People's Democracy

Editorial

Predictable Anti-Communist Vitriolic

THE reactions of the mainstream media to the deliberations and conclusions of the CPI(M)’s 20th Congress, recently held at Kozhikode, Kerala from April 4-9, 2012 have, indeed, been on predictable lines. These range from the rabid anti-Communist denunciation of the Marxist-Leninist ideology itself to the so-called inability of the CPI(M) to understand  Indian realities.  A vast mass of vitriolic attacks lie in between.  These either betray the authors’ inability to comprehend what the CPI(M) had to say about the Indian realities and the consequent advance of the revolutionary movement, or, the brazen desire to please the bosses of global finance and pundits of neo-liberalism. 

The drumbeaters of the neo-liberal economic reform trajectory in India decry that the CPI(M) has, once again,  refused to come to terms with current realities.  The Economic Times editorial comments (April 11, 2012) that the CPI(M) “never came to terms with reforms that unleash the creativity of the private sector,  creating jobs and opportunities  for  millions.” Likewise, the Business Standard editorially says: “Victor Hugo famously said it is not possible to resist `an idea whose time has come’. For the CPI(M)’s out of touch Delhi-centric leadership, it is impossible to resist an idea whose time has passed.”  The Asian Age (April 10, 2012) editorially says: “….instead of dragging everyone down to poverty to promote social justice!  The times are changing everywhere, and its time our Marxists altered their thinking too.”

These cheer leaders of global finance are aghast at the fact that the CPI(M)’s 20th Congress has given a stirring call to the Indian people with the determination to redouble its resolve in uniting in struggles all the exploited sections of our people against the open loot of our country’s resources through these economic policies that is pushing an increased number of our people into poverty and deprivation.  Even according to the absurdly unreal  official estimations of poverty in India,  there are more people today living in conditions of abject deprivation  than the entire Indian population at the time of independence.  While the number of Indian US dollar billionaires has trebled during these two decades of reforms, who together have assets equal to a third of our GDP, over 80 crores of our people  continue to eke out a miserable existence on less than Rs 20 a day.  These are the conditions that the CPI(M) is determined to change.  And, this it will do by forcing the Indian ruling classes to reverse this neo-liberal policy trajectory on the strength of massive popular people’s mobilisations.

The attacks mounted by these sections against the CPI(M) only reflect their frustration at the fact that the 20th Congress redoubled its resolve to not merely refuse being co-opted by neo-liberalism but, on the contrary, to strengthen the popular  struggles against these policies forcibly being pushed down  the Indian people by international finance capital led  imperialist globalisation. The 20th Congress of the CPI(M) has given the clarion call  to fiercely oppose the Indian ruling classes led by the big bourgeoisie who have embraced this neo-liberal economic reform trajectory. 

Another set of attacks in the media are directed at blunting the thrust of the CPI(M)’s renewed resolve. Their argument is the following: Since the CPI(M) is refusing to be co-opted, let us render it incompetent by advising them to become social democrats and not remain Communists.  In this vein, The Economic Times editorially says that the CPI(M) “unlike the Latin Left, who are proud social democrats, the CPI(M) insists it is a Communist Party that just contests elections to pass time before the revolution rolls by.  Trapped by its musty ideology, it’ll be a long wait.” This is a typical reaction of those who shudder at the thought that the CPI(M)’s 20th Congress has resolved to hasten this revolutionary process. Communists lead the revolution, as they know and as history has repeatedly vindicated a revolution has to be brought about, it never “rolls by”.

Likewise, the Business Standard says: “The question of how the party needed to re-align  itself in a world that jettisoned political Marxism two decades ago did not provoke fresh thinking.”  What they mean to say is that the CPI(M) refused to be co-opted  by neo-liberalism. Bemoaning the CPI(M)’s steadfast adherence to creative science of Marxism-Leninism and its resolve to realise the socialist alternative  and, thus, refuse to  turn to social democracy, The Indian Express  (April 12, 2012) editorially says that the 20th Congress “resolutions  only prove how the CPI(M)’s reliance on its  dusty manuals keeps it from  detecting decisive political and economic shifts.  Unable to make itself a genuine progressive alternative, it is stuck chasing its own tail.”  Notice the undisguised anger at the CPI(M)’s resolve to advance the revolutionary struggles in India.

CPI(M)’s 20th Congress has unambiguously rejected social democracy as being an apologist of imperialist globalisation and its neo-liberal ideological foundations.  Social democracy is an ideology which, as was famously remarked soon after the Second World War, “champions the interests of the ruling classes when in government and champions the interests of the working class when in the opposition.”  The CPI(M) champions the interests of all exploited classes and oppressed sections of the Indian people led by the working class all the time to advance the revolutionary movement in India. 

The hope and desire that the CPI(M) will not succeed in these efforts in the Indian conditions,  is ideologically buttressed by brazen advocates of neo-liberalism as reflected in some of these editorial comments.  The Indian Express  says for the CPI(M) “caste, communalism and identity politics  don’t sit with the class struggle and should be shunned.” In a similar vein, The Asian Age says: “Communists everywhere are busy transforming  their outfits  to play by the rules of democracy rather than swear by an archaic Soviet model.”

Last week, in these very columns, we had outlined the decisions of the CPI(M)’s 20th Congress on tackling these very issues of India’s social realities such as caste, tribe, gender and other expressions of social oppression and the ideological assault of identity politics as propagated by post-modernism.  Likewise, we had highlighted  the CPI(M)’s resolve to strengthen the parliamentary and extra parliamentary means of struggle to advance the revolutionary  movement in the country.  Those who seek to teach us lessons on democracy in Indian conditions will do well to recollect that it was the Indian Communists who showed the world for the first time in 1957 that Communists can participate and win in state assembly elections  in a country ruled by the bourgeois-landlord classes.  No other political party in India has the record of winning seven consecutive elections to the state assemblies as the CPI(M)-led Left Front had in West Bengal.  This generation of venerable editors will do well to recollect that the freedom of expression that they exercise today is the product of the Indian people’s struggle against internal emergency and the restoration of democracy in 1977.  A struggle in which the CPI(M) played an important role. 

In fact, the focus of the 20th Congress has been to strengthen the revolutionary struggles of the Indian people on the basis of the concrete conditions of current Indian reality.  We do not wish to restate what has been said in these columns last week on these issues. 

For our detractors, we wish to recollect what EMS Namboodiripad once said way back in 1964, at the time of the CPI(M)’s founding Party Congress.  Many delegates from fraternal Communist Parties of the world had arrived in India to attend the CPI’s Congress and none came to the CPI(M)’s.  When a journalist pointed out to this fact and perkily asked  EMS “who is with the CPI(M)?” EMS famously remarked, “the people of India.” 

The CPI(M)’s 20th Congress re-doubled its resolve to strengthen these links with the people of India to advance the revolutionary movement for the establishment of people’s democracy and on its basis to establish socialism in Indian conditions. 

(April 18, 2012)