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The dog-fights within
the Indian ruling classes have reached a new peak notwithstanding the anti-Pak
war hysteria, the Kargil "victory", the high-pitch frenzy and appeals for
national unity. The consensus that was sought to be achieved and acclaimed to
have been achieved, afterall, proved illusory and short-lived.
In fact, even at the
height of the Kargil operation, the various ruling class political parties were
playing politics, each trying to outwit the other in whipping up nationalist
frenzy, playing up the sentiments of the people as the corpses of the soldiers
arrived back home — all with the aim of garnering more votes in the ensuing
elections. Now that the Kargil operation is over, the intra - and inter - party
fights have intensified to a feverish pitch. Even as people are increasingly
getting disillusioned with the various ruling class parties and the
parliamentary system itself, the reactionary media is trying desperately to
refurbish the image of parliamentary democracy by sensationalising the electoral
politics, drawing the attention of the people through head-line stories out of
trivialities such as Sonia Vs Sushma, Advani Vs Seshan and so on; everything
possible is being done to bring the people out of their apathy and indifference
towards the third general election in a span of three years — the ruling class
circus that had frittered away atleast Rs. 10,000 crores of the people’s money
in just three years in their power games.
Statistics are
churned out day in and day out: that India is the largest practising democracy,
that it has a mind-boggling 600 million-odd voters; so on and so forth. But how
does this democracy (meaning rule by the majority) operate in practice ?
Firstly, out of the
600 million-odd voters, the actual voter turn-out is a mere 50-55% of the total
voters i.e., about 330 million voters actually exercise their vote. These votes,
in turn, are divided among an umpteen number of parties. Even if the single
largest party gets a third of the votes polled, it would amount to about 100
million. By securing just a sixth of the total votes, a party claims to secure
the mandate of the majority to lord it over the entire population ! Thus the
party with a minority vote rules over the majority. But even these votes are not
secured based on principles or on the conscious choice by the voters. Money
power, caste, religion, region, race, gender — virtually every unscrupulous
means is used to lure the voter. Rigging and using brute force to capture booths
are widely practised under the eyes of the election commission-appointed
officials. Liquor flows like water as election day draws near. It is these
factors that actually decide the poll outcome. If all these are taken into
account, the winning party would perhaps get less than a tenth of the total
votes for the "politics" it is supposed to represent! And a large part of even
these votes are acquired by luring the people with high-sounding but empty
promises.
Even more significant
is the manner in which the entire state machinery is set into motion — the armed
forces, the para-military and the police, the bureaucracy, the electronic and
print media in the control of the government or the big business, etc — are all
used to the maximum possible extent to push through the electoral farce. Day in
and day out the media propagates how one should exercise one’s "democratic"
right to vote for the party/candidate of one’s choice; that the responsible
citizen should defeat the designs of the "terrorists", and other "anti-social"
and "anti-national" elements to disrupt the "democratic" process; so on and so
forth.
In several parts of
the country, voting is ensured at gun-point; in Kashmir, North East, AP, Bihar,
the central Indian region of Dandakaranya and other places where people refuse
to take part in the so-called democratic farce, threats, intimidation and a few
"encounters" of activists of the nationality and revolutionary movements would
ensure a "free and fair" poll in the largest democracy in the world. In
these regions, in almost every election it is the state’s armed forces which
actually conduct the campaign. Contesting candidates hardly venture into the
countryside; their job is taken up by the state. In thousands of villages,
people are threatened that if they do not vote, all facilities to their villages
would be withdrawn; bus services would be withdrawn, ration-shops would be
closed, bank loans would be stopped, power-supply would be cut off, all
construction work would stop and all social welfare programmes would be
scrapped. Besides, in several villages, the activists in thousands find
themselves behind bars until the curtain drops on the electoral drama.
