An inquiry into how the ascent of Hindutva intertwines with the rise of corporate power in India, The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India, edited by Rohit Varman and published by Cambridge University Press, brings together scholars who examine Hindutva not merely as a political ideology, but as a fascist, capitalist counter-revolution—one that cloaks corporate interests behind the veils of religion, nationalism and manufactured order.
Varman, a professor at the Birmingham Business School (University of Birmingham), writes in his introductory chapter that the “relentless pursuit of profits” causes corporations to support fascists. He quotes American prosecutor Telford Taylor at the Nuremberg trials who declared that “those enterprises, and not the crazy and fanatical Nazis, were the real war criminals”.
Spanning 13 chapters, the volume lays bare the mechanisms through which big capital and majoritarian politics reinforce each other, and how this alliance deepens repression while accelerating accumulation.
The collection features a formidable group of contributors, including Marzia Casolari, Radhika Desai, Prabhat Patnaik, Anand Teltumbde, Ajay and Vijay Gudavarthy, Arvind Narrain, Ashok Kumbamu, Rohit Chopra, Daniel Kinderman, and Anand Patwardhan. Their essays document and interrogate the entanglement of Hindutva, corporate profiteering and state violence.
Urgent in tone and rigorous in its analysis, this book is both diagnosis and act of resistance. By exposing what Varman calls the kleptocratic nature of contemporary capitalism and sounding an alarm about the “undeclared emergency” shaping India, The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India seeks to understand fascist power, and to confront it. The excerpt below is from a chapter by Radhika Desai, professor in the department of political studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, also director of the Geopolitical Economic Research Group at the university. The chapter is titled Fascism Perfected: The Corporate Stage of Hindutva
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Excerpt
From concentration to super-concentration
First, already high industrial concentration rose further under Modi. As a share of total investment, private corporate investment rose at the expense of investment in the public and in the small and medium enterprise (SMEs) sectors. Indian billionaires’ assets went from 1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1990s to 10 per cent the following decade (Gandhi and Walton 2012), leading the future governor of the RBI, Raghuram Rajan, to ask, ‘How long can we resist calling India [an oligarchy]?’ given that India was second only to Russia in the number of billionaires in relation to GDP (Rajan 2008). Under Modi, the former deputy governor of the RBI, Viral Acharya, pointed out, certain corporates increased their weight through mergers and acquisitions so fast as to reach ‘super-concentration’ levels: Starting in 2015, the Big-5 started acquiring larger and larger shares within the sectors where they were present.... In particular, their share in total assets of the non-financial sectors rose from 10% in 1991 to nearly 18% in 2021, whereas the share of the next big five (Big 6-10) business groups fell from 18% in 1992 to less than 9%. In other words, the Big-5 grew not just at the expense of the smallest firms, but also of the next largest firms. (Acharya 2023)
Rent-thick concentration
Much of this concentration was occurring, moreover, not in competitive sectors with limited corporate interaction with the state such as information technology/software, engineering sector firms, pharmaceuticals, and finance and banking—these were largely free of the taint of scams—but in ‘rent-thick’ sectors such as ‘real estate, infrastructure, construction, mining, telecom, cement and media’ where the ‘role of the state in giving licences’ was ‘pervasive’, giving the corporate sector a reputation for illegality and monopolistic practices (Gandhi and Walton 2012, p. 12).
Rising world demand for primary commodities in the twenty-first century, which already pushed many developing countries back into their primary commodity exporting roles, could only exacerbate this tendency in an India plagued with low productivity, low innovation, and low competitiveness in manufacturing. Sure enough, ‘the wealth of billionaires shot up most of all in the rent-thick sectors, from mining and property to cement, infrastructure, and telecoms’ (Crabtree 2018, pp. 93–94).
Concentration and politics: office, scams, election funding
Inevitably, corporate concentration had political consequences. In the 2000s, wealthy businessmen were increasingly showing up in Parliament, drastically shortening the avenues to political influence for an expanded capitalist class, while corruption and the role of money in elections also rose markedly.
The argument that neoliberal reforms decrease corruption has never been credible and, in India, they only added grand or ‘horizontal’ corruption involving vast sums changing hands between the wealthy and the powerful in a small number of instances to the already established system of vertical or petty corruption of low-paid state employees—from bureaucrats to policemen—skimming small amounts in a large number of instances from a harassed and irate public (Gupta 2017). Such grand corruption increased the sums involved astronomically and became both cause and consequence of the equally steep rises in the cost of winning elections: counteracting the electoral unpopularity of neoliberal policies among voters afflicted with poverty, inequality, resentment of ill-gotten wealth, mass unemployment, and gloomy prospects required ever more money.
Scandals involving land acquisition, infrastructure projects, sale of public assets, and the awarding of defence contracts (ibid.) rose in the new century. The Indian state’s embrace of public–private partnerships (PPPs)—state contracts with private corporations to build infrastructure or run large facilities—became another major hotbed of corruption. Justified, as in the West, as increasing investment without adding to government expenditure, these ventures ‘created an entirely new mechanism for astronomical rent extraction’, so much so that one observer called India a contractor state—‘government of contractors, by contractors, for contractors’ (Crabtree 2018, p.206). Increasing awareness of rentier concentration and corruption led some to hail India’s own ‘gilded age’ resembling late-nineteenth-century United States’s ‘robber baron’ capitalism, allegedly a necessarily violent prelude to a highly efficient form of capitalism. However, India’s ‘gilded age’, if such it was, was headed elsewhere.
House of debt and ‘policy paralysis’: Modi’s moment
For behind these forms of corruption stood another peculiarly Indian one and its crisis became Modi’s opportunity.
