(Concluding remarks by Comrade Dipnkar Bhattacharya at the delegate session of 7th Congress)
We have had four days of intense and inspiring discussion on every aspect of the report. Many points that came up in the course of debates have already been clarified. Several amendments suggested by delegates have already been recommended for incorporation into the final document. I would like to limit myself to just three areas: the fascist threat, the question of our work among the middle peasantry and agricultural workers, and strengthening the Party organisation.
This is the first Party Congress in which we have spent so much time discussing fascism. The chapter dealing with the national situation and our tasks is replete with references to fascism or fascist dictatorship. This is but natural. For this is the first Congress being held in the shadow of such a serious threat. Now in describing the fascist danger in India, the term that we have used most often is communal fascism. This term has not been coined by us, rather we have used it because it has already gained currency in general political usage. Terms like Hindutva fascism or saffron fascism are also used equivalently. The reason is quite obvious – the slogan of Hindu Rashtra is central to the fascist project of the Sangh Parivar, and Ayodhya and Gujarat remain the two major milestones marking the ascendance of the fascist forces during the last ten years.
Ideologues and activists of the dalit movement often describe this fascism as Brahminical fascism. They believe that this term best expresses the essence of fascism for it highlights the historically principal fissure or faultline within the majority Hindu community as well. Indeed, for all the RSS attempts to appropriate Ambedkar and woo dalits and the BJP’s repeated alliances with the BSP, there can be no glossing over the stark reality of increasing atrocities on dalits. The whole bogey of religious conversion is invoked systematically to browbeat and persecute dalits as well as religious minorities. And in Bihar we have been experiencing this whole phenomenon of private armies, the close, organic ideological-operational nexus between the Sangh parivar and an outfit like the Ranvir Sena which specialises in massacring the rural poor from a dalit-oppressed background.
It is also not difficult to see the key role that patriarchy plays in the Sangh parivar’s scheme of things. Glorification of patriarchal practices like sati, subordination of women to all kinds of obscurantist codes of conduct and perpetration of the most brutal and organised violence against women especially from minority communities and dalit-adivasi sections have been hallmarks of the fascist offensive in India.
Now these are all characteristic features of fascism in India and one may choose to describe fascism in terms of any of these or other related dimensions. There is nothing really contradictory or mutually exclusive about these different aspects and we can use any term to describe any particular situation as long as we are clear about the class character of the fascist danger facing us. Fascism is open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary section of the bourgeoisie of a country. In India too, fascism can only be understood as the ugliest form of bourgeois-landlord rule where power is wielded by the most reactionary, bigoted and venal elements of the ruling classes.
The ideological underpinning of this fascism is provided by the RSS with its concepts of Hindu Rashtra, cultural nationalism and so on and so forth. But we cannot understand the fascist threat merely in terms of the intricate organisational nework and ideology of the RSS. The RSS has been fascist since its inception, but it has not always enjoyed the kind of influence and power it enjoys today. What is important is to understand the dynamics of developments that has made the Sangh’s ideology acceptable to the ruling classes and also to considerable sections of the people.
One aspect of it is linked to developments in the larger international arena – the collapse of the Soviet Union and the intensification of American hegemony as the world’s only surviving superpower. The Sangh Parivar has been consolidating its domestic position in what New Delhi calls strategic partnership with Washington. The pseudo-nationalists of the Sangh do not however have the guts to admit the simple fact that in this partnership they are only playing the humiliating role of a very junior partner, the kind of role that can only make the rulers of a vassal state proud. This strategic integration with US imperialism has entered a new phase after 11 September with the extension of unconditional Indian support to the US-led global war.
Then there is this whole agenda of economic neo-liberalism which entails a wholesale reshaping of the role of third world nation-states to serve the interests of free movement of global capital within the framework of so-called free trade and free market. Implementation of this neo-liberal agenda of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation has started resulting in large-scale socio-economic disruption and the ruling classes are therefore clamouring for a hardening of the Indian state to contain the growing resentment of the masses. The entire gamut of legislative measures from POTA to labour law amendments and institutional interventions that smack of judicial despotism constitute an unmistakable political complement to the agenda of economic neo-liberalism. Like the cancerous growth of corruption and criminalisation, systematic curtailment and erosion of democracy is also a characteristic feature of the polity in every neo-liberal economy.
