MARXIST theory holds that in societies that come late to capitalism, the bourgeoisie is no longer capable of dealing those telling blows against the feudal order which the bourgeoisie in an earlier epoch had done, such as during the French Revolution. This is because when the bourgeoisie comes late on to the historical scene, ie, when bourgeois property itself has come under challenge from the nascent socialist movement, the bourgeoisie becomes afraid that any attack by it on feudal property might well rebound into an attack on bourgeois property itself. It therefore makes common cause with the feudal elements, desists from attacking feudal property and carrying out land redistribution. It keeps the sweep of the democratic revolution restricted. Because of this, the historic task of carrying forward the democratic revolution by attacking feudal property and breaking up land concentration devolves in such societies upon the working class, which does so through forming a worker-peasant alliance. The pusillanimity of the Indian bourgeoisie with regard to feudal property, manifested in the bourgeois-led national movement’s going back after independence on its earlier promise of “land to the tiller”, is clearly in conformity with Marxist theory. This theory however is capable of being misinterpreted. It is prone to being understood in the manner of a historical “relay race”, as if the bourgeoisie carries the democratic revolution up to some point where it remains, until the working class appears on the scene to carry it further forward beyond that point. This is a non-dialectical, and hence un-Marxist, understanding. The bourgeois-landlord alliance is not just some static arrangement to protect feudal property and ward off threats to bourgeois property; it is an arrangement through which a trajectory of capitalist development is pursued. And the unleashing of capitalist development necessarily keeps altering the balance of social forces, which in turn affects the state of the democratic revolution causing even setbacks to it. Even if this fact is not immediately apparent in the post-independence period when the dirigiste regime, despite pursuing the capitalist path, attempts to balance class interests in certain ways in order to project the impression of standing above classes, it becomes particularly clear with the onset of “economic liberalisation”. Neo-liberalism, even when it succeeds in brining about a higher growth rate of the GDP, necessarily entails a rolling back of the democratic revolution, both with regard to the rights and the conditions of life of the oppressed classes, and also with regard to marginalised social groups like dalits, minorities and women. This is obvious in the case of the peasantry where large sections of it are now exposed to a process of primitive accumulation of capital. Dispossession of tenants which is also a form of primitive accumulation of capital had occurred even earlier in the dirigiste period; but this was for promoting a capitalist development from within that sector, not at the behest of corporate capital and multinational corporations. In fact, the dirigiste regime had taken a number of steps to protect and promote peasant agriculture from encroachment by corporate and multinational capital, even while encouraging its transformation in a capitalist direction from within. These included protection against world market price fluctuations through tariffs and quantitative trade restrictions; a system of price support through procurement at remunerative prices fixed by a Commission; subsidisation of inputs, including credit after bank nationalisation; government promotion of R&D; the dissemination of better cultivation practices through a huge network of public extension services; substantial public investment in agriculture; and so on. The net effect of these measures was to insulate Indian agriculture from domestic and foreign corporates, and keep it remunerative, though, needless to say, the benefits from these measures were unevenly distributed across the peasantry. Most of these measures are now gone; and where they do exist, such as procurement at CACP-fixed prices, they no longer serve the same purpose with the same effectiveness as they used to. Not surprisingly, Indian agriculture has ceased to be a remunerative activity (ie, has become subject to a squeeze which is a “flow” form of primitive accumulation of capital); peasants are leaving agriculture in lakhs; over 2,00,000 of them have committed suicide over the last decade and a half; and peasant land is being grabbed by corporates for trivial sums (which is primitive accumulation in a “stock” form). What is true of peasant agriculture is also true of other forms of petty production which also had enjoyed a degree of protection earlier under the dirigiste regime but are now witnessing rampant primitive accumulation of capital. The flocking of displaced petty producers to towns in search of jobs swells the reserve army of labour and gives rise to a burgeoning lumpen proletariat. The weakening of the bargaining strength of the organised working class arising from this phenomenon is compounded by two other factors: one is a mode of “employment rationing” which takes the form of casualisation, informalisation, and such like, ie, a given amount of work is carried out not with the help of a permanent labour force, but with a labour force that has no security of employment; the other is growing privatisation and a shrinking of the public sector. (It is a phenomenon observed all over the world that workers are more unionised in the public sector than in the private sector). This weakening of worker’ organisation emboldens the government to institute “free sacking” of workers in the name of “labour market flexibility” and thereby launch an assault on the hard-won democratic rights of