In India and abroad, socialism is back

Readers of this newspaper may not have noticed, but we are now living in a pre-1989 world. In fact, in a pre-1970s world. Globally, capitalism is considered a dangerous conspiracy that is certain to impoverish a country, and authoritarianism is viewed as permissible in the pursuit of national interests. And, above all, socialism is back.
 
I happened to be, this week, in the town of Brighton on the southern coast of England. Brighton is a picturesque resort, with much to recommend it — including the Pavilion built by the Prince Regent in the early 19th century, an early exercise in the blending of Western and Indian styles that gave us the buildings of Lutyens’ Delhi — but this week it was also the beating heart of revolution. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn had descended on the town for its annual conference, and Corbyn himself declared the era of “21st-century socialism” open. A party spokesman even refused to answer, several times, if the British economy would look recognisably capitalist once Corbyn was through with it. The Labour leader — unchallenged in his party now that he has “won” an election against Theresa May, who, Corbyn’s followers have failed to notice, is somehow still the British prime minister — outlined a programme far more sweeping than in Labour’s last manifesto, a programme that included widespread rent control, sweeping nationalisation, tax hikes, grumbling about business and all the rest of it.
 
Over in Germany, the Social Democrats, long in coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, have emerged as the biggest losers in the latest parliamentary elections; because, some argue, they are too similar to Merkel’s party and have little “social” to offer. And in the United States, over the past month, the Democrats have revealed that they have been so spooked by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 insurrection that not a single potential presidential candidate is willing to take the self-professed “democratic socialist” on.
 
Perhaps we should go easier, then, on our own homegrown, swadeshi socialists — by which I mean not the discredited rump of the Parliamentary left, too weak and divided even to keep their supposed leader in the Rajya Sabha, but the ones who rule almost all our big states and the Centre. Prime Minister Narendra Modi ran in 2014 claiming — at least to those who wanted to hear it — that he was a Thatcherite reformer but now sounds like a Vedic socialist. Perhaps that simply shows his desire to stay current with global trends. Either way, public investment, industrial policy, state-owned banks, trade scepticism, contract cancellations, tax terrorism, bashing the rich — they’re all back, a return to the Indira Gandhi economic vision that proved so fruitful for our development. Like Corbyn, who grafts a nod to the digital future onto a 1970s programme, the “New India” programme depends on mingling modern technology with distinctly antique thinking about government’s place in economic development.
 
It isn’t hard to see why all this is appealing. The 2008 financial crisis was a blow to the popular legitimacy of capitalism; an even greater blow was governments’ response to it, which in India consisted of bailouts and loan extensions and tax cuts for companies. Almost 10 years after the financial crisis, the mistakes of the past are finally coming home to roost. And, of course, the longer the government of the People’s Republic of China staves off its own crisis, the greater legitimacy state management of the economy achieves.
 
This context allows the argument to proliferate that free-market capitalism defends only the powerful. The enthusiasm for old ideas was visible everywhere in Brighton this week; socialism was cool. We in the rest of the world ignore this appeal at our peril. The notion that Modi, because of his political gifts, might serve as a unique political champion for reform in India must give way to the possibility that those very gifts might cause him to sense that greater political energy might be unleashed by a commitment to state-led development.
 
It helps, of course, that many young people have no memory of the time when socialism was a shibboleth for many mainstream parties across the world. None of Corbyn’s followers remember the 1970s, the troubled decade that gave birth to the Thatcherite reactionaries; and given how young a country India is, the proportion of voters here who remember the grey pre-1991 economy are even fewer. The dominant thinking on the subject is, of course, that if anything went wrong in the past, after all, it was because of the personal failings of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and not because of the policy choices of the establishment.
 
Our next general election is not too far away. Modi has already staked out the ground on which he will fight. Rahul Gandhi’s Congress has made it clear that it will fight him to his left, and not from the Centre — the noise the Opposition made about petrol prices made that clear, and it was also the subtext of Gandhi’s speeches abroad. Socialism is back, apparently, and we will just have a choice between its dynastic and Vedic varieties.

m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma