Narendra Modi Has Ruled in the Interests of Big Capital https://jacobin.com/2025/05/narendra-modi-bjp-inc-neoliberalism ..The story of the BJP’s rise and the INC’s roughly proportionate decline is a complex one with many threads. The historical development of different factions of capital in India and the shifting dynamics of conflict between them is a key part of the picture...
Though big capital is unquestionably the dominant faction in India’s ruling coalition, two factors constrain the capacity of the state to act in its interests. First of all, the adoption of political democracy based on universal adult franchise in 1947 empowered classes that might have been dispossessed by an industrial transformation — small manufacturing and agrarian capital, small and marginal peasants, and a large mass of people surviving through petty commodity production, trade, and services — to influence state policy.
Although the neoliberal policy consensus is shared by forces across the political spectrum in India, including by communist, socialist, and social democratic parties, the present BJP government has pushed it further than any regime since the 1990s... A bid to further deregulate agricultural output markets and weaken MSP guarantees was defeated by a movement led by left-wing farm unions that represent middle, small, and marginal farmers — the only time in the last two decades that the BJP has had to conceded defeat on a major policy move