A dear friend of mine from USA sent me this mail regarding the demonetisation in India.
Look at Boston. If we can do this, so can people in India! Mobilize, I recommend!
This is my reply to her.
Dear EM,
Yes, this exactly what India need. I wrote that in my last article too https://countercurrents.org/2017/01/01/modis-new-year-eve-speech-what-comes-next/
Unfortunately, I don’t see it coming, not in the near term future. That’s the sad plight of India.
There are several reasons for this.
- India is deeply polarised, much more than USA with the Trump shadow looming large
- The larger than life figure of Modi still is still appealing to a large section of the people.
- Modi & Co succeeded in the initial propaganda of pitching demoentisation as a fight against black money and corruption and it still sticks with major part of the public
- The Media has been bought over, co-opted or coerced that it is largely innocuous. Result, there is no counter mechanism to fight the Govt. propaganda
- The opposition is largely divided like the Weimar republic. One-upmanship, political opportunism , clear lack of leadership and vision
- Modi propaganda succeeded in dividing the society in ‘class lines’ ie pitching demonetisation as a fight against corrupt rich (simply glossing over the fact that it is prescribed by the neo-liberal elites to aid the super rich and big corporates and implemented with fascist ruthlessness which stunned even the neo-liberal masters) and a major section of the people believe in this lie and secretly smiling believing that the rich will be suffering now. Many middle class people I talked to showed this tendency, many media reports also suggest similar behaviour of the middle class and even poor.
- In India it takes a lot of time for information to percolate down especially because large portion of the people are illiterate or semi-literate and the literate media consumers are targeted by the propaganda machine 24 X 7.
- India is a diverse federation of states with so much linguistic diversity loosely held together by the Nehruvian concept of ‘India’. The Modi government is trying hard to destroy the federal structure and force upon it the fascist monlithic Hindutva ‘Nationhood’.
- India is a caste ridden and highly hierarchical society. It takes a mammoth work to unite these diverse sections of the people. It becomes even more hard since the main sufferers of demonetisation are the lower castes and the decision makers are the upper castes.
- Civil Society groups are being silenced and destroyed by the current government. Even political parties are witch hunted and silenced. A growing climate of fear grips India.
- There is a certain kind of lethargy to the Indian society. It is slow to wake up to reality. Even Gandhi emerged after 400 years of foreign occupation and rule
In this context I don’t see any united political opposition emerging as in Venezuela or Boston.
Yes, a Gandhi like figure may emerge, I can see it happening only after the tsunami has been hit and the dead are counted and buried.
Even when Gandhi was in the highest of prowess India buried over 6-7 million people in Bengal who died due to British induced hunger. https://countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm. Sadly the two British induced Bengal famines of 1770 (which killed an estimated 10 million people) and the 1943 Bengal famine which killed an estimated 6-7 million people are not even in the footnotes of Indian history. And that is India for you!
LIFE IN INDIA IS CHEAP, DAMN CHEAP
Warm Regards
Binu
Binu Mathew is the editor of www.countercurrents.org . He can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org.
