A WIN discussion June, 2024. India now has the largest population in the world. And In the ten years since the far-right prime minister Narendra Modi came to power, its economy has grown from the world’s tenth largest to its fifth. At the same time, India’s credentials as a parliamentary democracy have been tarnished by brutal attacks on Muslims and other minority communities and blatant repression of opposition parties.
Modi had been expected to win an overwhelming majority in the recent parliamentary elections, thus giving him a mandate to enact a Hindu supremacist constitution and consolidate a virtual dictatorship. Instead, his regime has been reduced to an unstable minority government which could collapse overnight. Modi’s grip on power is fatally weakened.
This result has given renewed confidence to India’s workers, farmers, poor and unemployed. For two years in 2020-1 the capital city Delhi was blockaded by 300,000 insurgent farmers; and over the last few years, time and time again the opposition trade union federations have come together to stage token general strikes mobilising up to 250 million workers: by far the biggest strikes in world history. India is at a turning point. What will the future bring? To throw light on this question, we will welcomed
Maya John
Maya is a Marxist theoretician associated with the left movement for more than two decades, organising domestic workers, nurses, and teachers and writing about labour history, educational inequalities, health, caste and the labour market. She is General Secretary of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies and a teacher at the University of Delhi. Listen to the discussion HERE
For more information, check WIN’s statement A TURNING POINT FOR INDIA at https://www.workersinternationalnetwork.net/a-turning-point-for-india/