REFLECTIONS ON THE NATURE OF THE INDIAN BOURGEOISIE 17 More than a hundred years back, Marx had written, in reference to merchant capital, that its existence and development to a certain level are historical premises for the development of capitalist production. He cautioned, however, that its development is by itself incapable of promoting genuine capitalism and explaining the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This formulation still remains valid today but it has to be interpreted in the light of our particular circumstances. Indian ruling classes in their urge for self-preservation at any cost have erected formidable obstacles against the development of industrial capitalism in India. Indian agriculture in many parts of the country remains locked in semi-feudal relations. Outside a few enclaves of organized industry and finance, Indian labour faces extreme repression whenever it tries to set up effective unions.5 Indian technologists see their efforts being continually subverted by the touts of foreign enterprises. Indian civil law remains fragmented into myriad divisions of religious injunction. Some years back, in the controversy over the Shah Bano case, the Congress(I) government at the Centre instituted a particularly retrograde variant of Muslim personal law against the opposition of many sections of Muslim opinion and the opposition of all politically active women and at one blow made the position of Muslim women in India inferior to that of Muslim men. At that time I found many of the Hindu communalists very enthusiastic in opposition to the»enactment of the Muslim personal law because they thought that if this was Muslim law, they could show how Muslim law as such was inimical to the welfare of ordinary p ;ople. What nobody talks about is that Hindu law remains tied to the apron strings of religion and extremely subdivided, varying in different parts of the country. It is with the help of the Mitakshara law what many of the Indian capitalist groups and property-owners protect their property in legal and semi-legal ways. And these laws go against most of the rules of bourgeois logic. As yet there is no move among all these enthusiasts for bringing back Muslim personal law into the general arena of civil law to bring all the Hindus under the umbrella of a non-religious civil law meant for all Indians. To my sorrow and surprise, most of my radical friends also have not yet really voiced this demand SLS strongly as they should have done. Big Indian capitalists by and large remain casteist, communalist, collaborationist, authoritarian, and thrive by corruptly utilizing governmental machinery. They behave like short-sighted merchants even when they control large factories. The few who try to behave as industrial capitalists and exploit the home-market, for increasing output and making productivity gains are all the time hobbled by myopic governmental policies favouring collaboration with foreign capital on unequal terms. There is plenty of evidence from Eastern India in areas such as drugs and pharmaceuticals, engineering, ceramics and metallurgy that the more progressive and more nationally oriented