Introduction
Modern India’s relationship with the capitalist world economy has been through three broad phases. First, British colonialism ruined a flourishing textile industry in India and converted the country into a source of raw materials for its own manufacturing industry, forcing India into the position of a colony subordinate to an imperial power. Second, the post-independence Indian National Congress (hereafter Congress) government embarked on a process of industrialisation in an economy that was heavily protected though not completely cut off from global capital. The third period, globalisation and neoliberalism, is usually traced to the economic liberalisation of 1991, when India began a process of re-integration into the world economy
This chapter will sketch an outline for each of these three periods, introducing the social forces and struggles that could constitute the basis for moving forward from neoliberalism to an economy where production is for need, not profit, and working people control their lives and work.
The colonial period
Between 1850 and 1900 the British rulers over India built more than 25,000 miles of railways for their own purposes. In doing so they introduced the industrial processes necessary to maintain the network and hired tens of millions of workers, mainly through Indian contractors resembling Marx’s description of petty capitalists. Larger capitalists and more stable workforces developed in various industries, resulting in the formation of a capitalist class and a proletariat, both of which were relatively well developed by Independence in 1947 (Hensman 2011: 32-33, 36-37). Partly in response to workers’ struggles over wages and working hours and partly in response to English textile manufacturers who feared competition from an unregulated Indian textile industry, the British colonial government introduced the first Indian Factories Act in 1881. The Act was amended and strengthened due to continuing struggles. Other labour legislation was also passed, including the Trade Unions Act (1926) and the Industrial Disputes (ID) Act (1947) (Hensman 2011: 95-97).
This legislation provided protection to a section of the labour force but discouraged collective bargaining. The Trade Unions Act allowed for the registration of unions; however it neither required employers to recognise and negotiate with them nor prohibited the victimisation of members by employers. The ID Act made it mandatory for unions to give strike notice two weeks before embarking on industrial action, during which period compulsory arbitration could be imposed. The legislation also created a sharply segmented labour market. For example the Factories Act (revised in 1948) – which provided for registration of employers and employees and covered working conditions, working hours, the prohibition of child labour, and so on – did not apply to workplaces with electric power that had fewer than ten workers or those without power that had fewer than twenty. Most other labour laws likewise omitted these workers as well as agricultural labourers, who thus constituted an informal labour force, deprived of legal recognition as workers and denied protective legislation. Although the Trade Unions Act did apply to them, in practice it proved almost impossible for them to form or join a union without losing their jobs (Hensman 2011: 97-100).
Colonialism created a large proletariat, but it was internally divided by gender, caste, ethnicity and religion. During the nineteenth century, Indian social reformers such as Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule emerged, who were influenced by radicals like Thomas Paine, and fought against the extreme oppression of women, girls, lower castes and ‘untouchable’ castes (now known officially as ‘Scheduled Castes’ and self-identified as Dalits) in India. These reformers inspired a younger generation, the most famous of whom is B.R. Ambedkar, himself a Dalit, who chaired the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly after Independence. Dakshayani Velayudhan, the only Dalit woman in the Constituent Assembly, fought for the rights of Dalits, women and workers.
While British rule allowed the emergence of movements for the emancipation of women and Dalits, it also saw the emergence of extreme right-wing organisations, both Hindu and Muslim, which in the 1920s and 1930s drew inspiration from Italian and German fascism. Their unchecked growth and activities resulted in the catastrophe of partition (1947), in which an estimated one million people were killed and fifteen million were displaced. Its toxic legacy remains till today, with right-wing Hindu organisations persecuting Muslims and other minorities in India, right-wing Islamist organisations in Pakistan and Bangladesh persecuting Hindu and other minorities, a continuing hot-cold war between India and Pakistan, and Kashmir claimed by both. The right-wing, Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was banned temporarily after Gandhi was assassinated by Hindu extremists in 1948, but later survived and spawned a large and growing ‘family’ of organisations (known as the ‘Sangh Parivar’). Their goal is a Hindu rashtra (Hindu nation-state), and the political ideology that inspires them is known as Hindutva (not to be confused with the Hindu religion). One of the main rivals to the Congress Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is a member of this family.
