Vaskar Nandy
Prime Minister Pushpa Kumar Dahal (Prachanda)’s resignation was followed by the formation of a ministry headed by Madhav Kumar Nepal of the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) in collusion with the comprador-feudal Nepali Congress whose main leadership is tied up with the Indian Congress party and powerful sections of the Indian ruling classes by numerous strings. Since then, more than months have passed. Many parties, including the Madhesh Forum, the fourth largest party in the Constituent Assembly (CA), has either supported or joined the ministry of Madhav Nepal. There is now a clear majority for the ministry, but the two-third majority required to promulgate the constitution will remain elusive unless Prachanda’s Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is accommodated within a grand alliance.
Right now, the immediate question is why the cabinet formation process seems to have become unending, with no clear conclusion in sight. This question should be viewed from the vantage point of Comrade Prachanda’s resignation.
That resignation hinges on the two most important questions presently before the Nepal revolution. Will the present standing army subordinate itself to the authority of the CA and the Prime Minister? And will it stop new recruitment and make way for the merger of the Maoist fighters with itself? According to the terms agreed upon by all major parties (upon which agreement stands the present, temporary republican dispensation) the answer to both questions must be in the affirmative. But the chief of the Nepal Army has not only defied the Prime Minister and the Home minister by recruiting soldiers and refused to stand dismissed when so ordered by the PM.
The chief of the Nepal Army, a man brought up in the palace and a royalist, is now courted assiduously by both the Indian expansionists and the US imperialists. The Nepali Congress, the army chief and these interfering foreign powers have formed a solid, reactionary team to unhinge the major plank of policy regarding the future army and, therefore, the future state and government. The deposed King is said to be active on the management. The Supreme Court, which remains basically unchanged since the days of the King and as such suffers from a deficit of legitimacy, duly obliged the army chief by approving his recruitment of soldiers on the plea that he was merely filling up vacancies, forgetting that it is the Defence Minister and the Prime Minister who decide whether there are vacancies and when to fill them, if at all. The Court annulled the dismissal of the army chief by the Prime Minister. With such backing, it was no surprise that the army chief held press conferences denouncing the government and got away with it.
The most crucial political role at this juncture was played by sections of the CPN (UML), already close to the Congress leadership and just as vehemently opposed to the Maoists as the latter. They rallied a section of the leadership with the lure of the loaves and fishes of office and installed Madhav Kumar Nepal as the UML Prime Minister, backed by the Nepali Congress. At first, the Nepal ministry could not commandeer the required numbers for a simple majority. Once that was achieved, ministry formation should have come to an end. But months have passed, but there is no end in sight.
The inherent lack of stability in the process is manifest in different ways. The Congress leaders often make claims to form a ministry headed by them. But that is probably nothing more than their attempt to convince the flock that they are alive and as bad as they always have been even after the severe drubbing they received during the elections. Nevertheless this is not a good omen for the Nepal ministry. But far more serious is the growing preponderance of factions in nearly all the parties, especially the UML and the Madhesh Forum, who are increasingly critical and vocal about the role of their parties in the army chief affair and who favour a ministry headed by the U C P N (Maoist) as the only way to end the crisis and draft a republican constitution. More than that, each party has to counter the general perception of all the oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups who constitute the overwhelming majority that the only reliable ally they have to gain self-determination are the Maoists.
The Maoists are logical, principled and firm. Their position is that the CA must categorically declare the subordination of the armed forces to the civilian authority even if the present prevarications on the issue see the army chief retire as scheduled in October. On that condition they are willing to lead an all-party ministry or even support one, with or without direct participation. They are confident that their growing support within the CA and their massive power on the street will continue to ensure that the reactionary forces will remain fragile and unstable until they are forced to submit to the just demands of the Maoists.
The real question, one that we are sure the Maoists have seriously considered, is whether the frustrated reactionaries and their foreign mentors will soon consider a military option such as a coup d’état by the generals. The episode of the defiant army chief would indicate that the Generals are more than willing. Anything of course can emerge from desperation, but the Maoist support among the masses, which would appear to have grown significantly since their electoral triumph, their mastery of insurrection and guerrilla tactics and their combination of flexibility and bold resolve will make the expansionists and their mentors in Washington pause.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Lok Sabha Election 2009: The West Bengal Verdict
Santosh Rana
The people of West Bengal have given their verdict against party-dictatorship and the terror of the CPI(M).
