(Address delivered by CPI(ML) General Secretary Comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya at the inaugural session)
Comrades and friends,
On behalf of our outgoing Central Committee and the Seventh Congress of our Party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), I extend a very warm welcome to all of you present at this inaugural session.
I extend warm revolutionary greetings to the veterans of the communist and left movement and the veteran fighters from the flaming fields of Bihar who have transformed this backward and oppressed region into an advanced outpost of Indian revolution. Your presence here is a source of great inspiration for all of us.
I welcome, with a warm Red Salute, all our esteemed fraternal guests who have come here from as far as Australia and Norway to our closest neighbouring countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, bringing us greetings of solidarity from their own organisations and movements. We take this opportunity to renew our shared resolve to sharpen our concerted resistance to the number one global enemy of the world people - American imperialism and its ugly war on the world.
I say a very big thank you to our comrades and friends who have come from various parts of Bihar to convey their best wishes to this inaugural session. This Seventh Congress of our Party is a testimony of the great support and cooperation we have received from you. I say a special thank you to all our friends from the media whose constant critical gaze over our Party has always prompted us to strengthen and intensify the revolutionary movement for freedom, democracy, human dignity and progress.
And last but not the least, I extend a hearty welcome to all our delegates, observers and guests from various parts of the country and also from the Indian diaspora in the heartlands of western imperialism who are going to be with us over the next five days for an intense brainstorming exercise to determine our course of action for the challenging days ahead.
Comrades and friends,
Bihar has a very special place in the history and geography of our movement. In the early 1970s, when the Indian ruling classes had begun to believe that they had succeeded in crushing the great Naxalbari movement, Bihar proved them wrong. The oppressed rural poor of Bihar rose with the greatest of courage, determination and heroism to give a new lease of life to the movement. The flames of Naxalbari were rekindled in the villages of Bhojpur and however deep the darkness may threaten to be, the torch of the revolutionary peasant movement has invariably prevailed over it at the end.
It was here in Bihar that our Party was reorganised with the formation of just a three-member Central Committee on 28 July 1974. On the 29th of November 1975, Comrade Jauhar, the second General Secretary of our Party embraced martyrdom in Babubandh village of Bhojpur. And four years ago many of us were present here in Patna to say adieu to Comrade Vinod Mishra. The soil of the communist movement in Bihar has been enriched by the precious blood shed by our countless martyrs.
The revolutionary movement in Bihar is no longer confined to the villages of Bhojpur and Patna. From Siwan to Champaran and Nalanda to Nawada, it has now spread to almost every corner of the state. It has kept itself alive in the face of the heaviest of state repression and organised feudal violence. It has decimated the challenge of one private army after another and withstood dozens of massacres. This is why when Gujarat burns the people of Bhojpur have no difficulty in recognising the fire. When the Modis and Togadias declare a war on India’s history of cultural plurality and threaten to turn India into a graveyard of democracy and secularism, we know that we have already seen their cohorts in action at Bathani Tola and Bathe.
This is why we invoke the Bihar model of red resistance to the Gujarat challenge of saffron subversion. The fascist threat to India is backed by an alliance of the ugliest elements of Indian history and society and the most obnoxious designs of global capital and US imperialism. To defeat this alliance we need a fighting coalition of the progressive forces of Indian society and the progressive trends of Indian history powered by the noblest vision of modern history - the vision of socialism and communism, and led by the most trusted and tested banner of human progress, the red banner of resistance and revolution. The Seventh Congress of our Party being held in Bihar is dedicated to this great task of strengthening the Bihar model of red resistance and spreading it all over India to combat and eliminate the growing threat of fascist subversion.
Comrades and friends,
We are passing through a very critical phase in our national life. This 6th of December will mark the tenth anniversary of that most disgraceful event in recent Indian history, the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which was the first alarming announcement of the arrival of the fascist threat in India. From Ayodhya to Ahmedabad, the threat has since covered considerable distance.
