 Hello and welcome to Dispatches from India, where we bring you stories from across the country and the developments that impact the present and the future. We are recording this episode ahead of August 15, which marks the 75th Independence Day of India. On that day in 1947, after decades of struggles marked by innumerable sacrifices, the people of India overthrew the British. It was one of the great anti-colonial struggles of human history, bringing together millions of workers, peasants, students, women and members of oppressed communities against the most powerful empire of the world. The newly independent country held out a promise to its citizens, which was codified in its constitution that was inaugurated in 1950. Its promise was of a democracy which would strive to leave behind the divisions of the past and build representative structures that ensured social and economic justice for everybody. Today, 75 years later, where do we stand on some of these promises? We first bring you the view of Subhashini Ali, Politburo member of the Communist Party of India, Marxist, who talks about India's democracy, the rights of the people and the strength of its institutions. Well, of course, it is a great celebration that's happening in our country. 75 years of our independence from colonialism and from colonial slavery of a kind, it is something to be celebrated. But of course, when we look back and think about what the people who are fighting for freedom who sacrificed a lot, what they were dreaming of and what kind of freedom they were envisioning, what we see today is very different. And I think that their dreams have been actually certainly not lived up to maybe we have come after coming some way towards that promised land that they were dreaming of. We now seem to be retreating. So we see three things happening all simultaneously. One is tremendous promotion of hatred against minorities and also hatred against the oppressed castes. And we see tremendous attacks on them and mobilizations against them. Simultaneously, we see increasing immiserization, increasing unemployment, increasing poverty, increasing hunger. We are now the most hungry nation on this earth. We are the nation with the largest number of poor people. We are very, very low on the gender equality index and so on and so forth. And thirdly, we also see the absolutely obscene increase in profits by the leading corporates, especially the two big conglomerations of Ambani and Adani, who have now, despite COVID, they have increased their wealth many fold. And today, Mr. Adani is supposed to be even richer than Bill Gates. So these are the three processes that are underway at a very accelerated pace in our country. And obviously they are taking us further and further away from the dreams of those who fought for freedom, from the, you know, inclusive ideals of the freedom movement. And in fact, the very constitutional institutions that had been created to preserve our democracy, preserve our rights are actually being hollowed out and being destroyed. So that is really the situation in which we are in today, which is not to say that there is no dissent and there is no opposition. There is dissent, there is opposition. And all the steps taken by the government to increase exploitation and, you know, reduce the strength of our democracy are being challenged. But another very, very terrible thing that has happened is the complete takeover of the press by corporates. And in fact, the press, the media has become a spokesperson or a spokes thing of the government itself. It promotes communal hatred. It promotes majoritarianism. And it supports all the attacks made by the government on various institutions, which have been created to preserve and strengthen our democracy. So in this very challenging situation, there is a fight back, there is opposition. The greatest example of that was of course, the farmers movement. And there are, there are movements among the political classes also to try and forge some sort of unity against the ruling party. And also there are movements bringing together many diverse groups, many individuals, many organizations to fight the politics of hate and to fight the attacks on democracy. Even before independence, India had a history of religious polarization and violence. This was often used towards specific political goals. Organizations seeking special privileges for Hindus and Muslims engaged in a game of divisive politics encouraged by the British policy of divide and rule. This led to many deaths and great violence and eventually the partition of India in 1947, which was one of the great man made disasters of the 20th century. However, religious polarization did not end with independence. It continues to this day and is a key weapon of the ruling class. Here is Nelanjan Mukhopadhyaya is speaking about the politics of intolerance in India today. In the euphoria of independence, social justice was not really a priority area. India was coming out of the national movement in which various communities were living. So at one level, there was attempt to ensure that all communities could live together. Most importantly, because of the terrible Holocaust of the partition, there was a lot of deliberation on the social fabric in terms of people with various religious identities living in India. We chose to be a nation where the citizenship would not be determined on the basis of religious identity of people. Now, while in the constitution and in speeches which are made on in India's parliament and in public religious minorities were assured of safeguards and there was also constitutional laws which are for all for providing positive discrimination for what we call the scheduled castes, which means the lowest caste in the Hindu society and the tribals for the indigenous people of this country. So certain reservations were made for them both in the legislature as well as in institutions and in various government-occupied jobs. But we did not really look in terms of the hierarchical Hindu caste order and give preferential treatment to those who were in the lower ranks, not outside the caste completely, but within the caste order, but on the lower ends of who required