At last, the people of West Bengal, both urban and rural, both Hindus and Muslims, and both low and high caste, voted against the Left Front, particularly the CPI(M). In 1977, the people had voted against the dictatorial regime of the Congress. After 32 years, the people almost repeated that performance. It was a historic victory of the people.
In 1977, the people had brought the Left Front to power. A massive movement of the workers and peasants unleashed itself. The peasants occupied many vested lands, the share-croppers recorded the plots in their names and there was an uprising against semi-feudal landlords and other vested interests. The revisionist CPI(M) leadership did not want this movement to advance further to overcome the limits of bourgeois democracy, i.e., the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In the name of controlling disorder, they concentrated all power in the hands of their party committees. They formulated a line to decimate all opposition parties in both rural and urban areas. If some peasant did not support the CPI(M), then he would not get any vested land, a BPL card or a house under the Indira Awas Yojana. Starting from primary schools to the universities, all appointments were controlled by the party.
After Buddhadeb Bhattacharya became the Chief Minister, the bureaucratic set-up formed during the previous 25 years engaged itself to start a process of rapid “industrialization”. Being Marxists, they knew very well that under a neo-liberal regime, industrialization would destroy more jobs than it could create. Still, they jumped on to that path. In this venture, they had to grab land from peasants as demanded by the corporate sector and they started doing it. They had to go against the interests of the small retail traders. They invited the Salim group of Indonesia to build a highway from Barasat to Raichak, a pleasure cum health-tourism city at Bhangar near the airport and a chemical SEZ at Nandigram. They also planned to acquire vast lands in Singur for the Tatas in Howrah and other districts for the corporate sector. They tried to convince the people of West Bengal that industrialization would create jobs for the jobless but the people were not convinced. Protest movements started in Bhangar and then in Singur, Nandigram and other areas. The valiant peasants built massive resistance struggles in the face of which the government had to withdraw, but not before committing mass murder in Nandigram. The people tasted victory for the first time in their struggle against the bureaucracy, party-dictatorship and the pro-imperialist policies followed by the CPI(M).
In the Panchayat election of 2008, the people got a chance and they utilized it to defeat the CPI(M) in vast areas of South and North Bengal. In the Lok Sabha election, the people who were eager to get rid of the CPI(M) misrule wanted an anti-CPI(M) alliance. With Congress, Trinamul and SUCI joining hands this unity was partly achieved. Some M-L parties were outside this alliance. So were the PDS (Party for Democratic Socialism) — a breakaway group of the CPI(M) — and the PDCI (People’s Democratic Conference of India) — a party promoted by the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind of West Bengal. But the people were eager to defeat the CPI(M) and they considered the Congress-Trinamul alliance as a viable alternative to the CPI(M). There was a strong polarization of votes and with nearly 7 percent swing away from the Left Front, it managed to win 15 seats out of 42, compared to the 35 it won in 2004. Considering the Assembly segments, the Left Front lost in as many as 193 out of a total of 293 seats. If the present trends continue, 2011 is going to witness the end of three decades of Left rule in West Bengal.
The Sachar Report
Apart from the party dictatorship and the bureaucracy of the CPI(M), the discontent among the Muslims played a significant role in the Lok Sabha results. Muslims constitute nearly a quarter of the state’s population but their presence in the government and semi-government services is negligible. This is a result of severe discrimination against the Muslims observed in all other spheres of life. The Muslims themselves were quite aware of this discrimination but the publication of the Sachar Report gave them an opportunity to vent their grievances.
A Wave for the Congress?
The CPI(M) leadership was shocked by the election results. They had apprehended a loss of few seats but could not imagine such a devastating result. But they are not ready for a self-examination. Instead of critically examining their policies, particularly those followed over the last few years, they tried to explain their defeat by a “Congress Wave”. Their Bengal leadership went so far as to criticize one of the few correct decisions which their Central Committee had taken, i.e., the decision to oppose the Indo-US nuclear deal, as having caused the debacle. But where was the “Congress Wave”? The Congress got 2 percent more votes than what they got in 2004. This was certainly no wave. There was a real sympathy wave for Congress in 1984 after the death of Mrs. Gandhi. Even then, the Congress could not win more than 16 seats in WB. This time the Left Front lost because they had abandoned the Left positions and had joined the battle for the rich, the Nano, the Tatas, the Salims and other multinationals.
