and resumes pursuing policies in the overall interest of the Indian masses, it will break up the current coalition. In that case, the rightwing in the Congress may try to join hands with the BJP with the backing of the Americans. As the Indian middle class and the moneyed Indian diaspora — the financers of the BJP — is so enamoured of the USA they are blind to the virtual civil war already going on in the Southern and eastern States.

There already are areas that are under the control of rebels. One may call them Maoists or Naxalites or give them any handy dismissive or discrediting name but they are capturing the imaginations, and expressing the bedrock interests, of the deprived. No state government, for instance, has done more for the masses then the CPIM of West Bengal but even they are feeling strong pressure in some areas of their province.