1. Currently the country is passing through an unprecedented juncture in post-Independence political history. The NDA government at the Centre has entered the fourth year of its second successive term after a short-lived first term which lasted only thirteen months. No non-Congress government in the past ever managed to survive this long. With crucial support from its partners in the NDA and also from non-NDA parties like the TDP in Andhra and BSP in UP, the BJP has ensured its continuing control over central power even as it has been steadily losing ground in one state after another. Of the six Assembly elections held this year the BJP has managed to hold on to power only in Goa and now in December it faces the crucial test in post-genocide Gujarat where Narendra Modi’s aggressive mix of communal frenzy and regional rhetoric would put even Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena to shame.
Contrary to liberal expectations, power has in no way mellowed or moderated the BJP’s politics of aggressive Hindutva. The so-called thesis of encirclement of the BJP by a host of ‘secular’ parties within the framework of NDA has also proved to be a complete hoax. The parliamentary problematic of marrying its identity with the compulsions of coalition politics and the so-called parameters of ‘responsible governance’ has not prevented the BJP from systematically unleashing its fascist agenda. If the BJP’s tryst with state power began with the daylight demolition of Babri Masjid, a decade later it has reached the next milestone with the Gujarat genocide. There can be no mistaking the fact that the BJP in power is systematically subverting the so-called rules of the game of parliamentary democracy to push on towards a complete fascist takeover.
2. Five years ago, the Varanasi Congress of our Party had forewarned us about this shape of things to come when it had described the BJP’s agenda in very precise terms as “imposing a fascist dictatorship in India.” It had specifically drawn attention to the following aspects of the BJP’s agenda: “pursuing a chauvinist policy vis-a-vis India’s neighbours, particularly Pakistan, escalating the nuclear arms race, transforming India into a Hindu Rashtra where religious minorities will be treated as second-grade citizens, undermining the federal polity, unleashing brutal state repression and organising private armies of landlords to crush agrarian movements of the rural poor, militarily suppressing ongoing movements of national self-determination and crushing all sorts of dissent in intellectual, aesthetic and academic fields.”
All these ugly and reprehensible features have been amply displayed by the BJP during the last four years of NDA rule. Advani himself has repeatedly identified Pokhran, Kargil and POTA as the three landmark achievements of the BJP in power while the likes of Modi and Togadia openly glorify the Gujarat genocide. Between the lynching of Graham Steins in January 1999 and the genocide in Gujarat, executed by the saffron brigade with complete connivance of the state machinery, the BJP’s politics of minority cleansing has already completed a gory circle. Meanwhile, the Ayodhya campaign for a Ram Mandir at the site of the demolished Babri Masjid has also been revived with official blessings. While keeping everybody preoccupied with the maze of dubious behind-the-scene parleys and protracted court battles, the VHP-Bajrang Dal storm-troopers are getting ready to stage another coup of the kind of December 6, 1992.
State repression is being sought to be further institutionalised and legitimised amidst the official clamour for a hard or effective state and the passing of draconian acts like POTA. Both Advani and Vajpayee have openly declared that the notion of human rights has no place in the fight against terrorism. Addressing a recent meeting on police reforms, Advani enunciated his doctrine of good governance in opposition to what he called the human rights approach. And to add to the state’s power to crush insurgencies and ‘discipline’ the civil society, counter-insurgency troops are also being raised systematically by giving surrendered militants, both genuine and fake, a virtual licence to loot and kill. This strategy is being perfected through practice not only in Kashmir but also all over the North-East and in other pockets of militant mass unrest.
The RSS is blatantly penetrating apex academic and research institutions like the ICHR, ICSSR, NCERT and UGC, textbooks are being rewritten, curricula are being revised and irrational and obscurantist values and communal prejudices are being systematically smuggled into the educational system by all possible means. In the field of art and literature, and films and other cultural forms, any creation that defies the Sangh’s worldview is being sought to be suppressed by all possible means. Cultural activists and journalists, who refuse to toe the RSS line and show the courage to expose the BJP’s misrule, rampant corruption and its sinister campaign of fascist subversion, are being subjected to blatant intimidation and harassment.
3. In the sphere of economic policy, the two successive BJP-led governments have considerably accelerated the momentum of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. Throwing all caution to the winds, the crucial financial sector including banking and insurance has been opened up to the manipulations of speculative finance, and foreign investors are being offered all kinds of tax concessions and other lucrative benefits in every sector of the economy. The process of disinvestment or systematic dismantling of profit-making and strategically important public sector units is proceeding apace. A full-time minister has been appointed for the job and the disinvestment target for the present financial year has been raised to as much as Rs. 50,000 crore. Even the five-year plans which once used to fix investment targets are now soaked in the spirit of disinvestment, with the Tenth Five-year Plan setting a disinvestment target of Rs. 78,000 crore. Downsizing and casualisation of labour have become the order of the day and the goal of a flexible labour market is being pursued through systematic curtailment of trade union rights and relaxation of the system of industrial closure. Vajpayee’s promise of creation of ten million jobs every year has turned out to be nothing but ten million jokes every year for the growing army of unemployed Indians.
Meanwhile, the neo-liberal agenda is being vigorously extended to the agricultural arena. At the behest of the WTO, quantitative restrictions have been removed even on agricultural imports. Subsidies for the agricultural sector are also on their way out. The new agricultural policy introduced in 2000 is wedded to corporatisation of agriculture and reversal of whatever land reforms have been carried out so far. The public distribution system has been effectively dismantled resulting in shocking starvation deaths in states like Orissa and Rajasthan while falling prices, crop failures and declining procurement of food grains and other commercial crops are driving even hitherto well-to-do farmers to suicides.
4. Accelerated implementation of the neo-liberal economic agenda has meant a rampant growth of financial scams and corruption in high places, something the BJP had promised to get rid of. Small investors have been robbed of their hard-earned savings through a string of scams in the share market and even in that erstwhile epitome of small investors’ confidence, the Unit Trust of India. The government is now repeatedly diverting huge sums of public money in the name of ‘bailout packages’ for the UTI. Recently, inaugurating a conference of the CBI and state anti-corruption bureaus in Delhi, the Prime Minister himself went on to say, “After the liberalistaion of our economy, there has been a spurt in financial frauds, bank and stock market scams, money laundering and cyber crimes, running into hundreds and thousands of crores of rupees.” The Prime Minister however conveniently ignored that these frauds were not happening merely in the mystic realm of the liberalised free market. Senior BJP and NDA functionaries and officials in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Finance Ministry have been found to be closely involved in most of these scams.
The unprecedented revelations made by the Tehelka journalists clearly indicted top BJP-Samata leaders and also gave the whole country a stunning glimpse into the kind of institutionalised corruption that thrives in the absolute secrecy that shrouds our megabuck defence deals. Several reports of the CAG have also exposed serious instances of corruption in several ministries including the most sordid coffin scam related to the Kargil martyrs. More recently, the petrol pump and land allotment scams revealed the kind of venality and nepotism that have now become hallmarks of the BJP and RSS leadership. The following observation made by Dimitrov in his 1935 report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International stands fully corroborated by our experience with the Vajpayee government: Fascism delivers up the people to be devoured by the most corrupt and venal elements, but comes before them with the demand for “an honest and incorruptible government.”
5. While eclipsing the Congress in the competitive pursuit of the economic policies of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation and also in terms of sheer magnitude and variety of corruption in high places, the BJP has also sought to hijack from the United Front its much-proclaimed agenda of federalism and coalition politics. In reply to the UF’s discourse of coalition era, Vajpayee coined the famous phrase of coalition dharma and now Advani wants to do a Vajpayee by saying that the NDA would stay even if the BJP were to win majority on its own. The BJP’s advocacy of small states and the actual creation of the three new states of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh in 2000 generated a lot of illusions and misplaced optimism among many a nationality-based organisation. In particular, the Vajpayee government has managed to develop a close rapport with the NSCN(I-M). During his visit to Japan last year, Mr. Vajpayee even had a direct meeting with the NSCN leadership on the Japanese soil. The removal of territorial limits on the government’s cease-fire with the NSCN created a major turmoil in Manipur threatening to upset the delicate ethnic balance in the state. In Assam too, the BJP’s main focus is now on befriending tribal organisations, particularly on cementing its ties with the ABSU, a breakaway group of ASDC, and surrendered wings of various militant outfits.