But the Rightists Took Advantage
It is true that the Congress-TMC alliance took advantage of the situation and increased their seats. But it is also true that they had to pay a price to get that advantage. In West Bengal, the TMC opposed the SEZ, opposed the eviction of hawkers and retail traders and opposed land grabbing in Bhangar, Singur, Nandigram and many other places. The people got some immediate respite which they longed for.
Now, what will the UPA government do? Will it reverse the pro-imperialist and pro-rich policies followed during 2004-09? Certainly not. It may be that it will go slow on certain reforms like privatisation of banking, insurance and pension schemes and disinvestments in profit-making PSUs. Till the Assembly election in West Bengal, the Central Government may be pressurized by its Trinamul partner to go slow on SEZs and other projects affecting the people of WB and even sanction some more trains or a factory to show a pro-Bengal image. Their target is to capture power in WB. Their real face will be seen only after that.
The people of West Bengal have witnessed how the powerful mass movement of the 1970s and the 1980s was destroyed. The route was through a bureaucratic set-up that substituted for the mass movement, suppressed the opposition and democratic rights, and set up a one-party dictatorship. The Trinamul Congress is getting ready to take the same route. Once they capture Writers Buildings, they will probably suppress all opposition in urban and rural areas as the Congress did in the seventies. Even before capturing Writers Buildings, they have started doing it in some parts of East Midnapur. They want to replace a CPI(M)-led bureaucratic structure by a Trinamul-led structure. It is only after that they will advance to implement the neo-liberal policies dictated by Manmohan Singh.
But it will not be easy for them. It took 32 years for the people of West Bengal to realize the true nature of the CPI(M) and gather courage to rise in revolt against it. For the Congress-Trinamul combine, it will be less than five years. This time, the people’s struggles will advance to a higher stage, provided the genuine Left forces chalk out a programme of revolutionary democracy and persistently work to isolate both the CPI(M) and the Rightist forces.
The people of West Bengal have given their verdict against party-dictatorship and the terror of the CPI(M).
At last, the people of West Bengal, both urban and rural, both Hindus and Muslims, and both low and high caste, voted against the Left Front, particularly the CPI(M). In 1977, the people had voted against the dictatorial regime of the Congress. After 32 years, the people almost repeated that performance. It was a historic victory of the people.
In 1977, the people had brought the Left Front to power. A massive movement of the workers and peasants unleashed itself. The peasants occupied many vested lands, the share-croppers recorded the plots in their names and there was an uprising against semi-feudal landlords and other vested interests. The revisionist CPI(M) leadership did not want this movement to advance further to overcome the limits of bourgeois democracy, i.e., the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In the name of controlling disorder, they concentrated all power in the hands of their party committees. They formulated a line to decimate all opposition parties in both rural and urban areas. If some peasant did not support the CPI(M), then he would not get any vested land, a BPL card or a house under the Indira Awas Yojana. Starting from primary schools to the universities, all appointments were controlled by the party.
After Buddhadeb Bhattacharya became the Chief Minister, the bureaucratic set-up formed during the previous 25 years engaged itself to start a process of rapid “industrialization”. Being Marxists, they knew very well that under a neo-liberal regime, industrialization would destroy more jobs than it could create. Still, they jumped on to that path. In this venture, they had to grab land from peasants as demanded by the corporate sector and they started doing it. They had to go against the interests of the small retail traders. They invited the Salim group of Indonesia to build a highway from Barasat to Raichak, a pleasure cum health-tourism city at Bhangar near the airport and a chemical SEZ at Nandigram. They also planned to acquire vast lands in Singur for the Tatas in Howrah and other districts for the corporate sector. They tried to convince the people of West Bengal that industrialization would create jobs for the jobless but the people were not convinced. Protest movements started in Bhangar and then in Singur, Nandigram and other areas. The valiant peasants built massive resistance struggles in the face of which the government had to withdraw, but not before committing mass murder in Nandigram. The people tasted victory for the first time in their struggle against the bureaucracy, party-dictatorship and the pro-imperialist policies followed by the CPI(M).