There are also certain aspects which are rather specific to India. Since the late seventies India has witnessed a surge in the movements of various nationalities and other regional identities. Beginning with the Assam movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s through the Khalistani insurgency to the movement for self-determination of the Kashmiri people, powerful centrifugal pulls have been at work all through the post-Emergency era. Instead of reinforcing India’s national unity externally on a strong anti-imperialist basis and internally on a more democratic and inclusive foundation, the ruling classes have followed precisely the opposite course of kowtowing to imperialist pressures while whipping up a constant jingoistic frenzy against Pakistan and riding roughshod over the democratic aspirations of the small nationalities, backward regions and alienated groups of people. Shrill chauvinism, draconian laws like NSA, TADA and POTA and extensive deployment of armed forces equipped with special powers have been the order of the day. It is in such a context that the BJP’s advocacy of a Hindu Rashtra and a hard state has come to find a larger audience.
It is also important to look at the changing social complexion of Indian politics in the post-Naxalbari period. While the Indian state succeeded in overpowering the Naxalbari-inspired CPI(ML)-led quest for political power, the spirit of Naxalbari survived in the form of a militant awakening of the rural poor for land and liberty, for democracy and dignity. It was not possible to meet this challenge merely at gunpoint. The ruling classes needed to widen their social base and acquire a new social complexion. It was to meet this need that the ruling classes finally accepted the Mandal formula or the politics of so-called social justice. But the process of co-option of the emerging elite from backward castes and dalits has also generated its own tension and the ruling classes are now faced with the challenge of keeping the whole process under control. For a good section of the ruling classes the answer seems to lie in the Sangh parivar’s discourse of cultural nationalism and social harmony around a Brahminical core of Hindutva.
If the RSS is now able to sell its ideology, albeit with an amount of adapatation and updating, to significant sections of the ruling classes as well as the people – let us not forget that the ideas of the ruling classes become the ruling ideas – the reason has to be located in this constellation of diverse factors. The ruling classes are increasingly unable to negotiate this juncture without an extreme course and hence the RSS and its politics, which, if not marginal, were never so central in the previous decades, shot into such prominence during the last decade or so. Of course, as Gujarat has revealed, not all sections of the ruling classes are completely satisfied with the turn and magnitude of events. Hence we find the Congress offering some opposition and some institutions and wings of the state are at times refusing to fall in line.
Now some comrade here has said that the Supreme Court or certain other institutions have been inconsistent. They come up with some positive judgements one day only to let you down the next day with an obnoxious ruling. Well, what kind of consistency do you expect from these institutions which are not products of even a bourgeois democratic revolution? There is certainly some kind of unease with the BJP and especially with the RSS in certain sections of the ruling classes, but it is not correct for Marxist-Leninists, for revolutionaries to construe this unease as some sort of principled opposition on questions of secularism, democracy or anti-imperialism.
We must always remember the other side of the coin. The circumstances under which the BJP has come to prosper also hold for the Congress and we cannot overlook the large area of consensus between the two parties. Even in Gujarat both are fighting for the same legacy of Sardar Patel and the Congress cannot think of taking on the BJP on any basis other than that of what has come to be widely termed as soft Hindutva. The difference between the two is one of degree and not of kind. Just as the temptation to paint a section of the bourgeoisie as progressive or anti-imperialist on the basis of the foreign policy of non-alignment or certain economic measures like zamindari abolition or bank nationalisation has been proved to be completely subjective, any attempt to discover a fascist-democratic or communal-secular division in the bourgeoisie is also bound to prove disastrous.