the workers. And this weakening of course manifests itself in an absolute stagnation of real wages, even of organised workers, compared to the late 1980s. In short, compared to the pre-liberalisation period, the conditions of life and the rights of the workers and the petty producers, including the peasants, have suffered a diminution. Exactly the same is true of the SC/ST population. At least four sets of factors have been operating in their case. The first is the fact that the bulk of the jobs created during the high growth phase of neo-liberalism have required some education (even when the jobs themselves, such as “call centre” jobs, are not particularly creative); and this has favoured the upper caste youth with access to education rather than the dalit youth which has been traditionally excluded from education. The existing social inequalities in other words have been strengthened by the nature of employment generation under neo-liberalism. If this was only a transitional phenomenon, until the dalit youth acquired sufficient education to access such jobs, then matters will be different. But, here I come to my second point. The privatisation of essential services like education and healthcare under a neo-liberal regime, makes such services far more expensive and hence puts them beyond the reach of the poor in general and dalits in particular. The glib argument advanced by neo-liberal spokesmen, namely that deprived students could study on student loans, takes no cognizance of the enormous insecurity associated with studying on a loan in a situation of mass unemployment. Thirdly, the maintenance of even such jobs that there exist for dalits becomes difficult with privatisation. Affirmative action in favour of the dalits in India had taken the form of “reservations” which typically were confined to public institutions. But with the weight of the public sector coming down, youth from this segment gets excluded effectively from “reservations”. Finally, an ideological element comes into play here. Those from privileged upper caste backgrounds who succeed in becoming the beneficiaries of the neo-liberal dispensation, do not naturally attribute their success to their privilege; they attribute it to their “ability” and “talent” whence it necessarily follows that those who do not succeed, ie, those from socially deprived backgrounds must be less “talented”. The growing inequality spawned by neo-liberalism generates therefore a new ideology of casteism, about the “inferiority” of the “lower castes” etc, whence it is an easy step to demand an end to “reservations” and an end to all expenditure on the poor (since it appears simply as “money down the drain” on “populist schemes”). Exactly the same can be said of the Muslims who did not even enjoy any “reservation”, even though they too were an educationally deprived community. Neo-liberalism in short breeds a kind of superciliousness among the privileged towards the underprivileged. When young people from privileged groups are successful in obtaining employment and material prosperity, they see the unsuccessful as less talented. When they are not, they blame the very same underprivileged for their own lack of success (claiming that expenditure on them “holds up growth” and is responsible for their own lack of success). All this which is naturally best articulated by Hindu supremacist political formations, since they never had anything to do with the anti-colonial struggle and since they hold the need for the perpetuation of the institutionalised inequality of the caste-system as their core belief (no matter what opportunistic utterances they may make from time to time), brings such formations into prominence, and even, as now, into power. This is a veritable rolling back of India’s democratic revolution. What is more, if the “basic classes” and marginalised social groups face an erosion in their rights and living conditions during the “boom” when the country experiences high growth, they face an even greater erosion when the economic crisis comes, as it has done now. The boom and the crisis in other words do not have symmetrical socio-economic effects. Growth in a neo-liberal economy is necessarily associated with “bubbles”. The “dotcom” and “housing” “bubbles” in the US stimulated the world economy and therefore counties like India who had hitched their economies to the word economy through neo-liberalism; this was further aided by local “bubbles” which were the second-order effects of the global boom. These “bubbles” have now collapsed and it is obviously not known when the next “bubble” will appear. The word economy, and with it the Indian economy, has now entered a protracted period of crisis, which poses a threat to the neo-liberal order and the hegemony of international finance capital. Exacerbating the social divide, pitting one segment of the people against another, becomes under such circumstances a potent weapon which it uses to defend itself. The effort to roll back the democratic revolution, it follows, is likely to gather further momentum in the new situation of crisis. There is an additional reason for this. The only way that the neo-liberal regime will try to revive growth in the economy will be by making further concessions to big globalised capital, both domestic and foreign. This is exactly what we are seeing in the Modi government’s “start up” campaign. This would not, of course, cause any actual revival of the economy, since capital, whether domestic or foreign, is not too keen on investing at present. But it would further curtail the expenditure incurred for the benefit of the poor, it would further privatise essential services, and hence further contribute to a rolling back of the democratic revolution. The Indian republic at sixty-seven is seeing a retrogression that must have been unimaginable when it was born.