In the Panchayat election of 2008, the people got a chance and they utilized it to defeat the CPI(M) in vast areas of South and North Bengal. In the Lok Sabha election, the people who were eager to get rid of the CPI(M) misrule wanted an anti-CPI(M) alliance. With Congress, Trinamul and SUCI joining hands this unity was partly achieved. Some M-L parties were outside this alliance. So were the PDS (Party for Democratic Socialism) — a breakaway group of the CPI(M) — and the PDCI (People’s Democratic Conference of India) — a party promoted by the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind of West Bengal. But the people were eager to defeat the CPI(M) and they considered the Congress-Trinamul alliance as a viable alternative to the CPI(M). There was a strong polarization of votes and with nearly 7 percent swing away from the Left Front, it managed to win 15 seats out of 42, compared to the 35 it won in 2004. Considering the Assembly segments, the Left Front lost in as many as 193 out of a total of 293 seats. If the present trends continue, 2011 is going to witness the end of three decades of Left rule in West Bengal.
The Sachar Report
Apart from the party dictatorship and the bureaucracy of the CPI(M), the discontent among the Muslims played a significant role in the Lok Sabha results. Muslims constitute nearly a quarter of the state’s population but their presence in the government and semi-government services is negligible. This is a result of severe discrimination against the Muslims observed in all other spheres of life. The Muslims themselves were quite aware of this discrimination but the publication of the Sachar Report gave them an opportunity to vent their grievances.
A Wave for the Congress?
The CPI(M) leadership was shocked by the election results. They had apprehended a loss of few seats but could not imagine such a devastating result. But they are not ready for a self-examination. Instead of critically examining their policies, particularly those followed over the last few years, they tried to explain their defeat by a “Congress Wave”. Their Bengal leadership went so far as to criticize one of the few correct decisions which their Central Committee had taken, i.e., the decision to oppose the Indo-US nuclear deal, as having caused the debacle. But where was the “Congress Wave”? The Congress got 2 percent more votes than what they got in 2004. This was certainly no wave. There was a real sympathy wave for Congress in 1984 after the death of Mrs. Gandhi. Even then, the Congress could not win more than 16 seats in WB. This time the Left Front lost because they had abandoned the Left positions and had joined the battle for the rich, the Nano, the Tatas, the Salims and other multinationals.
But the Rightists Took Advantage
It is true that the Congress-TMC alliance took advantage of the situation and increased their seats. But it is also true that they had to pay a price to get that advantage. In West Bengal, the TMC opposed the SEZ, opposed the eviction of hawkers and retail traders and opposed land grabbing in Bhangar, Singur, Nandigram and many other places. The people got some immediate respite which they longed for.
Now, what will the UPA government do? Will it reverse the pro-imperialist and pro-rich policies followed during 2004-09? Certainly not. It may be that it will go slow on certain reforms like privatisation of banking, insurance and pension schemes and disinvestments in profit-making PSUs. Till the Assembly election in West Bengal, the Central Government may be pressurized by its Trinamul partner to go slow on SEZs and other projects affecting the people of WB and even sanction some more trains or a factory to show a pro-Bengal image. Their target is to capture power in WB. Their real face will be seen only after that.
The people of West Bengal have witnessed how the powerful mass movement of the 1970s and the 1980s was destroyed. The route was through a bureaucratic set-up that substituted for the mass movement, suppressed the opposition and democratic rights, and set up a one-party dictatorship. The Trinamul Congress is getting ready to take the same route. Once they capture Writers Buildings, they will probably suppress all opposition in urban and rural areas as the Congress did in the seventies. Even before capturing Writers Buildings, they have started doing it in some parts of East Midnapur. They want to replace a CPI(M)-led bureaucratic structure by a Trinamul-led structure. It is only after that they will advance to implement the neo-liberal policies dictated by Manmohan Singh.
But it will not be easy for them. It took 32 years for the people of West Bengal to realize the true nature of the CPI(M) and gather courage to rise in revolt against it. For the Congress-Trinamul combine, it will be less than five years. This time, the people’s struggles will advance to a higher stage, provided the genuine Left forces chalk out a programme of revolutionary democracy and persistently work to isolate both the CPI(M) and the Rightist forces.
EDITORIAL: The Situation After the Lok Sabha Elections
For A New Democracy, July-Sept 2009
The corporate press is beside itself in its celebration of the Congress victory. With Biman Basu and other CPI(M) stalwarts playing the drone to hide their own dismal performance, the corporate press has played the sweet melody of a Congress wave. Having established the melodic line, the modulations begin. It is a vote for more so-called reforms, i.e., more capitalism by dispossession, more cuts in welfare spending and a general withdrawal of social safety nets and more of the rest of the prescription from the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. It is also a vote, the media tell us, that stabilizes the launching pad for India to become the local gendarme of the US imperialists.
