The Ugly Underbelly of “Emergence”: Indian Capitalism in the Era of Globalization

While India has been recognized as one of the prominent ‘emerging’ markets in the era of globalization, much less in focus has been the nature and basis of this emergence and the implications it has had for India's working people. This chapter argues that India's relatively high measured growth in the last three decades is not indicative of Indian capitalism's movement in the direction of becoming a core advanced capitalist economy. The accumulation process in India instead has been even more dependent than in the past on India's characteristic of being a cheap labour Third World capitalism. The conditions maintaining these, however, have also been reproduced precisely because they have also constrained that accumulation process and its ability to absorb the large labour reserve that exists. If India's big business class as well as foreign capital has flourished under globalization, extremely premature de-industrialization, arrested structural change, and mass unemployment have also marked the trajectory of the Indian economy. These have ultimately only created conditions for a crisis of accumulation and the transition to an extremely parasitic phase of Indian capitalism. Rising authoritarianism and the undermining of India's secular democracy has been the political expressions of the crisis and the sharpening contradictions underlying it.