Browsing through comments on youtube videos about India right now is crazy. Full of Islamophobic, racist rhetoric almost indistinguishable from white nationalist ones (example CW: Islamophobia).
I get that BJP is responsible for appealing to hindu nationalist sentiment and making it worse, but what are the material reasons that caused a former br*tish colony to become like this?
I’m going to defer to other comrades who are more familiar with the situation in India, but from my understanding, a lot of it came from the failure of land reform in India. This stifled industrialization because rural landlords often hold disproportionate amount of power and rule over their local fiefdoms, and as such were able to resist state-driven industrialization projects. As a result, the failure to industrialize means the failure to proletarianize the working class.
This is in stark contrast to the situation in China, whose land reform under Mao created the ideal conditions for industrialization, which subsequently enabled Dengist reform to take place. Despite having two of the highest populations in the world, Western capitalists vastly preferred China to India due to China’s highly industrialized base that resulted from the first 30 years of Mao’s rule.
Of course, the actual situation is far more complex and multi-faceted but the social relations between labor and capital play a huge role in determining the socio-economic development trajectory of the country.