People's Democracy

40 YEARS AGO

Detention Undemocratic

TUNJI Otegbeye, secretary-general of the Nigerian Socialist Workers’ and Farmers’ Party, youngest of the world’s communist and workers’ parties, expressed his solidarity with Indian communists against whom the Indian ruling classes have launched a ferocious attack.   

The SWFP, founded in 1963, has within two years grown into a powerful party of the Nigerian people in their struggle for full independence, national advance and socialism. This young party is also facing severe repression though it is not illegal.

After explaining the Nigerian situation in detail, the secretary-general of the party, who has a high degree of knowledge about the Indian situation, expressed his opinion on some of the recent Indian developments.

About the communist victory in the recent Kerala elections, he said, “Nigerian communists are happy that the Communist Party in Kerala won a big victory in the elections and emerged as the strongest and largest party. Please convey my congratulations to the leaders, cadres and people of India who added this glorious victory to the international fund of democratic advance against imperialism and reaction.”

The Nigerian leader condemned the Indian ruling classes for liquidating parliamentary democracy in Kerala and for illegally detaining elected representatives.      

“It was shocking news,” he said, “for every democrat abroad that in Nehru’s India such a naked thing had happened. Even in backward Africa, in many cases, when an arrested man is elected by the people, the government just out of shamefacedness releases him.” He said that Kerala events had been a topic in discussions on international affairs among communists in a number of socialist countries he had recently visited.

Discussing the arrests of over a thousand communists in India, he said that in Nigeria, too, the bourgeois government arrested and even murdered their political opponents, especially during the last elections….. He dismissed the evil propaganda carried by international imperialist and bourgeois nationalists that the split in the Indian communist movement was engineered by China. “When we founded our party in 1963 the bourgeois nationalists said that China had inspired it. In India they say the Communist Party was split by the Chinese. Every quantitative and qualitative development has its own dialectical reasons…..”

--- People’s Democracy, July 4, 1965

(Note: At that time, the CPI(M) was still known as the CPI, till the Election Commission rules necessitated a change in name.)