The Indian developmental state
For the post-Independence Congress government, the main task was state-planned industrialisation, including electrification and the development of heavy industry. In pursuit of this goal, state authorities employed a variety of means to encourage foreign investment in technologically advanced sectors like oil refining, electrical engineering and pharmaceuticals, and Indian private sector investment in less capital-intensive manufacturing industries. Protective tariffs, import restrictions and currency control led to a withdrawal of British capital and Indian takeover of their concerns. With the Second Plan (1956), the state began building up heavy industry despite US opposition, obtaining collaborations with German and British private capital, the Soviet Union, and East European countries. After drastic import controls were imposed during a foreign-exchange crisis in 1957-58, foreign companies in technologically advanced sectors formed joint ventures with Indian companies to gain access to the protected market. By the 1960s, the state had partially taken over many services formerly provided by foreign capital, including electric power, transport, banking and life insurance, and production of key industrial inputs like coal, and the trend continued (Hensman 2011: 36-38).
The Congress’ vision of development included a measure of social justice, and for the Congress Left this meant strong union rights. An upsurge in the labour movement after World War II strengthened this section, but as the upsurge subsided, the Congress Right, which supported domestic business, gained in strength. In 1950, there was an attempt to pass a new Trade Union Act requiring compulsory recognition of representative unions by employers, collective bargaining, and protection from victimisation for trade union activities, along with a comprehensive Labour Relations Bill to replace the ID Act. But these were opposed by the ministries in charge of railways, defence establishments, and posts and telegraphs, and lapsed in 1951. Former trade unionist V.V. Giri became labour minister in 1952 and tried to reintroduce the bills, but again encountered opposition.
Millions of informal workers continued to work for the public sector as well as private enterprises. Policies encouraging informalisation were enacted by the Janata Party when it won the elections in 1977, and were continued by Indira Gandhi when she came to power again in 1980 (Hensman 2011: 101-104). Agricultural workers too were overwhelmingly unorganized. Together with marginal farmers, who could not survive unless family members engaged in wage-labour, they constituted a large and growing majority in the countryside. Rural class conflict was exacerbated by the fact that most agricultural labourers were Dalits. Their attempts to organise and claim their rights challenged the caste hierarchy, and were therefore met with the utmost brutality: rape, massacres, and the torching of entire villages.
By contrast, permanent employees in the public sector enjoyed employment security, which was extended to large enterprises in the private sector by the introduction of Chapter VB of the ID Act in 1976, stipulating that permission had to be obtained from the government before employers could close down establishments or dismiss workers. Job security enabled these workers to form strong unions, bargain collectively, and win benefits like health care, paid leave, and retirement benefits. Affirmative action in the form of job reservations in the public sector enabled a small section of Dalits and Adivasis (tribals or indigenous people) to share these benefits.
Meanwhile, the provision of social security and welfare for vast numbers of working people outside these sections remained abysmal. Vastly overcrowded public hospitals in cities offered in-patient and out-patient services, but even these were unavailable in most parts of the country. State schools left out millions of children, many of whom were engaged in child labour. Loss of employment could throw workers into destitution. The only universal welfare measure was the Public Distribution System (PDS), which provided rice, wheat, sugar and kerosene at subsidised rates. Although migrant workers and the homeless were excluded by the requirement for an address, and corruption was widespread, it provided a safety net for many who might otherwise have starved.
The worst victims of this model of development were the tens of millions displaced by large dams, mines, and infrastructure projects. The 2012 report of the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN estimates that 60-65 million have been displaced since Independence, over 40 per cent of them Adivasis and another 40 per cent Dalits and other rural poor. The colonial Land Acquisition Act (1894) was used by the post-colonial state to dispossess these people of their homes and livelihoods, supposedly in the interests of ‘public purpose’. Even where compensation was considered, it was only for the owners of land; the vast majority, who were landless, received no compensation. Despite sporadic resistance, a development agenda resting on large-scale involuntary dispossession continued in full force.
In Bombay, the most industrialised city in India with a strong presence of women in its workforce and unions, a case against the ‘marriage bar’ (dismissal of women workers when they marry) was taken up and pursued to the Supreme Court level, where it was finally won in 1965. Struggles for equal wages, maternity leave and childcare were fought and won in the formal sector, but unions had no counter-strategy when employers retaliated by ceasing to recruit women (Hensman 2011: 214-217). This revealed a more general failure to fight against discrimination, which also affected Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis, and for equal opportunities legislation (Hensman 2011: 132-137). In 1979, a Supreme Court verdict acquitting two policemen who had raped a tribal girl, Mathura, sparked a huge upsurge of protests from women and the birth of the autonomous women’s movement in India. A partial overhaul of the obsolete rape laws inherited from British rule was one result of the movement, which also branched out to tackle other forms of violence and discrimination against women and girls.