Was there a Congress wave? There was no doubt an increase of 2 percent in this party’s vote share nationally. Compared to Indira Gandhi’s triumph after the Bangladesh war or her ignominious defeat five years later, 2 percent is not something to crow about. The vagaries of the first past the post election system has allowed the Congress to win a greater percentage of seats than their mandate of less than 29 percent of votes polled. Consider the Andhra Pradesh results. The vote share of the Congress there actually declined by 2.6 percent but its share of the seats went up from 28 in 2004 to 33. It is that familiar story of adversial vote division, thanks largely to the rise of another thespian on the Southern parliamentary firmament. Among major States, Congress gained in vote share significantly in the so-called BIMARU (4) States and Punjab, while shedding vote share in Orissa, Chhatishgarh and Jharkhand, along with Andhra Pradesh. Without going into the details of vote divisions and causes that account for the Congress vote, it is safe to say that the results show a mixed bag for the Congress and it is certainly not a wave of any kind.
This notion of the wave brings the corporate media to another fond idea pushed by their mentors in Washington and Tel Aviv: the result of the general election shows that the country is on the edge of a bipolar electorate, with the Congress and the BJP at the two poles. Two neo-liberal parties ruling India alternatively from a strong national integrationist (read soft and hard Hindutva) centre and serving the US imperialists single-mindedly must be the panacea favoured by the captains of industry and commerce to quell the millions of insurgencies engulfing India today. But is the idea true when we know that the BJP has dug itself into a hole and the combined vote share of the two big parties has declined in this election? In spite of a strategic ¬weakening vis-à-vis the present composition of the Lok Sabha, the centrifugal forces representing various compositions of caste, tribe, religion, language and region (which includes the three regional satrapies of the CPI(M)-led front) still command a vote share equal to or more than the two so-called national parties. It is easy for the casteists of the media, for instance, to mock Mayavati’s ambition to become the first Dalit Prime Minister, but it is somewhat inconvenient to ignore the fact that her vote share did not change significantly from what she had received during her assembly triumph. It was rational of her to expect many more parliament seats, but that did not happen due to various factors, mainly adverse vote division, one of the lesser gainers being the Congress. That Congress has just about emerged from the doldrums with some mild wind on its sails in UP, but there is no wave in sight. The Congress gained in vote share and seats in Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Rajasthan, places precisely where there were no significant local forces and the fight was between it and the BJP. In Maharashtra, it gained some seats because the Shiv Sena votes got divided. The so-called Congress wave did not carry the party very far in Orissa. As long as Hindi, Hindu and Hindutva, in the softer or the harder version prevails as the mechanism of integrating the country, new centrifugal forces will rise over and over again until a federal polity with multi-layered autonomies is established. Only a twenty-first century socialism that builds upon the positive experiences and eschews the blunders of twentieth century socialism can deliver such decentralization. Until that day, the corporate media and the leaders of the ruling classes can crow to their hearts’ delight, but the democratic consciousness that has embedded itself in the Indian people will not allow centripetal forces to grow without decentralization to the grassroots and federalism.
Whatever the corporate media might conjecture about the future of economic policy, the Indian ruling classes, like the ruling classes all over the capitalist world, have been shaken to the core by the collapse of the neo-liberal verities. Already, a section of the Congress is crowing about their sagacity in not going the whole hog in opening up the economy more fully when in fact their sagacity would have taken us much further if not restrained by the mass movement. Some are even brushing up on their paens to Indira Gandhi’s policy of nationalisations and a strong public sector when only the mass movement stopped them from privatising everything in sight. But such dishonest posturing shows that some powerful sections of the ruling classes are already trying to confront the policies pursued by the World Bank dream team of Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia. The fundamentals of economic policies are vital to a ruling class and that class tends often to split on them. The people must keep a close watch and utilise even the mildest contradictions that emerge from differences on such policies.
The corrosive fluids of our mass poverty and our inhuman deprivations took the shine off the BJP’s Shining India five years ago. The shine was in the malls, the superhighways and the vicious ideology of individual selfishness propagated as the trickle down theory whereby the poor will also get to play in the long run, but right now let the Ambanis present their spouses with fifty-floor town houses. The BJP has not recovered from that debacle. It did not put up any serious economic issues because it was unsure about its own roots in the ruling classes. Its top leaders knew that shrill Hindutva had become counter-productive, although well into the campaign some of its leaders, apprehensive about the outcome, tried to revive it through the vicious and vulgar Varun Gandhi and his mother. Without a sharp edge to policies and barely concealed in-fighting for leadership, the BJP did perhaps better than expected. Now the daggers are out and it is not certain that these saffronites will not fight each other until a return back to the insignificance of the Jan Sangh days is assured.
