Workers World Vol. 19, No. 15
April 7 – The euphoria exuded by the ruling press here over the electoral results in India and the ouster of the Indira Gandhi regime is beginning to dissipate even before the new administration there has had time to settle down. The loud cheers in Congress, the White House, and the capitalist press over the election results were not for the proclaimed “democracy” in India but for a new and enlarged role for U.S. plutocracy on the Indian subcontinent.
The congratulatory resolution which was introduced by Senator Moynihan in Congress and so loudly applauded was in the usual spirit of imperialist hypocrisy. If the U.S. government were really concerned about the fate of the Indian people, it would at least have introduced an accompanying resolution to cancel the vicious anti-India Long Amendment.
Very few people in this country know what this is all about. The capitalist media have done little to publicize it. The Long Amendment was enacted in 1974, long before Gandhi instituted the repressive Emergency Decrees. Its purpose was, among other things, to deny India low-interest loans from the World Bank which as is well known is dominated by the U.S.
At first glance it might seem that not much of an issue is involved in this matter. Senator Hubert Humphrey characterized the purpose of the amendment as “a message to India to drop dead.” Humphrey, as a capitalist politician, is not prone to harsh invective in these matters and is more inclined to measure his words, particularly in a case of such importance.
It is well understood that the measure was broadly aimed at the economic strangulation of India. The original intent of the measure was supposedly in retaliation for India exploding a nuclear device without first getting U.S. permission. In reality, however, it was an economic squeeze play to pressure India into an anti-Soviet and pro-Western direction. It is to be noted that no retaliatory measures were taken against, for instance, France or Britain for their nuclear explosions.
Even if the anti-India amendment were to be cancelled, which it may be, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the Carter-Lance-Blumenthal triumvirate who manage the capitalist state’s monetary and fiscal affairs are about to open wide its purse strings to the Indian government. (It’s another matter altogether what position a revolutionary, working-class party in India should take on accepting or rejecting any assistance.)
Be that as it may, the anti-India measure as it was enacted illustrates how far the U.S. went in trying to jettison the Gandhi regime, not because of its dictatorial or repressive measures, but because Washington sought a fundamental, pro-Western orientation from the Indian government.
An example of how the anti-India Long Amendment works is dramatically illustrated by the way the U.S. has approached the problem of malaria, a considerable one in India. There were over 100,000 cases of malaria in 1963. By 1975 it had reached the staggering number of 4 million. The Agency for International Development (AID), a State Department organ, estimates that there were 8 million cases last year! No estimates were given of how many deaths were involved.
The U.S. has an abundance of pesticides and drugs which are useful in the fight to control malaria. However, the imperialists have held up financing pesticides and drugs for India for longer than a year and even now the impediments bottling up funds for the drugs have not been removed, despite all the cheering for the new administration (Washington Post, March 31).
But more ominous developments in the field of foreign affairs have already gone ahead even at this early stage, and these could scarcely go unnoticed in New Delhi. A front-page headline in the New York Times announces that the U.S. Navy is rushing “to complete work on [the Diego Garcia] Indian Ocean Base.” This is a matter of grave concern to India and could scarcely be regarded as a very friendly gesture in the light of India’s opposition ever since the U.S. began constructing this base in secret several years ago.
No less significant was Washington’s announcement two days earlier that it was not only continuing military aid to Pakistan but actually hurrying it up. This obligated the new Foreign Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to express “concern” (New York Times, April 5). The military hardware being shipped to Pakistan of most concern to India is the A-7 jet fighter-bomber and other equipment.
Why the indecent, shameless haste to make this two-pronged military move in the face of professed renewed friendship? In the light of the Carter administration’s announcement just last week that it was trying to inaugurate a policy of reducing military sales abroad and cutting the arms race generally, why the rush to finish the Diego Garcia base and why the hurry with the jet bombers to Pakistan?
Along with these expressions of U.S. foreign policy, one must also take into account Washington’s view of the new Desai government’s domestic program. In the first important address to the nation, Prime Minister Desai unveiled a “gigantic task” for India in which is envisioned the ending of poverty on the subcontinent within ten years. This, of course, is a tall order for any bourgeois government.
But such programs are in disrepute of Washington and Wall Street today. The watchword is austerity. The U.S. has adopted a hardline, severe austerity program, not only at home, but even more so abroad, and is vigorously pushing it. It therefore must view with disdain the kind of post-election promises indulged in by Prime Minister Desai.
It is well-known that since 1971 60 million more Indian people have dropped below the poverty level (Wall Street Journal, April 4). The prospect for Indian capitalist development on an upward curve is dismal, as it is everywhere in the capitalist world. Inflation and repressive anti-labor measures have taken a huge toll for a considerable period, since long before the Emergency Decrees and even the economic crisis which has engulfed the entire capitalist world. It is likely to continue to take a much more severe turn in the underdeveloped parts of the capitalist world in the coming period.
India is likely to loom larger and larger in the arena of world affairs and the calculations of Washington are bound to become more and more focused on the future of the Indian subcontinent, even though now it is much more preoccupied with southern Africa and the Middle East. To understand the U.S. role in India, it is well to bear in mind that American finance capital has regarded itself as the legitimate heir to the disintegrating British empire ever since the beginning of the Second World War.
Churchill is reported to have said that he did not become the King’s first minister so he could preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. But he had no choice in the matter. Neither had his successor, Prime Minister Clement Atlee.
The anti-imperialist struggle, which was gathering momentum before the Second World War and took on monumental proportions thereafter in all of Asia, made it a certainly that the Indian people would at least achieve an end to their colonial status with Britain.