While the performance of the Indian economy from Independence to 1991, with its absence of major famines and average growth rate of around 3.5 per cent per annum, was incomparably better than the zero to negative growth rate and famines that killed millions during British rule (Drèze and Sen 2013: 2-3), informal labourers and the displaced, who constituted the overwhelming majority, continued to be disempowered in significant ways. Permanent workers in the formal sector were able to form powerful unions, but were increasingly under attack by employers from the late 1970s. The 1980 industrial policy encouraged subcontracting and offered incentives to companies to relocate production from unionised workforces in cities to non-unionised workers in greenfield sites, thus helping employers to smash some of the strongest unions.
Globalisation and neoliberalism in India
The most significant changes came after 1991 with the liberalisation of international trade and capital flows, which intensified with India’s accession to the WTO in 1995. The Indian capitalist class was split between sections who had mismanaged their businesses for decades and could not survive in a more competitive environment, who opposed liberalisation, and more aggressive corporate groups, like the Ambanis, who realised that the future of Indian capital lay in its ability to operate with global economies of scale and access global capital markets. The latter backed neoliberalism, not least because it brought about a wave of privatisations (in oil, telecom, financial services, and so on), of which they were the main beneficiaries. Indian GDP growth accelerated after 1991, crossing 9 per cent between 2005 and 2008 before declining after the global crisis, and even then remaining second only to China (Drèze and Sen 2013: 4, 19). The income of the wealthy and the new consumerist urban and rural middle classes (the top 20 per cent) increased considerably after 1991. However, for the rest of the population there was little improvement in income levels (Ibid 29-32). Consequently, inequality increased massively.
Liberalisation unleashed a wave of corporate restructuring. Industrialists complained that India’s ‘rigid’ labour laws obstructed this process and needed to be ‘reformed’. They campaigned against laws and regulations that provided job security to permanent workers and prohibited the employment of contract workers to do permanent jobs considered part of the core activities of an establishment. Their excuse was that these provisions interfered with ‘flexibility’. Yet the way in which industrialists used informalised labour suggested that their real reason was to deprive workers of their union rights by removing obstacles to dismissing them if workers tried to organise. The industrialists’ campaign reached its peak when the National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP was in power from 1998 to 2004, and came to a halt after the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power. Under the UPA, other policies were explored, such as the provision of generous subsidies to businesses in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) (Hensman 2011: 110-112).
Although India’s labour laws were not changed, the changed industrial relations climate, in which state institutions and the judiciary were overtly pro-employer, allowed informalisation and the denial of union rights to proceed. The case of the Manesar automobile plant of Maruti Suzuki India Limited in Haryana, where 75 per cent of the workforce consisted of precarious workers paid roughly a quarter of the wages of permanent workers, illustrates this. The first attempt by workers to form an independent union in 2011 failed because the Labour Commissioner refused to register it and management forced union leaders to sign letters of resignation under threat of imprisonment and torture. A second attempt in 2012 succeeded, according to leaders of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Union (MSWU), because Deputy General Manager for Human Resources Avanish Dev helped them with the registration. The MSWU submitted a charter including the demand that contract workers should get the same pay and benefits as regular workers. On 18 July, while union leaders were arguing against the suspension of a Dalit worker who had protested when a supervisor abused him in casteist terms, there was fighting in the factory, a fire broke out, and Avanish Dev was later found dead. Some 147 activists – many of whom were not in the plant at the time – were accused of murder, arrested and jailed. Another 546 permanent workers and 1800 contract workers were dismissed. A year later, as the International Commission for Labor Rights reported in Merchants of Menace: Repressing workers in India’s new industrial belt, neither the criminal investigation nor the labour dispute had made any progress.
The use of contract workers for permanent jobs and victimisation of union activists in such a large plant are prohibited by law, yet the state government not only colluded with management, it went further and arrested and jailed workers on false criminal charges. Haryana is only an extreme example of generalised state collusion with informalisation and union-busting in the post-1991 period. It is not surprising that wages stagnated while workers fought to retain minimal control over their work and employment conditions.