The electoral fate of the CPI(M)-led Left Front has surprised many people. In Tripura its vote share has gone down very significantly. In Kerala it was nearly decimated. And in West Bengal it has received a body blow from which it will not recover very soon, if ever.
The causes for the loss of vote share in Tripura and West Bengal were similar. The Tripura bhadraloks followed their West Bengal kin in corruption, arrogance and the use or threat of violence against all civil society assertions in order to establish a monolithic party raj. Opposed to this party raj, the people of Tripura, especially the tribals who are drifting away from unproductive terrorism and rising in mass movements, are now ready to follow in the wake of the anti-CPI(M) tsunami in West Bengal. That mass movement has to develop much further before a debacle overtakes the Tripura CPI(M). We carry on another page an analysis of the West Bengal elections.
In Kerala, the party would appear to be vertically split with many elements, pro- and anti-people, leaving the party. The violence there is a little muted compared to West Bengal and Tripura, but the corruption is rampant. Nevertheless it would appear that, unlike West Bengal, there are in Kerala substantial groups of people in the CPI(M) who have not totally jettisoned communist ways among the people in their struggles. The immediate causes of the Kerala debacle is the corruption case against the state secretary and the ensuing faction fights, his pursuit of anti-people neoliberal policies and, radiating out of the party’s factionalism, mistreatment of allies. Those who left the party also contributed to heavy losses in areas where the party establishment was always strong. Parliamentary cretins that they are, powerful sections of the CPI(M)’s leadership wish to put down their debacle to the withdrawal of support from the UPA over a perfectly legitimate, anti-imperialist issue. They say that they could not explain the nuclear power issue, so Karat is to be blamed. Why couldn’t they explain? Because the babus of Alimuddin Street had already issued eviction notices under the grotesque Land Acquisition Act of 1894 to thousands of villagers in East Medinipur in order precisely to set up a nuclear reactor as and when the US accepts India’s capitulation through the nuclear deal. More generally, how could Alimuddin speak of and explain any anti-imperialist stance when it has ecstatically swallowed every economic prescription by Washington.
The fact is that the withdrawal of support from the UPA caused the debacle in West Bengal is just a bit of a fancy confidence trick. After the fascist massacre at Nandigram, after Singur, after millions of violent acts since coming to power over three decades ago, after their final exposure as revisionist renegades who cause and preside over hunger, malnutrition, lack of healthcare for the poor, national and linguistic suppression, blatant caste, tribal and religious discrimination, etc. the poor people of West Bengal, especially the workers and peasants, have decided to give them the boot. The parliamentary results were inevitable after the mass movement grew to explosive proportions,
Parliamentary cretinism is so ingrained and powerful in this party that all the grand anti-imperialist analyses that emerge from the Gopalan Bhavan and the curious enclaves in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) cannot move this party beyond some parliamentary pressure on the government.
The Lok Sabha polls have dealt a stunning blow on Indian revisionism. It will take them a long time to recover, if at all there is a recovery. This opens up interesting prospects for a correct process of uniting and coalescing the millions of revolts, big and small, that have already covered the whole map of India. This will not be easy. The working class in the manufacturing sectors and the vast employee sector in the industrial and capitalist service sectors are still not out of the clutches of mainly revisionist leaderships. The largest working women’s organisation is led by the CPI(M). The revisionist debacle at the polls and the mass movement against revisionism is still a peasant movement mainly. These other vital sections could be galvanised into revolutionary action if hard work among them on the basis of policies that eschew sectarianism and adventurism can be put in place.
Imperialism is in great crisis because of the economic meltdown. Many different forces are rising up to lead the people’s discontent. Policies and action should be the judges of these forces and exposure shall follow with the development of the movement. But there should not be any policy of exclusion based on the idea of single party hegemony of old communist history.
