Terms of Trade | A century apart, the story of the politics of swadeshi

The use of Swadeshi as a political tactic, which called for a boycott of imported goods, was an integral part of the Indian freedom struggle.

Events around West Asian countries registering their strong diplomatic protest against inappropriate remarks by two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokespersons – the BJP has taken disciplinary action against them and they are also facing police cases now – dominated the news cycle this week.

The boycott call was meant to “settle scores” against Qatar’s “anti-India” behaviour (it was one of the countries which registered the protest). 

Ironic as it is, among the most profound political economy aspects related to this issue was brought to the fore by a fake news video where a man posing as the CEO of Qatar Airways was seen making fun of an Indian’s tweet calling for the boycott of the airline. The boycott call was meant to “settle scores” against Qatar’s “anti-India” behaviour (it was one of the countries which registered the protest). The “fringe-element” driven call for a boycott of Qatar Airways is not the first episode of vocal supporters of the Hindu Right, whether or not directly associated with the BJP, asking for an economic boycott of companies which have been deemed to be against what is considered “national” or “cultural” interest.

There are various such episodes including intermittent calls for the boycott of Chinese goods — these were particularly strong after tensions started between India and China on the Line of Actual Control in 2020 — to targeted campaigns against companies such as Snapdeal, Titan and Fab India for a particular advertising campaign or acts of important personalities associated with these brands.

If one were to step aside from the usual noise that such episodes trigger on both sides of the political spectrum, an argument can be made that there is nothing wrong in using a strategy of economic boycott as long as laws are not being broken and persuasion is the only tactic being deployed. In fact, the use of Swadeshi as a political tactic, which called for a boycott of imported goods, had been an integral part of the political praxis deployed in the Indian freedom struggle even before the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi on the scene.

Lest one takes offence to a comparison of what was an integral component of the freedom movement to what critics of the Hindu Right think is sheer bigotry, which is being reflected through such calls today, it is useful to remind them that in both pre and post-Gandhi phase, deployment of Swadeshi as a political tactic was an extremely controversial one.

In many instances, it led to violent conflicts including communal riots. The validity of swadeshi as a political tactic also features prominently in the debates between Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, where the latter was sharply critical of the former investing his political capital in a cause from which Tagore saw no benefits whatsoever.

What this week’s column will argue, based on debates and academic work on swadeshi in the pre-independence era, is the following — even though there is nothing wrong with deploying calls for economic boycott as a political tactic, the case for doing this today in India is far weaker than it was during the freedom struggle. The biggest reason for this difference is the vast progress India has made on the path of capitalist development. Not only has this made the deployment of swadeshi tactics incompatible with national economic goals, but it also betrays a fundamental sense of economic hypocrisy on part of the voices, especially within the ranks of the elite, who advocate such tactics. However, none of this means that such politics is likely to disappear anytime soon.

The impact of early 20th century swadeshi politics

Historian Tariq Omar Ali’s book A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta offers a very interesting account of the possible reasons for conflict around the deployment of Swadeshi as a political tactic.

Ali’s book traces the sudden prosperity, which the (predominantly) Muslim peasantry in the Bengal delta came to enjoy after the cultivation of jute in the region was followed by an international price boom in the jute. The enhanced incomes, Ali shows in his book, led to a large increase in consumption of imported goods and conspicuous consumption of all varieties, which included cloth made in Lancashire to Swedish match-sticks and even West-inspired food items such as confectionaries and sweetmeats.

The sudden prosperity of the jute-cultivating Muslim peasant made him more assertive and economically strong against the hitherto powerful Hindu landlords and the newly emerged Hindu urban Bengali middle class; Ali’s book discusses how the cash-rich jute peasantry was outbidding the Hilsa (a fish considered a delicacy in Bengal) from the urban salaried professional. The latter played a key role in the evolution of the economic doctrine of imperialism-driven drain of wealth in India and the use of Swadeshi as a tactic to turn the tables on the Raj.

However, for the Muslim peasant, the deployment of Swadeshi was seen as an effort to not just force him to consume far more expensive locally made items but also an attack on the continuation of what Ali has described as “rural markets as spaces of pleasurable and indulgent consumption”. The book discusses instances of violence between pro and anti-Swadeshi groups in fairs and local markets over issues such as forcing a small boy to return a small box labelled “Made in Germany” or vandalising a Muslim trader’s shop which was selling Liverpool salt. The same Muslim peasantry, which was willing to take to violence to defend its right to consume imported goods in local markets, would take to widespread looting of markets when jute prices crashed in the later period, the book says.

The early Swadeshi movement lessons should serve as a good historical lesson against any attempts to interfere with consumer preferences, especially where they concern a majority, to achieve political goals.

On this count at least, the BJP and its fellow travellers seem to be more pragmatic than the swadeshi enthusiasts of the early 20th century. One such example is the BJP’s relatively conciliatory approach to the issue of beef-eating in Kerala and Northeastern states where a large number of non-Muslims including Hindus also consume beef. As far as the question of the BJP’s opposition to beef-eating in large parts of the country is concerned, it might only be a reiteration of an overwhelming majority’s view, as opposition of Hindus to beef-eating in most parts of India is a largely bipartisan political value.

Swadeshi was driven by an economic agenda during the freedom movement

While Ali’s book argues that the conflict around Swadeshi is best seen in terms of Muslim peasants protecting their freedom as consumers rather than on communal lines, other historians have argued that communal divisions did get worse because of it.

