Workers of the World...

An article in The Hindu recently caught my eye. A man named Thomas Isaac was exhorting Kerala’s trade unions to protest the Indian government’s laggard issuance of monthly rice supplements to poor families. The majority of these families, who were slated to receive 2 kilograms of rice per month, earned income from manual labor, farming and fishing. Isaac was quoted in the article as saying, “Agitations and protests should be launched by the working class for their rightful demands including pensions and other pecuniary benefits.”

Nothing would be particular noteworthy about this story, except that Thomas Isaac is Kerala’s state Finance Minister. Imagine a government official in America openly encouraging labor unions and poor people to strike. Instead of authoring the auto bailout (which was controversial enough), imagine if US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had instead called for Ford workers to picket in Detroit.

Yeah, right.

Yet, Isaac’s call for ‘agitation’ passed as page-five news in The Hindu. His comments were presented as rather uncontroversial in the context of the article, which focused primarily on the government’s latest poverty figures.

Though I got a chuckle from the article, I was not necessarily surprised. For India has an entrenched, long-standing acceptance of what may be called—for lack of a better term—socialism. It was Jawaharlal Nehru himself, India’s first and still most revered Prime Minister, who said in 1936, “I am convinced that the key to the solution of the world’s problems and India’s problems lies in socialism.” Nehru became famous after Independence for relying on strictly regimented Five-Year Plans that mapped out in sometimes excruciating detail the goals and mechanisms for India’s economic development and growth. (The Five-Year Plans were eventually dropped in the early 1990s by then-Finance Minister Manhoman Singh, who is now India’s Prime Minister.)

Furthermore, the Communist Party of India has been around in some form or manifestation since the 1920s and has been the dominant political force in the two states in which Jenna and I have spent most of our time in India: West Bengal and Kerala. Hammer-and-sickle graffiti is apparent on nearly every block in Tirur (as it was in some parts of Kolkata), and it is common to see political banners projecting the stern faces of Lenin, Stalin, and Che Guevara.

Americans, in general, have a deep distrust for this type of iconography and understandably so, considering the Cold War’s legacy and the US’s founding ideals of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’—ideals that strike to the core of our very individualistic spirit. Capitalism has always been the name of our game and, except for diversions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, nothing much has changed that mindset

But Indian politics comes from a different place. The long struggle for freedom, which ended in 1947 but began with the founding of the Congress Party in 1885, was always couched as a mass movement of the poor and working classes of India against the ‘benevolent’ autocracy of British rule. Gandhi himself believed all of India’s industry should be indigenous and communal. In a more radical turn late in is life, he even banished the idea of private property. Nehru, of course, espoused socialist ideals from his youth, maturing as he did during a time when the Russian Revolution was still judged a remarkably surprising success.

The great Indian freedom struggle hit its nadir in the late 1930s just before war broke out in Europe. Anti-fascist tendencies easily melded with socialist beliefs as Hitler and Mussolini exerted their will from Dunkirk to Stalingrad. Bipan Chandra says in his book India’s Struggle for Independence, after 1935, there was a “consistent and militant anti-imperialism” among India’s elite political leaders and their followers. “The organization of workers and peasants in trade unions and kisan sabhas (farmers’ councils) led to the acceptance of a socialist vision of independent India.”

For India, the tradition of socialism is not, like it is in America, about the destruction of private enterprise and the dissolution of individual entrepreneurship. Socialism in the Indian tradition is a response to imperial domination and a willful statement of communal rights in the face of oppression.

As uncomfortable, then, as it makes my American sensibilities, I can place the hammer-and-sickle graffiti in context now. And I no longer feel the need to scoff at the Che Guevara imagery. And I no longer chuckle when I read of a government official urging the working class to ‘agitate’. All of it, oddly enough, makes sense in the proper context.