The corporate press is beside itself in its celebration of the Congress victory. With Biman Basu and other CPI(M) stalwarts playing the drone to hide their own dismal performance, the corporate press has played the sweet melody of a Congress wave. Having established the melodic line, the modulations begin. It is a vote for more so-called reforms, i.e., more capitalism by dispossession, more cuts in welfare spending and a general withdrawal of social safety nets and more of the rest of the prescription from the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. It is also a vote, the media tell us, that stabilizes the launching pad for India to become the local gendarme of the US imperialists.
Was there a Congress wave? There was no doubt an increase of 2 percent in this party’s vote share nationally. Compared to Indira Gandhi’s triumph after the Bangladesh war or her ignominious defeat five years later, 2 percent is not something to crow about. The vagaries of the first past the post election system has allowed the Congress to win a greater percentage of seats than their mandate of less than 29 percent of votes polled. Consider the Andhra Pradesh results. The vote share of the Congress there actually declined by 2.6 percent but its share of the seats went up from 28 in 2004 to 33. It is that familiar story of adversial vote division, thanks largely to the rise of another thespian on the Southern parliamentary firmament. Among major States, Congress gained in vote share significantly in the so-called BIMARU (4) States and Punjab, while shedding vote share in Orissa, Chhatishgarh and Jharkhand, along with Andhra Pradesh. Without going into the details of vote divisions and causes that account for the Congress vote, it is safe to say that the results show a mixed bag for the Congress and it is certainly not a wave of any kind.
This notion of the wave brings the corporate media to another fond idea pushed by their mentors in Washington and Tel Aviv: the result of the general election shows that the country is on the edge of a bipolar electorate, with the Congress and the BJP at the two poles. Two neo-liberal parties ruling India alternatively from a strong national integrationist (read soft and hard Hindutva) centre and serving the US imperialists single-mindedly must be the panacea favoured by the captains of industry and commerce to quell the millions of insurgencies engulfing India today. But is the idea true when we know that the BJP has dug itself into a hole and the combined vote share of the two big parties has declined in this election? In spite of a strategic ¬weakening vis-à-vis the present composition of the Lok Sabha, the centrifugal forces representing various compositions of caste, tribe, religion, language and region (which includes the three regional satrapies of the CPI(M)-led front) still command a vote share equal to or more than the two so-called national parties. It is easy for the casteists of the media, for instance, to mock Mayavati’s ambition to become the first Dalit Prime Minister, but it is somewhat inconvenient to ignore the fact that her vote share did not change significantly from what she had received during her assembly triumph. It was rational of her to expect many more parliament seats, but that did not happen due to various factors, mainly adverse vote division, one of the lesser gainers being the Congress. That Congress has just about emerged from the doldrums with some mild wind on its sails in UP, but there is no wave in sight. The Congress gained in vote share and seats in Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Rajasthan, places precisely where there were no significant local forces and the fight was between it and the BJP. In Maharashtra, it gained some seats because the Shiv Sena votes got divided. The so-called Congress wave did not carry the party very far in Orissa. As long as Hindi, Hindu and Hindutva, in the softer or the harder version prevails as the mechanism of integrating the country, new centrifugal forces will rise over and over again until a federal polity with multi-layered autonomies is established. Only a twenty-first century socialism that builds upon the positive experiences and eschews the blunders of twentieth century socialism can deliver such decentralization. Until that day, the corporate media and the leaders of the ruling classes can crow to their hearts’ delight, but the democratic consciousness that has embedded itself in the Indian people will not allow centripetal forces to grow without decentralization to the grassroots and federalism.
Whatever the corporate media might conjecture about the future of economic policy, the Indian ruling classes, like the ruling classes all over the capitalist world, have been shaken to the core by the collapse of the neo-liberal verities. Already, a section of the Congress is crowing about their sagacity in not going the whole hog in opening up the economy more fully when in fact their sagacity would have taken us much further if not restrained by the mass movement. Some are even brushing up on their paens to Indira Gandhi’s policy of nationalisations and a strong public sector when only the mass movement stopped them from privatising everything in sight. But such dishonest posturing shows that some powerful sections of the ruling classes are already trying to confront the policies pursued by the World Bank dream team of Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia. The fundamentals of economic policies are vital to a ruling class and that class tends often to split on them. The people must keep a close watch and utilise even the mildest contradictions that emerge from differences on such policies.