“Hindu-Muslim relations posed the greatest challenge before the swadeshi movement, and ultimately proved its greatest failure. The campaign against an arbitrary administrative partition (of Bengal), launched in the name of the essential unity of the Bengali-speaking people, ended with the two socio-religious groups into which that community was almost equally divided further apart from each other and more conscious of their mutual hostility than ever before”, Sumit Sarkar writes in his book The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal.

This conclusion notwithstanding, it would be unfair to say that the pre-independence Swadeshi movement was motivated solely by a desire of Hindus to settle scores with Muslims. In fact, the drive, even though it was harmful from the communal harmony viewpoint, was part of a larger nationalist vision to seek out a path independent of imperial subjugation. New York University historian Manu Goswami has articulated this argument well in her 1998 paper From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907.

“In order to combat the hegemony of British capital, nationalists proposed the protection and delimitation of indigenous capital within a national space. Condensed in Surendranath Banerjee's rhetorical question was a core ideological impulse of swadeshi: "If protection by legislative enactment is impossible, may we not, by fiat of the national will, afford industries such protection as may lie in our powers?" Goswami writes, while adding that “The swadeshi movement spurred the establishment, for instance, of the Tata Industrial Steel Company (TISCO) in 1907, the Bank of India and Canara Bank in 1906, the Bank of Baroda and Punjab and Sind Bank in 1908, and the Central Bank of India in 1911. Despite Gandhi's later conceptually radical reformulation, swadeshi was a movement for the nationalization of capital, not its abolition”.

Why today is different

Indian capital’s urge to break out of and protect itself from foreign domination was an important factor in the ideological consensus between it and the Indian state on adopting a state-led economic model. The willingness to live with a state-led model, which had strong elements of protectionism (something Swadeshi always demanded), gradually lost traction after the state was seen as an impediment to the growth of markets and hence profits, both in domestic and foreign markets. This change in the nature of the Indian capitalist class was discussed in detail in an earlier column.

To be sure, the support for discarding swadeshi in favour of a more outward-looking economic approach is not limited to capitalists alone in today’s India. The Indian diaspora is among the biggest in the world today and it sends a huge amount of money in remittances from incomes in many parts of the world, a large part of which comes from the oil-rich West Asian countries, which, unlike Indian Americans, also employ a large number of blue-collar workers. In fact, this must have been an important consideration in the BJP’s action on its spokespersons after protests by West Asian countries.

The lack of a widespread material basis for preaching economic boycott means that this tactic, when it is employed today, is basically aimed at creating political polarisation through the act or appeal of inflicting economic pain on the political rather than economic adversary. This is best seen in growing calls for economic boycotts of even small Muslim shopkeepers in places such as Karnataka.

What remains relevant

Many commentators have been rightly pointing out the threat to India’s economic prospects if divisive politics focusing on economic disruption of the kind described above, continues to gain in strength. These assertions, however correct they might be, however, do not explain why such politics continues to gain ground in India.

Among the most plausible explanations given is that Narendra Modi, arguably India’s biggest mass leader today, has not been forthcoming in criticising such politics and disapprovals, when they have come have been few and far between. Another argument believes that such acts provide a useful diversionary tactic to the present regime which has not been able to offer much in terms of economic advancement to the people at large.

If it is of any solace to people looking to answer such questions, one of India’s biggest intellectuals also made similar charges against the country’s biggest ever mass leader. While Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi were great friends, their intellectual disagreements, which were expressed freely in public debates, were quite unsparing even if entirely cordial.

Among the most important debates between Gandhiji and Tagore is the former’s insistence that spinning the Charkha would help India realise the goal of Swaraj. Not only did Tagore think it was a baseless idea, he also saw it as a diversionary tactic from larger challenges at hand.

“In Bengal, we have a nursery rhyme which soothes the infant with the assurance that it will get the lollipop if only it twirls its hands. But is it a likely policy to reassure grown up people by telling them that they will get their swaraj – that is to say, get rid of all poverty, in spite of their social habits that are a perpetual impediment and mental habits producing inertia of intellect and will – by simply twirling away with their hands?”, Tagore wrote in 1925 essay The Cult of the Charkha.

For Gandhi, the spinning wheel or Charkha was the first step to realising his ideal of a self-sufficient exploitation-free society, as articulated in Gram Swaraj. “Just as, if we are to live, we must breathe not air imported from England, nor eat food so imported, so may we not import cloth made in England. I do not hesitate to carry the doctrine to its logical limit and say that Bengal dare not import her cloth from Bombay or Banga Lakshmi. If Bengal will live her natural and free life without exploiting the rest of India or the world outside, she must manufacture her cloth in her own villages as she grows her corn there”, Gandhi wrote in his essay called The Poet and the Charkha which was a response to Tagore’s essay quoted above.

Gandhi’s idea of India as a village-based economy was shunned by his biggest follower Jawaharlal Nehru, and rightly so, when India opted for a plan-based model to build a modern economy after gaining independence. However, some of the problems which had moved Gandhi towards his swadeshi Gram-Swaraj thesis are as relevant today as they were then.

“Machinery has its place; it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace the necessary human labour… I would welcome every improvement in the cottage machine but I know that it is criminal to displace the hand labour by the introduction of power-driven spindles unless one is at the same time ready to give millions of farmers some other occupation in their homes”, he wrote further in The Poet and the Charkha.

The biggest reason the politics of schadenfreude, as described above, resonates with a large number of poor people in India today is that they have been left far behind in the onward march of economic prosperity which has also been accompanied by a large increase in inequality. It is in this disappointment and anger that they are willing to be convinced about perceived villains who are responsible for their plight. As long as this economic dualism persists, politics cannot be expected to show maturity in the larger interest of the nation-state. This also means that the international embarrassment which India has had to face for its shrill domestic political polemics, might not be the last such incident.

Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal