Hunger in India - What is the Issue?

              HUNGER IN INDIA - WHAT IS THE ISSUE?
Under the present rule of the landlords
and the foreign-dependent capitalists of
India, the misery of Indian people is increasing daily. It is becoming more and more
difficult for larger and larger fraction of the
population to survive under the extreme
exploitation and plunder of their labor and
land. The so called democracy in India is
only a fig-leaf to hide this barbaric oppression. In 1956-57, fully 40% of the Indian
population was below the depressed official
poverty line. (Indian government defines the
poverty-line income as that necessary to buy
2250 Calories of food per day at local prices
with no provision for clothing, housing,
health care etc.) In February of this year,
Mr. Varma the 'labor minister' to Desai
regime confessed in the parliament that the
number has reached 80% and is still increasing daily.
Associated with such wide-spread
misery and poverty, we find illiteracy, negligible public health care and housing shortage. People are at the mercy of floods,
cyclones and storms and even drinking
water is not available to a large majority of
the Indian people. Anywhere one goes, one
cannot miss the rampant unemployment
(more than 30%) and starvation.
The imperialists, the reactionary ruling
classes of India and their various apologists
and lackeys blame the hard working toiling
masses of India for their misery. This is as
callous as blaming slaves for their slavery.
These fascist lackeys peddle various
'theories' of how the Indian people are
'inherently lazy', unproductive, 'spiritually
oriented', and how they 'breed like mice'.
Overpopulation is the favorite
whipping-boy of a lot of these fascist theoreticians. They rationalize the existence of the
poverty of the masses by blaming the people
for overpopulation. Such arguments date
back to Thomas Malthus (1798) who even
urged that some (the poor) must perish
when population presses beyond subsistence.
Malthus was thoroughly exposed by Marx
and Engels for what he was - a bumbling
apologist for the landed aristocracy; a reac
tionary even at that time! (e.g. see "Marx
and Engels on the Population Bomb", Ramparts Press). Since that time despite being
exposed by progressive and democratic people, his theory has seen several attempts at
resurrection by the reactionaries, since they
find this theory convenient to explain away
the poverty inevitably resulting from the
rule of the reactionary classes.
Neo-malthusians today say that food
production etc. in the colonial and neo-
colonial countries cannot keep pace with
their growing populations. And therefore
they proclaim population-control to be the
principal issue facing the people of these
countries. Thus the reality of the imperialist
plunder and backward semi-feudal mode of
agricultural production becomes just secondary side issue and sterilization of the people (whether by using the priest or the
hangman) is presented as the burning issue.
No wonder that neo-malthusian theories are
popular with World Bank, A.I.D., the Club
of Rome, various multinational foundations
and reactionary propaganda organs (such as
Universities, TV, media, movies etc.). An
explanation of human misery in terms of an
'eternal law of nature' has an obvious appeal
for political reactionaries since it diverts
attention from the part played in the creation of this misery by class exploitation. As
Engels points out " Why is too little produced? Not because of limits of production -
even today and with present day means - are
exhausted. No. But because the limits of
production are determined not by the
number of hungry bellies but by the number
of purses able to buy and to pay". For example today the Indian ruling classes export
grain to the Soviet imperialists and to Vietnam and have so much grain on their hands
that they have resorted to storing it on airstrips and railway platforms; while hundreds
of millions of Indian people are dying slowly
of starvation.
Only by smashing the stranglehold of
the two ruling classes of India - the
imperialist-dependent capitalists and the feudal landlords - can the problem of hunger in
1978