The polling day
becomes a day of white terror. People who are still not cowed down by these
measures are dragged to the polling booths, their hands are checked for the
indelible ink to see whether they had voted. To cap it all, where people
unitedly resist the police threats and refuse to vote, all parties, or whichever
party has a biggest armed gang in the concerned village, stamp the ballot papers
with the connivance of the polling agents and police. That is how the polling
percentage goes up to unbelievable figures in the strongholds of the various
parties that give the call for boycott. In the villages from where the leaders
of these organisations hail, poll percentage goes up even higher, upto even 90%,
while the regional average would be half of that.
Such is the
democratic farce called election !
Elections are used by
the ruling classes as a democratic garb to cover their hideous fascist features.
Now a days, they are using them as a means to subvert democratic and
revolutionary movements. Wherever nationalist, democratic and revolutionary
movements give a call for poll boycott in pursuance of their just demands or
goals, a hue and cry is raised that the democratic process is being threatened
and wide propaganda is unleashed that elections would decide whether the people
are in favour of the "terrorists" or "extremists", or, are aspiring for a
"democratic" transformation. Thus if the Kashmiri, Assamese, Naga, Mizo,
Manipuri or any nationality opts for boycott in their struggle for
self-determination, the state sees to it that elections are held at gun-point,
installs a government which is said to have been "democratically" elected and
claims that the people are not in favour of the struggle for national
self-determination and that it is only a handful of "terrorists" who are putting
forth such a demand.
Likewise, in the
areas where the people’s war is raging and the people are in favour of rejection
of the electoral farce, as in Telangana and other parts of AP, parts of central
and south Bihar, Dandakaranya, and other regions under the influence of
communist revolutionaries, the ruling classes, by using all means at their
disposal as mentioned above, ensure a higher percentage. Then a vicious
propaganda is unleashed that the fiasco of the boycott call proves that the
communist revolutionaries have no mass base and that the revolutionary movement
itself is the domain of a handful of frustrated individuals. Then there are
fervent appeals to the revolutionaries and those "misguided" by the latter to
join the "main stream" of the democratic process i.e., to participate in the
electoral farce and thereby prove their support among the masses. Elections
are thus sought to be used by the ruling classes and their representative
parties and the state to discredit democratic, nationality and revolutionary
movements. The media, being controlled by the ruling classes, sees that
these farcical claims are dinned into the ears of the gullible people and the
facts are suppressed.
If this farcical and
tragic (for many) electoral drama is enacted by the ruling classes, it is even
more amusing to see some of the so-called revolutionary and ML parties too
partaking in this farce thereby aiding the nefarious schemes of the ruling
classes. "Liberation", "New Democracy", PCC, various factions going by the
nomenclature of UCCRI(ML) and Janashakti, and such others have joined this "main
stream" of ruling class politics long ago. The latest to realise the futility of
staying out of this "mainstream" and which jumped into the farcical drama is the
Red Flag group. It has waved the white flag even before it actually began armed
struggle. Its high-sounding call to the people in the current election is to
vote for its "anti-imperialist, democratic alternative". All these parties
swearing by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and yet getting bogged down in
parliamentarism, are actually helping the reactionaries in giving a new lease of
life to the moribund, parasitic and anti-people parliamentary system and are
diverting the people from the path of struggle for their genuine liberation.
Today, more than ever
before, there is an urgent need for exposing the electoral farce, the nature of
parliamentary democracy, the power games of the ruling class parties, the
opportunism of the revisionists and those in the ML camp, and to propagate the
revolutionary alternative of building organs of people’s democratic state power,
of intensifying the ongoing people’s war and extending it to more regions in the
country.
Parliament in India
is a repressive institution of the big landlords and comprador big bourgeoisie
who are in league with imperialism; it acts as a tool to get a legal sanction to
the policies that serve the class interests of the above-mentioned enemies of
the people. It has no relevance to the Indian masses at this juncture.
Intensifying and extending the people’s war and building people’s own genuine
representative institutions is the only alternative.
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