The saffron brigade today is displaying a new level of aggression, the AK-47 of the Vajpayee-Joshi-Advani vintage giving way to the AK-56 of the Modi-Togadia-Singhal variety. The Congress can only think of offering some competition by hiring the services of ex-servicemen from the Sangh. The Vaghela show in Gujarat is a clear example of the kind of competition that the Congress can offer. It is a continuation of the same disastrous way in which the Congress has always ended up legitimising the RSS and fuelling the saffron offensive with its attempts to steal the saffron agenda.
Can politics in India be allowed to be reduced to a competition between Modi’s BJP and Vaghela’s Congress? For all of us who shudder to think of being subjected to such a ‘choice’, where is the alternative way? The last decade has shown us clearly that enterprises of the RJD-SP-BSP variety, which once used to claim to be walking the third way, have gone absolutely bankrupt. The time has come when the new generations of fighters for democracy and social justice must reject the blind alleys of bankruptcy and betrayal, corruption and criminalisation where the self-styled disciples of JP, Lohia and Ambedkar have led them. Beyond these blind alleys, we will be only too happy to welcome you with open arms and march shoulder to shoulder with you in fighting the peddlers of aggressive communalism, Brahminical social oppression and economic backwardness and bondage.
I also take this opportunity to make a very special appeal to every section of the Left. Why can’t we unite and uphold our common legacy to resist and defeat our common enemy? Why can’t we, the heirs of Bhagat Singh, wage a powerful and unified resistance to defeat the disciples of Golwalkar and admirers of Hitler? Why can’t we hold out a vibrant democratic vision of united India that can inspire confidence even in the smallest and weakest of minorities in the face of the growing clamour for a Hindu Rashtra and a hard state that is arming itself with draconian laws like POTA to silence every dissenting voice? Why can’t we come closer in our day-to-day struggles on issues of livelihood and democratic rights and move towards a broad-based confederation of all Left forces and eventually to a unified party of all Indian communists?
Before coming to Patna I had the privilege of meeting Comrade Abani Lahiri, one of our last living links with the great Tebhaga movement of the 1940s. He asked me point-blank, why couldn’t the communist parties with more than a million members and more than fifteen million people come up with a programme of unified resistance to the Gujarat genocide? Why couldn’t we organise political strikes of the working class and protest marches of the rural poor all over the country? Some people may believe that missing the Prime Minister’s chair was a historic blunder for the Left, but comrades like Abani Lahiri continue to remind us that it is our inability to unite and combat the common enemy in the fields of struggle that will be construed as the real historic blunder in the face of today’s growing fascist and imperialist offensive. I could not agree more with him. As I address you, his words are ringing in my ears.
This was the clarion call that Comrade VM had made from the podium of our Party’s Fifth Congress held in Kolkata in December 1992. This is the commitment that Comrade Nagbhushan made at the CPI’s Chennai Congress in 1998 weeks before he passed away. This is the cause symbolised by Comrade Taqui Rahim, to whose memory we have dedicated the hall of this Seventh Congress. This is the dream that Comrade Chandrashekhar had in his eyes when he fell to the bullets of the Shahabuddin gang in Siwan.
Unite We Must. Unite We Shall. The Seventh Congress of the CPI(ML) renews this great commitment and makes a fervent appeal to all sections of the Indian Left to respond to this need of the hour and rise to the occasion.
We began by paying homage to our great martyrs. Not all of them were killed by the Ranvir Sena or other criminal mafia gangs or the killers in uniform who are known as the police. Many of our comrades have fallen to the bullets of the anarchists for whom this is what constitutes the people’s war. We, revolutionary communists have a different idiom. We uphold our right to self-defence under all circumstances, but we do not believe in political killings. Revolution for us is not a one-act play; it does not consist in sensational display or cowardly use of arms. Revolution for us is an epic; it is a genuine and protracted people’s war directed against the most brutal and reactionary enemies of the people. Revolution for us is the biggest festival of the masses, a celebration and triumph of life over the morbid culture of death. We will continue to live and die for revolution.
Red Salute to our great martyrs!
Inquilab Zindabad!