If you are looking for consistency and strength in waging anti-imperialist anti-fascist or patriotic-democratic resistance, you will find it only in the class forces of democratic revolution, the working class including the rural proletariat, the labouring peasantry and the progressive-democratic intelligentsia. This is why our tactical line lays the greatest of emphases on developing worker-peasant struggles, especially militant resistance of the oppressed rural poor and taking that as the key to having a stronger assertion of the Left and developing closer ties of political cooperation with other Left and democratic forces. About the dalit-backward-adivasi-minority streams and the diverse movements for autonomy and self-determination we have to maintain an analytical approach. These are not undifferentiated homogeneous categories and viewing all such forces and trends as inherently democratic is no less flawed than attempts to seek reliable democratic allies within the bourgeois and landlord-kulak camp. Both these approaches have landed the opportunist Left in the morass of tailism and parliamentary cretinism.
In sharp contrast to this opportunist line which surrenders the initiative to the Congress, corrupts proletarian consciousness by sowing illusions about the democratic pretensions of sections of the bourgeoisie and the kulak lobby and sacrifices the key content of proletarian indpendence and assertion at the altar of united front politics under bourgeois leadership, our tactical line is aimed at raising the level of political consciousness of the people and strengthening the assertion and intervention of the Left to expose every bourgeois pretension and betrayal and challenge the bourgeois hegemony. But in doing this we do not in any way dilute or underestimate the intensity of fascist threat or ignore the differences, however temporary and transient, conditional and relative, that crop up from time to time in the bourgeois political camp. We have described the present situation as a sort of prelude to fascism and to prevent a complete fascist takeover we must intensify democratic resistance. Parliamentary cretinism and opportunist hobnobbing and alliance with the Congress can only prove fatal.
The growing agrarian crisis has naturally evoked a lot of discussion and debates. The agrarian economy is in a state of flux. The old model of green revolution has run into rough weather. Public investment in agriculture has been steadily declining and the system of procurement and public distribution of food grains has been nearly dismantled. On the other hand the penetration of capital in agriculture and in the larger rural economy is increasing in a variety of ways ranging from multinational agribusiness corporations and food processing industry to microlending schemes and rural development projects. Meanwhile, under the WTO regime Indian agriculture has been exposed to a most unequal kind of competition resulting in a major disruption and uncertainty for almost all sections of the agricultural population. Now while the crisis has differential impact on different sections, the brunt has to be borne by the rural poor and the middle peasantry and small farmers. Apart from extreme manifestations of the crisis like starvation deaths or farmers’ suicides, we can see a growing incidence of heavy indebtedness, pauperisation and land alienation among these sections. While many people are thus being thrown out of agriculture, some kind of a reverse phenomenon can also be seen at work. Destruction of jobs in the industry and service sectors is pushing many people back into agriculture. Thus the pressure on agriculture for livelihood remains as high as ever.
Now while addressing the crisis in its entirety, we must focus on sections that have been the most vulnerable and worst affected. We have called for intensifying our work among the agricultural labourers so as to organise them as an independent class force on as large a scale as possible. We have already formed organisations in many districts and some states and we will have to move towards an all-India organisation in the coming days. This Congress has also called for making fresh efforts to reach out to the middle peasantry and small farmers and seriously address their concerns. We have begun to restructure our peasant associations and they have to be geared up for this task. Keeping in mind the diverse conditions of the agrarian economy in different regions we still do not consider it necessary to have an all-India peasant association, rather we must strengthen our district-level focus. But given the countrywide dimensions of the agrarian crisis we must also seriously explore the possibility of intervening from above and interacting with other peasant organisations and farmers’ movements and this is why we have revived the all-India coordination committee of peasant associations as the Akhil Bhartiya Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (All India Peasant Action Committee).
How do we combine the work among agricultural labourers and the middle peasantry? How do we run two organisations which may often have overlapping membership base and agenda of action? These are questions that have to be addressed and resolved in practice. But there are some theoretical and practical aspects that should remain clear. We are not addressing the question of agricultural labourers in a classical capitalist context of rapid and sharp disintegration of the peasantry and clear polarisation between agricultural labour and big capitalist farmers. In spite of growing capitalist penetration and consequent differentiation within the peasantry, in many ways and in many parts of the country conditions of agricultural labour remain similar and interlinked to those of the poor and lower-middle peasantry.
