22 April 1969 marked the resurgence of revolutionary communism in India from the quagmire of revisionism. Since then the CPI(ML) has taken in its stride savage repressions, serious mistakes and major splits, to reorganise and reassert itself both at the grassroots and in the national political arena. To defend the revolutionary orientation, principles and values which the party has held aloft all these years, it is necessary to continuously combat the liberal ideas that sneak into it and seek to lure it away from the correct but difficult course.
There are some comrades and friends who care a fig for the Leninist understanding of parliamentary struggles. What's the use of all these campaigns, they ask, if no seats come our way? Well aware of our sincere-principled efforts to tie up with parties like the CPI in Bihar, they press for a pragmatic alliance, one that will deliver seats, to be secured at any cost.
This pessimist framework refuses to go beneath the surface, into the areas where TV crews cannot reach, and feel there the real impulses of social dynamism. Thus no significance is attached to the high pitch of activity and assertion of our basic class forces, which surpassed all earlier levels in Bihar and certain other areas like Koraput in Orissa. Now this is something that won't attract any media attention, and therefore has little market value. And for parties like the CPI and the CPI(M), class militancy and initiatives are things which consistently go down as their parliamentary 'skills' go up. For a revolutionary communist party, on the contrary, this is the most fundamental achievement - one that lays the basis for all other expansionary initiatives and which can be accorded a secondary place only by those who have given up the Marxist class approach. Another significant achievement in Bihar was the exceptionally wide response and active support we received from sections of people who mainly constitute the social base of RJD. Most important among them are the Yadavs, the bulk of whom belong to the middle peasantry - the rural proletariat's crucial ally in anti-feudal struggle. In some places they even said that after the RJD they considered the Maley (CPI(ML)) to be their second party. Such interactions further emboldened our dalit-landless-poor peasant base and made it difficult for feudal forces, including the Ranvir Sena, to launch attacks or capture booths. But in most cases this support stopped short of votes. So in the parliamentarist approach all these are deemed useless, and the people are blamed being treacherous for voicing support but voting otherwise.
Well, did we play our part properly? Did we actually fight for the interests of those sections who are getting attracted to us? What policies and issues should we now take up for that? How to channelise, in movemental forms, the fresh spurt of initiative among the most downtrodden? How to take up a planned expansion of party and peasant organisations among the new-found support-base? Questions like these - which call for a lot of hard thinking, thorough investigation and pain-staking practice - are sidelined in the superficial thought pattern outlined above. Rather the easy way out is sought and found in any "winning" alliance or seat adjustment, say with the RJD in Bihar. Which could only mean a very dishonourable pact, with the big party supporting us in very few seats in return for our support throughout Bihar. A seat or two won this way - by sacrificing our statewide projection and social activism, and by incurring the stigma of joining the RJD-Congress camp - would have signified a most demoralising defeat for our brand of politics, for our movement.
Such liberal, if not yet liquidationist, thought patterns assume different logical shapes in different political junctures. Comrades nurturing them are honest and well-meaning, but in the face of powerful onslaught of the bourgeois media, they easily waver and give up the proletarian stand, viewpoint and method. Of course, these notions have few takers in the party. Yet it is necessary to consciously repudiate the harmful trends characterised by abandonment of the class viewpoint, loss of faith in the people, reliance on bourgeois or social democratic parties, aversion for critical summing up of our mass work, and lack of conviction in the party's tactical line and strategic perspective. In such ideological struggle lies the essence of party building, a task we have to stress in commemoration of party foundation. For this alone enables us to perceive and pursue the new tasks of the new situation in a way that is different from the revisionists', and consistent with the goal we had set ourselves 29 years ago.