To me the issue with the strikes, as i said, appears to be that they were defensive actions rather than offensive. The government tries to implement neoliberal policies which would harm the people and this provokes a response: people protest and try to mobilize to stop it.
The problem when you always play defense is that you can at most stall the enemy's advance, never roll it back. And eventually the protests weaken or die down and the government still implements the neoliberal reforms, even if slower or temporarily in a more diluted form.
The people need to start taking the initiative and organize proactively. Demands need to be made for something and not just against something. And this needs to happen under a sustained, long term, organized and ideologically coherent movement rather than a spontaneous, single-issue uprising.
This cannot be achieved without political organizations. Even if you have to organize clandestinely at first, until a critical mass is reached which the government can no longer suppress. Whether the material conditions are suitable yet for this level of organizing, given that as you said, there is still some growth, i don't know.
Maybe the country does need to first hit rock bottom or some kind of crisis before this becomes a real possibility. I hope not.
Another interesting aspect to consider is how will the geopolitical situation with the US empire on the decline and China on the rise affect the interests of the national bourgeoisie? Will they still be motivated to act as compradors or will they be forced to adopt a more sovereigntist line on national economic development?
It is true that socialism and the caste system are fundamentally incompatible. But the question is which needs to come first? Do you first have to get rid of the caste system to have a socialist revolution or do you need a socialist revolution to get rid of the caste system? A sort of chicken-and-egg problem, if you will.
I'm thinking here of historical examples such as the feudal-patriarchal social order that existed in pre-revolutionary China. Did the revolution require women to be liberated and feudalism to be abolished before it could happen or could the liberation of women and abolition of feudalism only happen once the revolution had succeeded?
In fact what happened was both essentially took place at the same time. The revolutionaries pushed for land reforms, women's equality and dissolution of the old aristocratic system and this in turn made the success of the revolution possible as it rallied more people to the cause and convinced them that this was the force which was fighting for their objective material interests.
Obviously this didn't happen overnight and it wasn't just willed into existence by having the correct ideological line and someone speaking the correct words. It took decades of real on-the-ground struggle, communists working alongside the people and to convince them of the necessity of these changes. People also had to experience what didn't work and didn't deliver on its promises, which in China's case was the nationalist path.
Perhaps India needs to experience first the failure of the neoliberal path.