The question of organising the middle peasantry and building up a firm and durable alliance between the rural poor and the middle peasantry is a central question of our revolution. It is well known that despite our programmatic orientation and repeated attempts we have not yet had much success in winning over the middle peasantry. This at times leads to the defeatist conclusion that we need not bother about the middle peasantry. This is patently wrong. Alliance with the middle peasantry is crucial to change the correlation of class forces and tilt the balance in favour of the rural poor. The rigidity of caste-class divide plays a major role in prejudicing sections of the middle peasantry. We must however keep trying in every possible way to tear apart the veil of caste and accelerate the process of class-based alliance and polarisation. The present situation of agrarian crisis marks a new opportunity in this reagrd and we must respond earnestly.
One comrade here has rightly formulated that the Party must address the question of middle peasantry from the standpoint of agricultural labourers and not the other way round. Well agricultural labourers constitute an important component of the working class and the Party of the proletariat naturally looks at things from the proletarian point of view. This is the viewpoint which calls for elimination of all feudal remnanats and welcomes the growing differentiation of the peasantry. From this position it seeks an alliance with the middle peasantry. The typical middle peasant point of view on the other hand would like to avoid capital-induced disintegration and differentiation while appropriating he productivity gains and other benefits brought by greater application of capital. While putting in their own labour, middle peasants also employ agricultural labourers for certain operations and naturally as employers their relation with agricultural labour is also marked partly by the employer-employee contradiction. Naturally, there is bound to be an element of tension and struggle in the relationship between the rural poor and the middle peasantry.
But we must remember that the proletarian standpoint is not sectarian. This is the standpoint of the leader of the agrarian and democratic revolution and therefore this standpoint always differentiates between the enemies and allies of revolution and between consistent, firm and reliable allies and temporary and conditional allies. The proletarian standpoint is aware of the fact that the battle has to be concentrated against powerful feudal remnants and aggressive kulaks and rich farmers and these forces must be prevented from using middle peasants as their shields. The attitude of cooperation and mutual accommodation vis-à-vis the middle peasantry is therefore an integral part of proletarian leadership.
We have made a critical review of the organisational state of the Party. We have expressed concern over the slow growth of the Party’s membership. From 22,000 members ten years ago we have moved on to a membership strength of nearly 75,000. We are certainly not satisfied with this rate of growth. Nor are we satisfied with the growth of our mass organisations. To strengthen the revolutionary movement and radicalise the entire Left movement, we definitely need a much bigger and more powerful Party organisation and a network of mass organisations. We must therefore never feel complacent and work hard for all-round growth of the Party and mass organisations.
But our quest for rapid growth of the Party has got nothing to do with the constant barrage of propaganda in the bourgeois media about the so-called weakness of our Party. Indeed these reports have been dogging us ever since we came overground. For them it is immaterial that we had 22,000 members ten years ago and today we have a membership of 75,000. Let us make no mistake. This propaganda will continue no matter what our strength is because this is what the dominant political interests in the bourgeois media desire. Let us not forget that when our Party was reorganised twenty eight years ago, we were completely written off. We were born with death certificates and obituaries and we are used to this vicious bourgeois propaganda and boastful reactionary claims and predictions about our irrelevance. If we are really getting weaker, pray why does that bother you so much? Clearly, this whole propaganda barrage is aimed at demoralising our ranks and it is a well thought out strategy of psychological warfare. This is an integral part of the class war the ruling classes wage on the working people and their revolutionary forces.
Some comrade has said that we must not bother so much about numerical strength and instead focus on the quality of the Party organisation. After all, 75,000 is not a very small and insiginificant number. He has made an important point. Now what is the special quality about our Party? It consists in the fact that ours is the only communist party which is really trying to combine all forms of struggle, combining the parliamentary with the extra-parliamentary while keeping the former subordinated to the latter. We all remember that when the undivided communist party entered the parliamentary arena in the early 1950s that was premised on the basis of renunciation of the extra-parliamentary aspect of the movement. Despite the tactical blunder of 1942, the 1940s were the most glorious decade in the history of the early communist movement. That was a decade pregnant with revolutionary possibilities, the decade of almost revolution as a communist historian has described it. Telengana was the crowning glory of that glorious decade, and soon the Communist Party was banned. And the ban was lifted only when the party called off the great Telengana struggle. It was on that note of surrender and betrayal that the party then embarked on its parliamentary journey.