Sexual harassment of women at work, always rampant in the informal sector, was taken up by women’s groups in a sustained manner in 1992 after a social worker in Rajasthan, Bhanwari Devi, was gang-raped for opposing child marriage and the rapists were acquitted. By 1997, the Supreme Court had issued guidelines for tackling sexual harassment at work. The Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill became law in 2013. Bhanwari’s struggle for justice had emboldened other women and girls to fight against forced marriage, sexual assault and domestic violence, but it also illustrated the backlash that struggles against the oppression of women and girls could provoke. The caste equation in the countryside changed, with upper castes moving out and backward castes becoming the main perpetrators of atrocities against Dalits (Teltumbde 2007). Several cases of so-called honour killings demonstrated the brutal backlash against young people whose marriages defied traditional caste norms.
The universal PDS became a targeted one in 1997, with a higher subsidy for Below Poverty Line (BPL) recipients than for those considered above the poverty line, who were effectively eased out of the system by 2001. This resulted in even greater exclusion errors than before. The scandal of starvation deaths in 2001 while granaries were overflowing inspired the Right to Food campaign. It scored several victories, including the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) (2005), which promised 100 days of employment per year building public works for each rural household at minimum wages. If the state was unable to supply work, it was obliged to provide unemployment benefit. Implementation proved enormously difficult due to the hostility of local vested interests. Wherever it was made to work, the recipients (a large proportion of whom were women) benefited, and local agricultural wages went up (Hensman 2011: 246-250). The Food Security Bill (2013) pulled together and expanded existing government schemes, promising subsidised foodgrains to 75 per cent of the population, food for pregnant and lactating women and children aged six months to six years, maternity benefits, and mid-day meals for schoolchildren aged 6 to 14 years.
At 1.2 per cent of GDP, India’s public expenditure on health is among the lowest in the world, with public health facilities extremely limited and often very badly run. The National Rural Health Mission, launched in 2005-6, is a promising initiative, and in 2011 the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage recommended free health care for all, yet funding for public health care continues to be grossly inadequate. Instead, the trend is towards schemes like the Rashtriya Swasthya Bhima Yojana, in which the government pays the insurance premium for BPL families to enroll with private insurance companies to be treated in government and private hospitals (Drèze and Sen 2012: 148-152). Apart from the exclusion of many who cannot pay for private health care, such schemes also result in several distortions. For example, by privileging high-cost surgical procedures, they neglect prevention and treatment of widespread diseases that account for more than 98 per cent of illnesses; patients are burdened with out-of-pocket expenses; post-operative complications are not treated; and unnecessary procedures including hysterectomies are common. Such ‘public-private partnerships’ result in public money going into private rather than public health provision, thus moving away from universal health care.
The 21st century has seen much more emphasis on education as a right, starting with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education-for-All Movement) and culminating with the Right to Education Act (2009), which promises free compulsory education to all children between the ages of six and fourteen. Some activists saw this as a significant step forward. However, there were also criticisms of the legislation, which did not pledge to provide good quality elementary state education to all. Rather, authorities required private schools to take 25 per cent of ‘disadvantaged’ students and their expenses to be paid by the government. These steps resulted in a much higher proportion of children having access to schools, yet the quality of schooling remained poor. Even where standards were higher, the emphasis on rote learning discouraged critical thinking. Apart from a tiny minority of elite institutions, these drawbacks afflicted private schools almost as much as state schools (Drèze and Sen 2013: 120-126).
Thus welfare provision remained stunted, partly due to a narrow income-tax base and widespread tax evasion. Given that liberalisation was supposed to end the corruption of the ‘license-permit raj’, it is an irony that black money continued to flourish and corruption was rampant during this period, especially in sectors like real estate, infrastructure projects, mining and telecom. However, the fight-back was also more vigorous, scoring a major victory in the passage of the Right to Information Act (2005).
The anomaly in the Land Acquisition Act (1894), whereby ‘public purpose’ was supposedly secured by massive displacement of the poor, became even more glaringly obvious when the beneficiaries of land acquisition were private businesses and the threat to the environment from deforestation and large dams was better understood. Here too there was increasing resistance, resulting in the passage of the Forest Rights Act (2006). This Act gave Adivasis and other forest dwellers much stronger rights over their habitats. In addition, the new Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (2013), while still allowing for forcible acquisition, put much greater emphasis on consent, compensation and environmental protection than its 1894 predecessor.