Behind this pseudo-federalist veil, the BJP is actually intensifying repressive measures while playing a sinister divide-and-rule game. In Kashmir, the BJP has clearly taken it upon itself to complete the unfinished Partition agenda. Over the last five decades, the North-Eastern region has been witness to a number of dead accords and political betrayal and military suppression of the basic democratic aspirations of different communities and ethnic groups. This has only led to a proliferation of insurgent groups so that by the time the government begins negotiation with the Naga insurgents, its policies would have already resulted in the rise of a few dozen insurgent groups all over the North-Eastern region including the northern districts of West Bengal. Whether in the North-East or in other tribal regions of India, the BJP’s real agenda remains two-fold: forcible Hinduisation of tribal people and systematic denial of the indigenous people’s aspiration for effective autonomy and their basic right to land, forests and other natural resources.
6. In terms of both domestic and foreign policies, the BJP-led NDA government has turned out to be the most pro-imperialist and especially pro-US regime in the history of independent India. Indian foreign policy under the BJP-led dispensation has become a veritable adjunct of the American design of a unipolar world under US hegemony. The NDA government was the first to openly welcome and support the NMD project of the Bush administration. Again, after September 11 New Delhi went out of its way to extend unconditional support to the US-led war campaign. Visits by US State Department and defence officials to India have become a regular fixture matched by frequent US trips by Indian ministers including the Prime Minister and Home Minister. Joint military exercises between the two armies, which had last taken place in the wake of the India-China war of 1962, have also been resumed amidst celebratory claims of a new-found ‘strategic partnership’. Under cover of this so-called strategic partnership, American political intervention in Kashmir affairs has assumed alarming proportions.
The NDA government’s foreign policy also contains a marked pro-Israel component with a high degree of military cooperation and intelligence sharing. This is accompanied by a silent approval of brazen acts of Israeli aggression and occupation in Palestine. India kept mum at the time of recent Israeli attacks on Arafat or over Bush’s statement that a solution to the Palestine crisis can only be found after Arafat is removed from the leadership.
This pro-US pro-Israel position of the NDA government has resulted in India’s growing isolation from most of her traditional third world friends. This is all the more true in the context of South Asia where India is being increasingly seen as the biggest regional ally and representative of US imperialism.
7. Viewed in totality, the present BJP-led dispensation at the Centre should be understood as a prelude to communal fascism or fascism of the Indian variety. The term communal fascism has gained wide currency in India because in the political scheme of the RSS and BJP, fascism manifests itself primarily in the form of majoritarian, aggressive communalism. But the fascist threat portended by the BJP is by no means limited to the issue of communalism or directed against just one community or all minority communities. Like every other form of fascist rule witnessed in modern history, full-fledged fascism in India too can only mean the open terrorist dictatorship of a minority comprising the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most pro-imperialist sections of the Indian ruling classes directed against the overwhelming majority of the Indian people comprising not only religious minorities but the working class, the labouring peasantry and the progressive intelligentsia cutting across communities. In the specific historical context of India, the fascist trend comes also with a strong feudal-Brahminical and patriarchal component resulting in particularly intensified attacks on dalits and women. Even though the BJP’s grip on power and the state system in India is still far from total, we have already been witnessing a growing consolidation of the essential features of what can only be characterised as the Indian variety of fascism.
Some sections of liberals and even left forces are however still bogged in pedantic debates and academic hairsplitting over whether India can ever really witness a real fascist takeover. While it can be nobody’s case to equate India of early twenty-first century with Hitler’s Germany of the 1930s and 40s, it will be simply suicidal to ignore or underestimate the glimpses of what we have already seen during the last fifteen years of BJP’s ascendance, and more particularly, the last four years of BJP-led coalition rule at the Centre.