There was sadness in Washington when the Union Jack was finally pulled down and the Indian colors raised. The sadness, however, arose from Washington’s inability to immediately step in as the successor in interest to British rule over the subcontinent.
Even in the early 1920s, when the resistance to British imperialist rule was already in full swing, the popular sympathy for India that was beginning to arise in this country was in sharp contrast to the sordid motivation that U.S. finance capital was counting on: that is, to step into Britain’s shoes. Ludwill Denny’s book, “American Conquers Britain,” which demonstrated how the U.S. finance capitalists had by the late 1920s already taken over Britain’s imperialist interests in Latin America, also by implication posed the question of the U.S. prospective role in India.
Thus, all the U.S. presidents, beginning with Roosevelt and up to and including Carter, have consistently viewed themselves as virtual trustees in bankruptcy to the assets of the British empire, that is, to the colonial booty. However, events went way beyond the original anticipation of the State Department and Pentagon planners following the Second World War.
Things didn’t go the way Washington had thought they would. The anti-imperialist revolutions in all Asia, indeed the worldwide struggles of oppressed peoples everywhere, made it quite impossible that a huge country like India would become an easy prey and a vassal state in the spirit of the old colonialism. Non-alignment in foreign relations became the watchword with many of the newly developed and newly emancipated colonial countries. The Indian government was one of its strongest proponents.
Of course, as a permanent diplomatic and political conception, non-alignment becomes fictitious. It avoids the realities of the global character of the contemporary class struggle, which is worldwide in scope.
Non-alignment as a diplomatic policy, however, has been violently opposed by the U.S. government. To John Foster Dulles, non-alignment was an “immoral concept” and he relentlessly and viciously fought any and all in his own State Department who in any way lent lip service to tolerating it. He castigated them as “crypto-communists,” along with his attacks at the time against Nehru, Sukarno, and Nasser.
It would be no exaggeration to state that during the 30 years of the existence of Indian independence the U.S. has carried on a now secret, now open, political, diplomatic, and economic war against the Indian government. That the Indian bourgeoisie ruled through a bourgeois democracy during all these years, except for the period of the Emergency Decrees, did not enter as a factor into the formulation of Washington’s policy vis-à-vis India. There were also periods of collaboration, as during the Sino-Indian war in 1962. Again, this didn’t in any way change the fundamental orientation of U.S. foreign policy toward New Delhi.
Logically, it would seem that the U.S. ruling class, which so jubilantly embraced the election results in India, will now quickly turn a new page in U.S.-Indian relations, But this, as is already seen even at this early date, is a deception of American public opinion. The concern of the U.S. government is not now and never was over the form of state rule that the Indian bourgeoisie exercises over the Indian workers and peasants. Not at all. Brazil, Chile, and Indonesia, among others, bear grim witness to this.
The great concern first of all in Washington, as we have stated in a number of articles in these columns, is the foreign policy orientation of the new government and the prospects to enlarge the role of American finance capital in India. But this carries enormous risks for U.S. imperialism because India is such a huge country and this is a period of worldwide revolutionary struggle. It is interesting that the New York Times and the Washington Post, who are the principal advocates for American finance capital and who are never shy to give immediate prescriptions for any new government on the globe on how to run its affairs and what it ought to do, have been rather slow with their admonitions to India on foreign as well as domestic policy. And no wonder.
It is fear of getting dragged in, or rather of being lured in, by the insatiable appetite for super-profits, which permeates the more sober sections of the summits of American finance capital. Massive infusion of capital for quick profits, assuming that will be permitted, will heighten and aggravate all the contradictions of Indian capitalism. It will deepen the very profound economic woes which are presently afflicting the Indian subcontinent.
And the greater fears of the U.S. monopolists and especially of their political watchdogs are that the political consequences of an aggravation of the social conditions in India will most surely be laid at the door of the U.S. government. Sooner or later U.S. imperialism will become the target of the attacks, more than ever.
Probably no one outside of the Pentagon and the CIA knows how deeply the U.S. government may be involved with the current Indian administration. We can only surmise. But the new CIA director has affirmed the necessity for overt as well as covert operations, and if these are proper enough in countries from Chile to Italy to Portugal, why should India be exempt in their view?
Thus, Washington, while sending effusive congratulatory messages on the election, has nonetheless been careful not to make any new moves to repeal old legal encumbrances of an economic and diplomatic character as far as India is concerned, without first seeing in action what the new government will do for U.S. imperialism.
Prime Minister Desai has promised “genuine” non-alignment. But the word “genuine” in the U.S. has been interpreted to mean at least a tilt away from the USSR and perhaps a revision of the India-USSR Treaty, if not its scuttling altogether – in the say way Sadat of Egypt earned his spurs with the American bankers and industrialists.
India, no less than China, is bound to play a great role in the shaping of the destiny of humanity. The efforts of the Indian possessing classes, who are intimately linked to the metropolitan imperialist countries, are directed toward holding back the Indian people and acting as all other exploiting ruling classes have done in the centuries gone by.
India cannot raise itself to its full stature as long as the incubus of bourgeois private property continues. At the core of it all lies the exceptionally powerful grouping of industrialists, bankers, and merchants who have burgeoned since independence. Any new kind of expanded role by the U.S., either deepening and extending its economic penetration and /or trying to reorient India’s foreign policy and make it subservient to U.S. world imperialist objectives, will only end in a catastrophe for the Indian bourgeoisie and the U.S. ruling class.
The Indian socialist revolution has too long been delayed. The efforts of American finance capital and those of the Indian ruling class to stave it off will be of no avail.
In the new era which is unfolding on the heels of the revolutionary developments in southern Africa, a revolutionary upsurge in India would positively change the face of the earth.
Last updated: 11 May 2026