From Independence to Exploitation: India’s 78-Year Journey

The conclusion of the 16th Loksabha Election was aptly termed the Rockefeller Moment for Corporate India. The real economic power shifted towards crony capitalists or oligarchs, with influence now flowing from the Corporate Club 2.0.

Just as how Sita was kidnapped by Ravana, democracy has been hijacked by Crony Corporations replacing Corporatalism with Corporate terrorism’. This fusion of corporates with governance has led to ‘fascism’ in India, obliterating democratic processes.

The contract-labour system, emerging from this power shift, has enriched the political apparatus with lucrative labour contracts, while fostering a harmful industrial-silence, across the industries in India. Contract labour is exploited like disposable tissue and remains silenced. This system and outsourcing have helped keep wages low and created instability and insecurity among the working class.

The contract-labour system has unleashed new forms of slavery and neo-untouchability pushing a large portion of the working class to the periphery of the development. This process has led to ‘socio-economic exclusion which is harmful to the environment, fitting Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s description of India, as, islands of California, in a sea of Sub-Saharan Africa.’

We have succumbed to exploiting human weakness rather than building on human strength, turning civilization backward. The law of the jungle, where might is right, now prevails, with the powerful thriving while the weak are pushed aside.

Corporations compete by exploiting employees, hiding their inefficiencies, insatiable greed, and corrupt practices. Now, it is hard to find price wars in the open-market competition, and the real-time competition is in exploitative measures and marketing gimmicks. The contract-labour system and outsourcing are the newfound tools, in the hands of corporate sharks, with widespread collusion with corporates, politicians, the judiciary, and the labour department.

Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP), which focuses on promoting and protecting the downtrodden’s economic interests, have been compromised through a criminal conspiracy between the political and capitalist domains of our country. Corrosive effects of malevolent and ominous corporate influence on public policy, political processes, and especially, the environment are glaringly open to anybody’s scrutiny, who is still left with some remnants of sensitivity.

Not only the working class belonging to this generation, but the future generations, are susceptible to the severest of risks, and the carcinogenic effect of this exploitative technique. The long-term potential implications are beyond blue-collar and white-collar employees in India, if not for the world.

Inequality has been sharply rising since 2014. As per the recent Oxfam report, the top 1% In India holds more than 40% of wealth, creating a Billionaire Raj.

Developed countries like Japan or Korea hardly have the kind of blood-billionaires India has solely because the inheritance ends almost after the fourth generation, owing to the progressive and coercive rates of inheritance tax!

We are now entering the 78th year of independent India, when we can ask ourselves whether the soul of a nation, long suppressed has found utterance or whether we have been able to fulfill a pledge to bring freedom and opportunity to the peasants and workers—who are the real wealth-creators of our nation?

India has been able to create unparalleled wealth within a few decades. But the distribution of this wealth has been totally lopsided and grossly uneven. This has given rise to the inhuman income disparity or inequality across our country, spawning a fleet of blood -billionaires.

The workers and farmers of India were promised a trickle-down theory, once the enormous wealth through the LPG Policy (Liberalisation, Privatisation, and Globalisation) could have happened. A promise that was never fulfilled. Instead, workers were handed out neo-slavery and neo-untouchability through the rampant spread of the contract-labour system.

So independence has not reached the lowermost strata of society, i.e. working class, or if at all, it had ever reached; it has been snatched away after the advent of the LPG era by the present-day Vampire-State System!

The writer is labour union leader. Views personal