The corrosive fluids of our mass poverty and our inhuman deprivations took the shine off the BJP’s Shining India five years ago. The shine was in the malls, the superhighways and the vicious ideology of individual selfishness propagated as the trickle down theory whereby the poor will also get to play in the long run, but right now let the Ambanis present their spouses with fifty-floor town houses. The BJP has not recovered from that debacle. It did not put up any serious economic issues because it was unsure about its own roots in the ruling classes. Its top leaders knew that shrill Hindutva had become counter-productive, although well into the campaign some of its leaders, apprehensive about the outcome, tried to revive it through the vicious and vulgar Varun Gandhi and his mother. Without a sharp edge to policies and barely concealed in-fighting for leadership, the BJP did perhaps better than expected. Now the daggers are out and it is not certain that these saffronites will not fight each other until a return back to the insignificance of the Jan Sangh days is assured.
The electoral fate of the CPI(M)-led Left Front has surprised many people. In Tripura its vote share has gone down very significantly. In Kerala it was nearly decimated. And in West Bengal it has received a body blow from which it will not recover very soon, if ever.
The causes for the loss of vote share in Tripura and West Bengal were similar. The Tripura bhadraloks followed their West Bengal kin in corruption, arrogance and the use or threat of violence against all civil society assertions in order to establish a monolithic party raj. Opposed to this party raj, the people of Tripura, especially the tribals who are drifting away from unproductive terrorism and rising in mass movements, are now ready to follow in the wake of the anti-CPI(M) tsunami in West Bengal. That mass movement has to develop much further before a debacle overtakes the Tripura CPI(M). We carry on another page an analysis of the West Bengal elections.
In Kerala, the party would appear to be vertically split with many elements, pro- and anti-people, leaving the party. The violence there is a little muted compared to West Bengal and Tripura, but the corruption is rampant. Nevertheless it would appear that, unlike West Bengal, there are in Kerala substantial groups of people in the CPI(M) who have not totally jettisoned communist ways among the people in their struggles. The immediate causes of the Kerala debacle is the corruption case against the state secretary and the ensuing faction fights, his pursuit of anti-people neoliberal policies and, radiating out of the party’s factionalism, mistreatment of allies. Those who left the party also contributed to heavy losses in areas where the party establishment was always strong. Parliamentary cretins that they are, powerful sections of the CPI(M)’s leadership wish to put down their debacle to the withdrawal of support from the UPA over a perfectly legitimate, anti-imperialist issue. They say that they could not explain the nuclear power issue, so Karat is to be blamed. Why couldn’t they explain? Because the babus of Alimuddin Street had already issued eviction notices under the grotesque Land Acquisition Act of 1894 to thousands of villagers in East Medinipur in order precisely to set up a nuclear reactor as and when the US accepts India’s capitulation through the nuclear deal. More generally, how could Alimuddin speak of and explain any anti-imperialist stance when it has ecstatically swallowed every economic prescription by Washington.
The fact is that the withdrawal of support from the UPA caused the debacle in West Bengal is just a bit of a fancy confidence trick. After the fascist massacre at Nandigram, after Singur, after millions of violent acts since coming to power over three decades ago, after their final exposure as revisionist renegades who cause and preside over hunger, malnutrition, lack of healthcare for the poor, national and linguistic suppression, blatant caste, tribal and religious discrimination, etc. the poor people of West Bengal, especially the workers and peasants, have decided to give them the boot. The parliamentary results were inevitable after the mass movement grew to explosive proportions,
Parliamentary cretinism is so ingrained and powerful in this party that all the grand anti-imperialist analyses that emerge from the Gopalan Bhavan and the curious enclaves in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) cannot move this party beyond some parliamentary pressure on the government.
The Lok Sabha polls have dealt a stunning blow on Indian revisionism. It will take them a long time to recover, if at all there is a recovery. This opens up interesting prospects for a correct process of uniting and coalescing the millions of revolts, big and small, that have already covered the whole map of India. This will not be easy. The working class in the manufacturing sectors and the vast employee sector in the industrial and capitalist service sectors are still not out of the clutches of mainly revisionist leaderships. The largest working women’s organisation is led by the CPI(M). The revisionist debacle at the polls and the mass movement against revisionism is still a peasant movement mainly. These other vital sections could be galvanised into revolutionary action if hard work among them on the basis of policies that eschew sectarianism and adventurism can be put in place.
Imperialism is in great crisis because of the economic meltdown. Many different forces are rising up to lead the people’s discontent. Policies and action should be the judges of these forces and exposure shall follow with the development of the movement. But there should not be any policy of exclusion based on the idea of single party hegemony of old communist history.
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