Even before the advent of COVID19, India's economy was in a depression. The condition of vast masses of people, particularly those in the informal sector, was grave. Then the Indian government, responding to the COVID pandemic, imposed the most stringent lockdown measures in the world. The lockdown had a particularly severe impact on the majority of India's people, who number well over one billion. At the same time, the Indian government, compared to other world governments, has provided virtually no financial aid to cushion economic blows to its population. Crisis and Predation explains that this shocking tightfistedness stems from the fact that global financial interests, as well as India's ruling neofascist government, explicitly oppose any sizable expansion of government spending by India. Crisis and Predation, a project of the Mumbai based Research Unit for Political Economy, lays out in meticulous and harrowing detail the economic - and human - crisis currently unfolding in India. As the COVID situation unfolds and pandemic deaths skyrocket, prevailing emergency conditions encourage reliance on security forces, state surveillance, detention of political activists, and censorship of independent media. And yet, this book contends, India could defy the pressures of global finance in order to address the basic needs of its people, an objective within the reach of India's present material capacity. But this would require imposing controls on destabilizing flows of foreign capital and being prepared to forgo foreign capital flows in the future, in other words, a course of democratic national development. For that, Indian rulers would need just what they currently lack: a positive vision of democracy and class alliance to bring it about. This hard hitting and carefully researched book, offering devastating financial analysis, also offers hope for change.