certain amount of privileges at that time. So they were not given. We continued with this policy and had economic measures were taken. Lot of land reforms were made in the 1950s, which gave land to a lot of lower caste, but they still remained out of political power and also the social hierarchy. They were never part of the political or the social elite in the country. What has happened in the last few years, the biggest problem is that religious intolerance has come back in a very big way. This is primarily because of the rise of the Bharti Janta Party, the party which actually is in power in the center at the moment in India and also in several states. They believe in defining Indian nation and nationhood on terms of religion and in terms of what they call the culture. Culture and religion is used as synonyms by the BJP and its ideological fountainhead, an organization called the RSS, which has been inspired by European fascist movements in the 1930s when it was formed way back in the 1920s. So we have in India now at the moment, a political party which is in power, which believes in the Hindus being the first citizens of this country and the Muslims and Christians, especially those communities whose holy land is not within the geographical space of India but outside India as some kind of a secondary citizen. It is not yet in the constitution or in any law because everybody is entitled to equal rights in India. But in terms of practice, religious minorities find their basic universal rights very severely constrained and under attack all the time from the supporters of the BJP and its affiliated organizations. And finally, when it gained independence, India was wretchedly poor due to centuries of loot by the colonial powers. Today, India has definitely risen from that status and is an economic power. However, have the promises of independence been realized? Have the vast majority of the poor seen the kind of economic uplift that was a dire necessity? At a time of great concentration of wealth and staggering unemployment, Professor Surajit Majumdar talks about the economic trajectory of India. The 25-year journey of India's economy since the country's independence is evident of two important truths. The first is that political independence from colonial rule was very important in unfettering the economic potential of the Indian economy. So the record of 75 years of the India's economy in comparison to what it was under colonial rule does establish the fact that independence was extremely important. But there is an added dimension to the 75-year record, which is that the 75-year record also establishes the limits to the unfettering of India's economic potential that simply political independence represented. Political independence was important. It was a necessary condition, but it was not a sufficient condition for realizing the aspirations that drove the Indian people in the struggle against independence, aspirations which were then enshrined in the Indian constitution in the form of particularly the directive principles of state policy. So if you look at India's constitution, it has this very important component called the directive principles of state policy. The directive principles adopted in 1957, in 1950, when the constitution was adopted and the subsequent amendments particularly up till the 1970s clearly envisaged a relatively egalitarian economic structure as the future of the Indian economy, not necessarily what was the present at the time of India's independence. So if one looks at purely the aggregative economic performance, India's per capita national income in contrast to decades or centuries of stagnation and regression, that was the story of colonial rule. India's per capita national income since 1947 has increased by over seven and a half times. So clearly something changed. If one looks, however, at the break up of this, then clearly this increase does not represent the story of the majority of Indians. In the 1990s, the Indian state made a transition to an economic policy regime where it essentially decided to open up the Indian economy, integrate with the global economy, give unfettered freedom to the operation of market forces and expecting that to deliver development. The consequences of that, however, were an agricultural sector that was already constrained in its development was then pushed into a negative crisis, forcing large number of people out of agriculture seeking work outside that sector in non agricultural activities. The consequence of this was also very sharp increases in inequality in India and the demand implications of that, such a with large sections of Indian not not being able to provide a market for Indian manufactured industry, you had a process of India's limited industrialization of the past continued into this particular period. And in fact, we are now getting a process of what is called premature de-industrialization or a process of decline in the importance of manufacturing within the economy, even before the economy had fully industrialized. And of course, we have had as a consequence of all of these and increasingly severe employment crisis whose implication has been that large majority of Indians either do not find work or have to work in different ways to sustain their low income households. And even when they find work, they don't necessarily find it regularly, or if they find it, they find it that the wages that these employments generate or the incomes that they generate are extremely low because we are in a perpetual situation of a surplus labor situation where the number of people seeking work are significantly higher than the employment opportunities available. So after 75 years of development in which inequalities have actually significantly increased, particularly in the last three decades, we have landed up in a situation where we are in an increasingly severe crisis, where the failed process of development in so far as it affects the life of the majority of Indians, that failure to ensure that large majority of Indians benefit from the process of economic development has now created a situation where that lack of development itself has become the barrier to any future development.