All this adds up to a picture that is more complex than pure neoliberalism. Paradoxically, ‘it is precisely during the period of high globalization that civil society campaigns and judicial interventions have placed the right to work, the right to food, the right to education, the right to health and the right to information firmly onto the agenda’ (Chandoke 2013: 155-156). All these initiatives were watered down by opposition, yet their impact has been significant. To find a straightforward example of pro-corporate policies, one needs to turn to Narendra Modi, the BJP Chief Minister of Gujarat, who offered massive handouts to corporate groups, facilitated the displacement and pauperisation of rural working people, led opposition to welfare legislation, and opposed, at considerable public expense, the appointment of an independent anti-corruption watchdog. In Modi’s Gujarat unfettered neoliberalism could triumph because he created a mass base for it through virulent Hindu nationalism and brutal persecution of minorities (Gopalakrishnan 2008). Conversely, sections of the top 20 per cent who were not necessarily Hindu nationalists backed him because he supported their sense of entitlement to the privileges they enjoyed and resentment against subsidies for the poor.
Alternatives in India
No viable alternative can emerge without an all-out fight against caste and gender oppression in India. The backlash against any progress made in the struggle for women’s rights has been ferocious, and concerted opposition to a deeply misogynist culture needs to be taken up within the working class (also see Spronk and Miraglia and Özmen Yılmaz this volume). The backlash against Dalit struggles to improve their lives has been equally ferocious. The failure of Dalit leaders to respond adequately has led a leading activist to suggest that Dalits should turn to class politics (Teltumbde 2007). The enthusiasm with which the Maruti union took up the victimisation of a Dalit worker suggests that the time could be ripe for such a turn.
An alternative would also have to combat the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities without pandering to minority ethnic supremacism or religious fundamentalism. Protection of the environment must also be on its agenda. Finally, it would have to emphasise Marxist understandings that capitalism is inherently global, and can only be defeated by a global movement. The debate in India over a workers’ rights clause in WTO agreements revealed that the Left parties and sections of the non-party Left believe that resisting integration into the world economy is an adequate form of opposition to globalised capital (Hensman 2011: 304-317). In such a context, it is important to reiterate that concrete steps to build international solidarity among workers are essential to an effective fight against global capitalism.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M), the largest party in the Left Front) were in power in West Bengal from 1977 to 2011, but failed to offer any alternative to neoliberal development. Their land reforms helped to consolidate a stable majority, yet the redistribution was neither as extensive as they claimed nor was it consolidated by forming cooperatives. Consequently, landlessness increased from 39.6 per cent in 1987-88 to 49.8 per cent in 2000. Poverty, malnutrition, homelessness, unemployment, health care and education were worse than in many other states. The death blow to the CPI(M)’s popularity was dealt by its violent attempts to displace thousands of farmers and rural workers in Singur in 2006 (to hand over fertile land at concessional rates for a Tata car plant) and in Nandigram in 2007 (for a chemical hub and SEZ) (Banerjee 2007). The Left Front was voted out of power in the 2011 state assembly elections.
The strategy of the CPI (Maoist) is ‘protracted people’s war’ to capture state power, and their main support base has been among Adivasis suffering state neglect and violence. Their programmatic document entitled ‘Strategy and tactics of the Indian revolution’ proclaims that their goal is a ‘new democratic revolution’ against imperialism, comprador bureaucrat capitalism and feudalism. The ‘motive forces’ named in it include the proletariat, landless, poor and middle peasants, semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, with rich peasants seen as vacillating allies and the national bourgeoisie as a revolutionary force requiring protection. Theirs is not, therefore, an anti-capitalist revolution, and this has practical consequences. In a report entitled ‘Mining companies are arming the Maoists’, the Asian Centre for Human Rights showed how the alliance with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ includes providing protection to legal and illegal mining companies, which are displacing Adivasis and destroying the environment, in exchange for money and explosives. Contractors illegally siphoning off funds from NREGA are also protected. The CPI (Maoist), by their own admission, murdered social activist Niyamat Ansari, who was fighting for these funds to reach their intended beneficiaries in Jharkhand. This alliance with rapacious capitalist interests precludes the possibility of building an alternative to neoliberalism.
