Articles by Bhabani Sen Gupta

eroded by the war) and, by doing so, conflicted directly with the demands of agro- export capitalists for a steady supply of cheap labour at harvest time. 'The policy of strengthening and reorganising the campesino sector tends to break one of the fundamental givens on which the functioning of the agro-export sector is based: the existence of a reserve labour supply whose low level of income and absence of alternative sources of employment has left them at the disposition of this sector for use during the agro-export harvests, without causing this sector additional cost during the rest of the year" (p 57).

India after the By-Elections Bhabani Sen Gupta Apart from consolidating Narasimha Rao's leadership of the Congress government, the by-elections have only confirmed the deep and durable fragmentation of the electorate. No political party has been able to wean away entrenched support from any other party.

CALL it 'electionitis' or 'electionics': when a democracy is forced to go in for two elections in 18 months, it is sick; when even the second election does not promise a stable government, it is very sick. The politicians blame each other for the sickness; they are determined to disown their collective responsibility. But, as Camus once put it, in a democracy everyone is guilty of what goes grievously wrong. If our democracy has come to a pass where it cannot elect a government that works or even lasts a fairly long time, all of us have to sit down and scratch our heads to discover what really has gone wrong, and how serious is the wrong that has happened and whether it can be righted in the normal process of democratic remedies of which election is only one.

Transitional Turmoil The current political disarray and the social turmoil in large parts of the country are the signs and consequences of the tensions in India's multinational, multicultural political milieu within which innumerable political and social experiments are taking place.

After the Crisis: Taller or Smaller?
Bhabani Sen Gupta The apocalyptic view of the July crisis and of V P Singh's 'failure' to provide leadership springs from a basic lack of understanding of how the National Front government came into being, what its major commitments to the people are, what can reasonably be expected of it and what precisely its role in India's no-longer-linear political evolution is.