We must remember that open terrorist dictatorships are not proclaimed overnight and that in states where fascism does not enjoy a broad mass basis, it always uses the parliamentary system to accumulate strength and gradually subvert the system before staging a final coup. The BJP has never sought to hide the fact that if it is not pursuing its entire agenda at one go it is only because it has not yet acquired that kind of power. There is no question of the BJP abandoning or altering its fascist agenda, the expression ‘hidden agenda’ was only a misnomer soaked in liberal illusions. The BJP of course makes a distinction between what is immediately achievable, the minimum programme, and what it has to wait and work for over a longer period of time, the maximum programme, or the strategic goal of a fascist counter-revolution. And while playing the parliamentary game it continually keeps testing the waters to push ahead its campaign for constitutional subversion. The practised ease with which the BJP changed gear after its rout in the February 2002 Assembly elections to perpetrate the genocide in Gujarat and revive the Ayodhya campaign provided a clear example of the BJP’s way of combining sham parliamentarism and open fascist terror.
8. While fully acknowledging the severity of the fascist danger portended by the current BJP-led dispensation, we must see it in its proper perspective. The RSS has been a fascist outfit since its inception and over the last seventy-five years of its existence it has single-mindedly pursued its fascist project of a Hindu Rashtra through an intricate network of organisations. From the Jan Sangh through the short-lived Janata Party to the present-day BJP, it has used several political instruments and even supported and used the Congress at critical junctures like the aftermath of the Indo-China war, and two decades later in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The Congress is currently looking forward to this history being repeated in Gujarat. This is why a confirmed swayamsevak and former BJP Chief Minister like Shankersinh Vaghela has been brought in as the state Congress President and the latter is openly pleading for support from the RSS in the present elections.
However, we cannot fully understand the growth of the fascist danger merely in terms of the RSS and its ideology. We must also keep in mind the present national and international environment which has legitimised and empowered the RSS to such an extent. The last fifteen years have witnessed a pronounced rightward shift in international politics while the neo-liberal market dogma has come to dominate the global economic discourse. In the wake of September 11, the process has now culminated in a global war. Of course, during the last few years we have also been witnessing a resurgence of the left or centre-left forces accompanied by powerful anti-globalisation struggles and growing questioning of the neo-liberal discourse. But in India the ruling classes have evolved a broad consensus on the neo-liberal agenda and also on seeking greater strategic integration with the US.
Worldwide, we also see multinational states being pulled apart by powerful centrifugal tendencies and India is no exception. The social complexion of electoral representation has also undergone a sea change in the last one decade with dalits, adivasis and OBCs gaining much greater visibility than ever before. While the ruling classes are trying hard to co-opt this phenomenon, we can also discern an unmistakable radicalisation of the consciousness and struggles of the oppressed masses in many parts of the country. The ongoing fascist consolidation in India has to be seen as an integral part of the ruling classes’ response to these challenges.
9. The Congress, historically the most natural representative party of the Indian ruling classes, has been out of central power for a record period of nearly seven years now. However having wrested several state governments from the BJP and its allies, Jammu and Kashmir being the latest one, it is now looking forward to staging a comeback on the national level. Even though the Congress has not yet been able to improve its electoral showing in the crucial Hindi-belt states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, its influence is clearly growing in both the states. In spite of being the junior partner of RJD in Bihar, the Congress is now in a position to mount effective pressure on the RJD-led government. Only the other day Rabri Devi had to beat a retreat in the face of a mini rebellion by three Muslim ministers of the Congress, which clearly revealed the growing clout of the Congress, thanks largely to a growing tilt among Muslims towards the party. In UP, the Samajwadi Party too now appears to be desperately trying to make it up with the Congress. The NCP which had broken away from the Congress over the issue of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin is already running coalition governments with the Congress in Maharashtra and Meghalaya.
While waiting for its turn to replace the BJP, the Congress continues to share a large area of consensus with the BJP in matters of all major domestic and foreign policies, especially on the entire agenda of economic neo-liberalism. In Gujarat, it repeated its disgraceful record of acquiescence on the question of Ayodhya, and watched the saffron brigade perpetrate the genocide. And now under Vaghela’s leadership it is trying to dislodge the Modi regime by glossing over the entire issue of the genocide and appropriating the very planks of the BJP. In Punjab, the present Congress Chief Minister has again begun to meddle in the internal politics of the Akali Dal and the SGPC. We can easily remember how such meddling had played a major role in the rise of Khalistani extremism. In Jammu and Kashmir, where the recent election has opened up a glimmer of hope of an eventual political solution comprehensively rejecting the RSS plank of trifurcation of the state on communal lines, the Congress has come back to power in a post-poll coalition arrangement with the PDP. The PDP’s spectacular showing in this election was achieved on the basis of its poll promises that struck a chord with the alienated and aggrieved people of the Kashmir valley: release of all political prisoners, disbanding of the notorious Special Operations Group, prosecution of human rights violators and unconditional dialogue with all concerned to find a political solution to the Kashmir question. The common minimum programme worked out between the Congress and the PDP has however already diluted some of these promises. It remains to be seen if the Congress is prepared to modify its past approach to the Kashmir question which has been largely responsible for the problem of alienation that lies at the root of the ongoing insurgency.