The crisis was exposed in an August 2012 report by Credit Suisse trying to square the prevailing view that the Indian economy had an easy 2008 crisis with the despondency its author found in conversations with corporate leaders (ibid., p. 227). The explanation lay in a corporate borrowing binge. Historically, corporate business houses in India had privileged access to credit from the banking sector which was nationalised in 1969. By the 2000s, this access was fuelling the exceptional corporate growth and concentration through investment, mergers and acquisitions, and even overseas acquisitions.
This borrowing began to sour after 2008. The ten most indebted corporate groups—Adani, Essar, GMR (named after Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao), GVK (named after Gunupati Venkata Krishna Reddy), JSW (Jindal South West), Jaypee Group, Lanco, Reliance ADAG (Anil Ambani), Vedanta, and Videocon—saw their loans grow by five times in five years, accounting for 13 per cent of bank loans and 98 per cent of the banking system’s net worth: ‘Therefore, ... in terms of the concentration risk, Indian banks rank higher than most of their Asian and BRIC counterparts’ (Gupta and Kumar 2012, p. 3). Given that most Asian economies feature high debt-to-equity ratios compared to their Western counterparts, this was saying something. Not only were they highly leveraged, but they also endangered the solvency of the entire banking sector.
The report caused a sensation. Based on information not usually available thanks to the complex, not to say shady, accounting practices and often private (not publicly listed) ownership structures of the biggest corporations, it revealed that borrower promoters often had little personal stake in the enterprises that they leveraged so highly and often used to acquire assets of questionable value in Europe or Africa. Worse, it also exposed how the little equity they showed one bank was often a loan owed to another. This practice made it even harder to scrutinize their accounts, given that much of this money was channelled through tax havens.
The sensation in business circles soon sparked a full-blown political crisis for the Congress-led UPA government already plagued by several scandals, such as the ones involving coal, 2G, and the Commonwealth Games scams in which it was found avoiding competitive bidding to allocate highly lucrative, risk-free licences and contracts to favoured private firms. In this context, Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement made political capital from public concern and birthed the Aam Aadmi Party. Not only were the Congress-led UPA government’s reputation and electoral prospects severely dented, but India Inc. also washed its hands of the ‘paralyzed’ UPA government and lighted on Modi as its saviour.
The Modi stage of Hindutva
One would never guess from the crony capitalism literature that the ‘policy paralysis’ crisis was the key turning point towards the perfection of fascism. The literature assumes an overall continuity of crony capitalism since independence, with ‘a blend of “rules” and “deals” alongside a mix of “informal” short- and long-run relationships’ between state and business ‘with rent-creation and rent-sharing as the explicit or implicit contractual basis’ (Chandra and Walton 2020, p. 178). It even credits the Modi government with ending crony capitalism, or at least trying to. Having been elected with ‘widespread support from the business community’, having ‘developed a
narrative of anti-corruption’, it ‘substantially reduced high-level corruption’ without hurting big business, we are told. The worst this literature says about the Modi government is that its anti-corruption measures ‘have suffered from weak specific designs, administrative burdens (the GST [goods and services tax] reform) or weak implementation (of the IBC [Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code])’ and increasing ‘uncertainty ... over the—potentially discretionary—action on alleged corruption’ (ibid., p. 178).
As for India Inc.’s borrowing binge, we are told that Modi was unable (rather than unwilling) to clean up the mess, though there is a suggestion that RBI governor Raghuram Rajan may have been dismissed for trying to do so (Crabtree 2018, pp. 77—78). According to this view, exposés of the UPA government’s corruption made Modi so wary of scandals that key corporate leaders like Ambani became ‘the unacceptable face of Indian cronyism’ and Modi’s election was ‘complicated’ for them as ‘the new Prime Minister fearful of accusations of favoritism cut out much of the kind of insider access enjoyed by senior industrialists’ (ibid., p. 46).
In reality, Modi did not cut access; he just re-routed it. Rather than cutting deals, Modi functioned by changing ‘rules and goalposts ... midgame to help politically connected businessmen’. For instance, ‘Adani’s rise was aided by a relaxation of prior regulations and veiled threats against business rivals by government investigative agencies’ (Bardhan 2023). Mukesh Ambani was similarly helped when, in the face of complaints about Reliance Jio’s ‘predatory pricing practices... in the telecom sector, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India hastily amended the previous rules: no foul, no harm’ (ibid.).
In short, under Modi, India Inc. enjoys efficient and frictionless access to the government. With scrutiny, whether by coalition partners, parliament, or the media curtailed, rather than corruption scandals, we see laws and institutional practices changed to suit India Inc. while the interests of the wider Indian economy and the overwhelming majority of Indians get short shrift.
The Modi governments have fundamentally transformed relations between India Inc. and the Indian state, making them closer, more secure, and more secret than ever. With India Inc.’s bankrolling transforming Modi’s slim pluralities into brute parliamentary majorities that block parliamentary scrutiny and dispense with interfering coalition partners, Modi enjoyed almost complete media control and freedom from public scrutiny and power over bureaucrats and judges. Though electoral bonds are now declared unconstitutional, for two elections they extended India Inc.’s bankrolling even further, as corporates not yet funding Modi’s BJP were threatened or enticed into doing so. The organization of repression in favour of India Inc. was complete and nearly watertight. The Sangh Parivar’s goons were now needed, if at all, only to engage in the retail intimidation of opponents, who still stubbornly crop up here and there, and to spread a pall of insecurity and fear.
(Excerpted with permission from The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India published by Cambridge University Press.)