It was only twenty years later at Naxalbari that the spirit of Telengana was resurrected and we have ever since tried to keep that spirit alive. When we started participating in elections in the 1980s and made the party open ten years ago we did it on the basis of our own independent assessment of the situation and not as part of any negotiated deal with the state. The so-called people’s war going on now in the land of Telengana is only a poor caricature of the original attempt made in the 1940s. And like all great events in history, if the first attempt at Telengana had ended on a tragic note, the second is nearing its farcical denouement. While the anarchists have reduced revolution to a question of sheer technique, negating the cardinal question of revolutionary transformation of the people, in terms of their organisation, struggle and consciousness, the opportunist Left remains bogged down in the morass of parliamentary cretinism. It is only our Party which has kept up the revolutionary spirit of Telenagana, Naxalbari and Bhojpur even as we utilise every legal and constitutional avenue to advance the cause of political assertion of the people. This is why the ruling classes and their conscious political and administrative representatives attack us by all possible means. Do not we remember the Jehanabad SP who had asked our comrades to be either like the CPI-CPI(M) or the MCC-PWG? Indeed, if we give up our principled and serious attempt to combine diverse forms of struggle keeping the people at the centre and laying utmost emphasis on organising the working people, especially the rural poor as an independent political force, we shall forfeit our right to call ourselves the CPI(ML), the true inheritor of the revolutionary legacy of the Indian people.
There is of course no readymade formula for combining the parliamentary and the extra-parliamentary. And there are many unresolved questions and uncharted areas where we have to make fresh moves and find new answers. The question of the Party’s growth and development has to be addressed in this context. We are indeed faced with major challenges. We have to face intense political competition which does not remain confined to mere electoral battles but spills over into the military domain where we have to contend simultaneously with private armies, criminal gangs, anarchist outfits and the repressive measures of the state. If we are targeted particularly because we pose a real challenge, on however modest a scale, to the forces of the status quo, we are also able to offer more effective and all-round resistance precisely because of the fact that we are combining diverse forms of struggle and exploring every possible avenue to advance the assertion of the masses.
It is true that in electoral terms we still have not been able to better our 1989-90 performance in many of our old areas. It is also true that combating the Ranvir Sena or the criminal gang of Shahabuddin has proved more demanding than our previous encounters with private armies like the Bhoomi Sena or other criminal gangs. We therefore at times come across this opinion which virtually negates the rich experience of the entire decade of the 1990s and harbours a nostalgic sentiment about the pre-90 phase whether in terms of peasant resistance, united front efforts or electoral struggles. There is nothing wrong with having a sense of pride regarding our glorious past as long as it inspires us to face the challenges of the day. But on the contrary, if it makes us lament the present and doubt the future, then such nostalgia is surely harmful. We must always remember that ours is the party of revolution and to accomplish the revolution the communist movement in India will have to surpass its achievements of the previous century. This is true not only for India but for the entire international communist movement. After all, we have to resolve the Soviet riddle and come up with more convincing and credible models of socialism than the Soviet Union.
We must realise that history does not permit any return to the past. We can only find solutions while moving forward. But we cannot move forward and resolve our problems by remaining blind to the positive experiences of the present and seeking ideal solutions on the basis of our past achievements. Such an attitude can only spell pessimism and passivity. This whole thought process and pattern of discourse needs to be changed. We cannot move forward with a discourse which is wedded to the theme of what used to be there and what we do not have. Instead our point of departure must be what we have and what has to be and must be done.
The Congress is the highest assembly of the Party. It is an assembly of leaders and it is not for leaders to complain. The task of leadership is to make every effort and exert all energy to find solutions to the problems, find the way forward and lead the entire Party and the people in that direction. Let us return to our work with a firm resolve and a forward-looking vision. Twenty-seven years ago, on this day, the twenty-ninth of November, Comrade Jauhar, the second General Secretary of our Party had embraced martyrdom while fighting the enemy on the soil of Bhojpur. From a small party led by a three-member Central Committee in that period we have now come this far. Let us resolve to do all we can to fulfil the unfinished mission of all our great martyrs. q