10. With the BJP heading a coalition government at the Centre and the Congress recovering much of its lost ground, the ruling classes are now trying to impose a two-party model in Indian politics. Five years ago even as a united front government was running the show amidst loud celebration of the presumed onset of the coalition era, we had made it clear that a coalition government excluding the two biggest all-India parties of the ruling classes could only be a temporary aberration. Subsequent developments have fully corroborated our assessment. The BJP has successfully appropriated the coalition plank of the United Front and many of the regional or centrist parties or their factions, which were earlier certified to be secular, are now coalition partners of the BJP. In spite of its share of internal divisions and tussles, the NDA coalition has proved to be durable enough to withstand even a social earthquake like the Gujarat genocide. There has even been no murmur of protest from any quarters in the NDA against the elevation of LK Advani to the specially created post of the Deputy Prime Minister.
The NDA experience has thus shattered the illusion of a secular front which has been a key component of the tactical line of the opportunist Left. The conduct of the BJP’s NDA partners and also of non-NDA friends and allies like the TDP and BSP has made it amply clear that the bourgeois parties have no permanent friend or enemy and that power is their only ideology. Even a party like AIADMK which advocates a third front in theory has been busy advancing the BJP’s agenda in practice, arresting opposition leaders and activists under POTA and legitimising the oppression of dalits and religious minorities with ordinance banning religious conversion.
If the AIADMK’s notion of a third front is completely spurious, the opportunist Left’s theory and practice of a third front is also facing a crisis. The crisis manifested itself in the disintegration of the People’s Front during the Presidential election early this year and since then both the CPI and CPI(M) have been moving constantly closer to the Congress.
11. The communist tactical line at the present stage must be geared towards preventing a full-fledged fascist victory and beating back the fascist offensive. And the opportunist Left’s tactical line can be the best negative teacher in this regard. Three decades ago, the CPI had entered into an alliance with the Congress precisely with the call of thwarting a fascist threat. The CPI(M) did not go that far but remained largely paralysed. Subsequently, it went to the other extreme of extending uncritical support to the Morarji Desai government which had a strong RSS component with Vajpayee and Advani holding important ministries. In real life, it was this tactical blunder which really left the field open for the RSS and its outfits to expand their influence and consolidate their position first within the popular anti-Congress movement and then within and with the help of the first non-Congress government at the Centre. Between 1977 and 1989, the saffron forces enormously increased their strength even though the BJP secured only two seats in the first parliamentary election it faced. During this period the tactical line of the Left took the Congress as its main target and in 1989 the VP Singh government was supported simultaneously by the BJP and the Left Front. This was a crucial juncture when the BJP seized the initiative and the CPI(M)-led Left Front remained preoccupied with propping up the VP Singh government. Subsequently almost all through the 1990s the BJP managed to retain political initiative in its hands in spite of suffering serious countrywide isolation for a period after the demolition of Babri Masjid. It also succeeded in adding to its parliamentary strength in every successive election and winning a host of allies. All through this period, the opportunist Left formulated its tactics treating the BJP as the main enemy and took every step in the name of halting the BJP’s advance and keeping it out of power, and yet failed precisely on this count.
Where did the opportunist Left tactics go wrong? It was not mistaken in highlighting the danger posed by the BJP, but in the name of halting the BJP it went soft on the Congress and then committed all kinds of unprincipled compromise to share power under the banner of the United Front and implement the very economic policies which had brought the Congress government down. It forgot the note of warning sounded by Georgi Dimitrov in his pioneering report to the historic Seventh Congress of the Communist International. Dimitrov had categorically warned that “before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism”and that “Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.”
