The history of the Communist Movement in India spans more than nine decades. The movement was at the forefront of many a glorious battle including the Navy Revolt, the fierce struggles in Telangana-Tebhaga, Punapra-Vayalar. However, after the withdrawal of the Telangana struggle, the Indian Communist movement sunk into the cesspool of revisionism. On the other hand, sixteen years after extricating
itself from the cesspool of revisionism, the Indian Communist Movement exemplified Lenin’s admonition that the proletarian movement pays the price for the sins of revisionism in the form of “left-wing deviation” and consequently the pendulum swung from revisionism to left adventurism. The most debilitating aspect of the Indian Communist movement has been its ideological weakness, which is in fact a congenital weakness. What can be more pathetically farcical than the fact that the Communist Party of India, which came into being in the 1920s, did not have a programme of revolution until 1951? It was only in 1951 Party Congress that programme documents were passed for the first time. But by then the Party had already forged ahead on the depraved path of revisionism as evidenced by the striking off of the phrase “revolutionary violence” from the preamble of the Party Constitution during the Special Congress held in Amritsar in 1958. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) that was formed in 1964 after the split within the CPI was likewise an essentially revisionist party, a fact which was sensed by a section of the radical cadres at the inception of the party itself. The CPIM’s neo-revisionism spawned three types of adverse reactions. The first reaction was manifested in the series of articles written during this period by first the Chinta group and later the Dakshin Desh group denouncing revisionism. The second adverse reaction came in the form of Charu Majumdar’s Eight Documents and the third in the form of the voice raised by the majority of the party’s Andhra Pradesh Committee against revisionism. Apart from this, a number of intellectual groups kept on flaying CPI-CPIM’s revisionism in the period stretching from 1956-66-68. In the meantime, the Naxalbari uprising took place. This popular uprising marked a decisive rupture with revisionism within the Indian Communist Movement, however the deficient understanding of Marxist ideology came to haunt the movement again and the pendulum duly swung from right-wing deviation to left adventurism. The leadership of the movement did not bother itself with a comprehensive analysis of the direction of development, production relations, class structure, and the nature of the State etc. Instead, following a deductive approach, on the basis of the international general line given by the Chinese Communist Party under Mao’s leadership during the Great Debate, the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal new democratic revolution was anointed as the stage of revolution for India as well. The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which was formed in 1970 in the wake of the Naxalbari peasant uprising, also adopted a left adventurist path and did not conduct any reasoned debate or discussion on pressing questions regarding the characterisation of Indian society, production relations , land reform, agrarian programme etc. The absence of such a debate led to a sustained lack of understanding of the differences between Marxist ideology and programme. The programme itself was equated with revolutionary ideology, when, in reality, the revolutionary programme i.e. the strategy and general tactics of revolution are always formulated on the basis of the revolutionary ideology! The 1970s flagged off a long period of the co-existence of “left” and right-wing opportunism. Consequently, the revolutionary communist camp (M.L. camp) underwent a series of fissions and fusions. New groups continued to emerge and disintegrate. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) continues to implement a left-adventurist line. At the other end of the spectrum, some ex-ML revolutionaries have been guilty of grave revisionist deviations and a few parties such as CPIML (Liberation) (Student wing AISA), have even ended up in the fold of outright revisionist parties such as CPIM (student wing SFI) and CPI(student wing AISF) and rolled over to the right. Based on a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of history and the present, we are of the opinion that capital has extended its grip to the most remote villages by means of the gradual land reforms that were carried out in India following the Prussian path and has succeeded in linking the rural areas to a national integrated market. The Kulak class in Indian villages is a junior partner of the Capitalist State. A four-class alliance is out of the picture. Liberalisation, privatisation and free-market policies have intensified capitalist development. There is a centralised government and democracy has been established, if only to a certain degree. Apart from this, taking into account several other indicators, particularly during the last two and a half decades, it is as clear as daylight for any student of Marxism that India is at the socialist stage of revolution. However, the socialist revolution in India shall be different from the socialist revolution in Europe and Russia because capitalist development did not take place here in the same way as it did in Europe or pre-revolution Russia. The countries of Asia-Africa-Latin America including India are bearing the brunt of imperialist exploitation along with capitalist exploitation. The contradiction between labour and capital is manifested in the contradiction between imperialism as well as capitalism on the one hand and the toiling masses of the country and the middle class on the other. Thus, India’s socialist revolution shall be anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist in nature and hence we think it’s appropriate to call it the New Socialist Revolution. According to us, today, the ML camp is in a state of tatters and there is no possibility of engaging in polemics with it for the purpose of party reconstruction. The dominant aspect of the process of the formation of a unified party has changed. To put it in classical Leninist terminology, today, party building rather than party formation has become the dominant aspect. The crying need of the day is to build a party rooted in democratic centralism, moulded according to Bolshevik party principles and tempered with rigorous training and education in Marxist ideology. We are open to all manner of debates and discussions on the issues raised in this piece. We heartily invite all those who are bristling with youth and sense the stagnation prevailing in the movement as well as those who resent the current system’s suffocating environment rife with injustice and inequality and are desirous of a change, to engage in warm, frictional and revolutionary comradely debate. We shall be commencing shortly with a round of debates and discussions to go more deeply into this issue and shall keep the students informed accordingly.
-Hundred Flowers Group