By contrast, self-organised struggles against displacement have had some impressive victories and could contribute to building an alternative. In an uncanny echo of the film Avatar, the Dongria Khond and other tribal and non-tribal forest-dwellers scored a spectacular success against the mining company Vedanta Resources, which had already received state approval to mine the bauxite under their Niyamgiri hills. They fought the incursion by appealing to their rights under Indian law and to international support for the rights of indigenous people. The legal battle resulted in a Supreme Court verdict requiring village assemblies to make the final decision. In all twelve villages selected by the state government of Odisha for the referendum, the mining proposal was rejected, unanimously and eloquently, by the villagers. This does not mean that Adivasis wish to remain segregated from the rest of society. As activist Dayamani Barla from Jharkhand explained, ‘We should also be part of this development process by getting access to health, education, jobs, etc… We want the polluted rivers to be pollution free. We want wastelands to be turned green… This is our model of development’ (Basu 2013).
Such struggles against mines, dams (the most famous being the Narmada Bachao Andolan), nuclear power plants (Koodankulam, Jaitapur and elsewhere), and so on by local communities which are incompletely proletarianised, with some members self-employed at least part of the time, raise a crucial issue for Marxists: can these struggles become part of a socialist revolution? In one sense the struggles capture the essence of that revolution, being struggles of working people against capitalism and for control over their lives and work. But do the struggles seek to go forward to socialism, or backward to a pre-capitalist era? This is where Barla’s clarification is important. She makes it clear that while they are fighting against dispossession and environmental destruction, they do not wish to remain stuck in the past. It is worth considering whether Marx’s remarks on Russian rural communes in his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich might be adapted to find ways in which these forms of production can, through voluntary formation of cooperatives, ‘turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide’ (also see Radice’s chapter this volume).
In India the trade union movement has survived despite a very hostile environment, but it is disadvantaged by extreme fragmentation and lack of union democracy. A different model is offered by the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI), a federation formed in 2006 by the coming together of independent unions reacting against the domination of unions by political parties or outside leaders. The NTUI thus represents an aspiration for trade union democracy, but also, by contrast with mainstream unions, its charter expresses the determination to fight against all forms of oppression (class, gender, caste, race) and for social security, secularism and democratisation of the state and society. Bringing together urban, rural, industrial, agricultural, domestic, and forest workers as well as formal and informal employees, the NTUI attempts to bridge divisions in the working class and has an explicitly internationalist agenda. An important element in the emergence of the NTUI was the attempt to form workers’ cooperatives, and this remains one of its goals (Hensman 2011: 118-161).
In thousands of struggles across India, goals are set and organisations built by working people in consultation with middle-class activists who contribute their knowledge of English, legal and other skills, and contacts. It would be impossible to bring these groups under a single organization as this would in any case destroy their autonomy – the source of their strength. However, creating a shared (broadly Marxist) critical understanding of capitalism and the importance of working towards an alternative system is a realistic goal. Recognising the need for internationalism would enable Indian workers and activists to see their struggles in a global perspective.
(This is a chapter in Polarizing Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis, ed. Thomas Marois and Lucia Pradella, London: Pluto Press. pp.203-213.)
References
(urls accessed September 2013)
Bannerjee, Sumanta (2007), ‘Moral Betrayal of Leftist Dream’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLII (14), pp.1240-1242
Basu, Moushumi (2013), ‘The Voice of Jharkhand’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLVIII (23), http://www.epw.in/web-exclusives/voice-jharkhand.html
Chandoke, Neera (2013), ‘Globalization and Democracy: The Equivocality of a Relationship’, in Kristian Stokke and Olle Törnquist (eds), Democratization in the Global South: The Importance of Transformative Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.148-169
Drèze, Jean and Sen, Amartya (2013), An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, London: Allen Lane
Gopalakrishnan, Shankar (2008), ‘Hindutva and Neoliberalism: Fascism, Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism’, http://www.academia.edu/251443/Hindutva_and_Neoliberalism_Fascism_Free_Markets_and_the_Restructuring_of_Indian_Capitalism
Hensman, Rohini (2011), Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, Columbia University Press: New York
Teltumbde, Anand (2007), ‘Khairlanji and its Aftermath: Exploding Some Myths’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLII (12), pp.1019-1025