The only saving grace was that the possibility of an even bigger blunder was averted with the CPI(M) Central Committee narrowly managing to reject the offer made to Jyoti Basu to accept the Prime Ministership of the UF government. However, the CPI(M) has since updated its party programme precisely to make a provision for participation in bourgeois governments at the Centre. During the first term of the NDA government, the tactical line of the Left remained focused on dislodging the government and replacing it by another coalition government. This time around, the CPI(M) was ready to accept any offer that might come its way but it never came.
After the 1999 election when the NDA returned with a relatively comfortable majority and the Congress made it clear that it was not in a mood to attempt an early toppling of the government, the CPI(M) and its LF partners formed a People’s Front in alliance with the Samajwadi Party and the JD(S). The PF adopted a minimum programme which read like a watered down version of the Common Minimum Programme of the UF government even though the CPI(M) claimed a major distinction between the post-poll UF which was formed to run the government and the PF which it said was not an electoral alliance but a platform of popular struggles against the NDA government. Yet ironically, the only occasion when the PF attained a degree of visibility before it died without a single drop of tear being shed was during the UP elections in which the Samajwadi party allocated a few seats to the CPI and CPI(M) as partners of the PF.
12. In opposition to the opportunist Left’s tactical line of targeting only the BJP and moving closer to the Congress, diluting in the process the very identity of the Left and truncating its initiative and independence, the revolutionary tactical line must stress the need for a powerful Left intervention which alone can serve as the basis for a third or democratic front. The opportunist line has come a full circle from anti-Congressism to anti-BJPism, but while targeting the main enemy in a given situation it has always neglected the core element of ensuring a bold and independent assertion of the Left. It should also be made clear that such an assertion cannot be achieved by just paying lip-service to the need for mass movements while remaining preoccupied with exclusively election-oriented united fronts and participation, direct or indirect, in bourgeois governments.
Developing powerful people’s resistance to the growing fascist danger and neo-liberal economic offensive forms the cornerstone of revolutionary communist tactics. We must develop more and more pockets of militant struggles of the rural poor and energise the broad democratic movement on the basis of powerful worker-peasant struggles. To this end we are prepared to unite with the entire range of Left forces and also cooperate with other anti-BJP non-Congress forces. In the Varanasi Congress we had visualised the possible emergence of a broad anti-BJP configuration and laid down three basic parameters to define our response to any such broad configuration: (i) the party’s independence and initiative must be retained, (ii) the Congress must be isolated from any secular or democratic anti-BJP configuration and (iii) we must continue to oppose all anti-people policies and steps of non-BJP, non-Congress governments. We reaffirm this basic tactical orientation of the Party under the present circumstances.
To strengthen the Party’s own role and build a broad-based Left and democratic unity with a clear anti-fascist anti-imperialist thrust, we must pay serious attention to the following tasks: (i) offering bold resistance to every manifestation of fascist offensive and attempt to subvert whatever limited democracy is guaranteed by the present constitution and parliamentary system, (ii) opposing the imperialist war and globalisation and every instance of imperialist interference in our internal affairs, (iii) resisting the state-led onslaught on civil liberties and human rights, (iv) defending the full rights of religious minorities and opposing every attempt to browbeat and persecute them, (v) mobilising agricultural labourers and the poor and middle peasantry in powerful struggles against agrarian crisis and feudal-kulak violence, (vi) strengthening the united movement of the working class and other affected people against privatisation and closure of industries and commercialisation of basic amenities and services, (vii) intensifying the battle against atrocities on dalits, adivasis and women and for securing comprehensive justice and equal rights, (viii) defending the livelihood and democratic rights of the masses of unorganised workers and all those who are adversely affected and displaced in the name of economic development, (ix) strengthening the student-youth movement to secure the fundamental right to education and employment, (x) sharpening the resistance of students, youths, intellectuals and cultural activists to attempts to saffronise education and culture and curb the freedom of expression, (xi) fighting for a democratic solution to the autonomy movements and the question of alienation in Kashmir and the North-east, (xii) rejecting imperialist intervention and jingoism of the Indian ruling classes to maintain peace and develop cooperation between India and all her neighbours. q