|
Sitaram Yechuri, the CPM leader, has recently written an article captioned
"Wrong shade of red" in the Hindustan Times dt.19-11-05. The main aim of this
article is to tarnish the heroic struggles of the Indian Maoists. To put it
briefly, it is a distortion of history, a distortion of Marxism-Leninism and is
based on falsehood. Like Anil Biswas, the CPM WB state committee secretary,
Yechuri also tried to equate ‘Maoism’ with ‘Anarchism’. Yechuri has raised a
number of questions which — though somewhat hackneyed —deserve some response. In
fact, it is a long-standing practice of revisionists like the CPM to make
deliberate distortions of facts of history to hoodwink the people and hide their
anti-people face.
To begin with, Yechuri writes that the CPM was born in 1964 "after a prolonged
ideological debate". This is a travesty of truth. The reality is just the
opposite. Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the CPM leader, while referring to the
Resolution of the Tenali Convention, stated that on 11 April 1964, 32 members
walked out of the National Committee meeting of the undivided CPI and issued a
statement. In that statement, they referred to the ‘opportunist policy’ of Dange
and his associates to form a united front with the Congress, creation of
sub-groups within the party and the attempt to hush up Dange’s letter sent from
jail to the British rulers that was tantamount to his surrender to the foreign
rulers1. However, Surjeet also made it clear that if the party leadership
shifted from their stand on organizational matters, they were ready to work with
the Dange group. In order to keep the unity between the two rival factions
within the CPI in tact, both the factions met on 4 July 1964 in Delhi. The
leading group was represented by Rajeswar Rao, Dr.Gangadhar Adhikari and Bhupesh
Gupta, while the other group was represented by Jyoti Bose, Promod Dasgupta and
Harkishen Singh Surjit. What is pertinent is that no ideological discussion took
place at the meeting, except a reference to Dange’s statement on the Kashmir
issue—the details of which are not mentioned. The organizational issue was the
main bone of contention. The two rival factions fought among themselves not over
any ideological issue, but over the question of which faction would be in
control of the party secretariat. Promod Dasgupta was willing to have Dange as
the chairman on condition that Namboodiripad would be the general secretary of
the party. This proposal was rejected by Rajeswar Rao and thus the meeting ended
in a fiasco( ‘Report on unity talks’, Resolution of the Tenali Convention of the
Communist Party of India, n.d.,pp.29-35) So, contrary to what Yechuri states,
the CPM was formed not ‘after a prolonged ideological debate’, but over the
issue of the control over the organization. It was nothing but a ‘give-and-take’
relationship, though this time it did not pay off.
In the Seventh Congress of the party held in 1964, the CPM leadership
incorporated the call for carrying out the people’s democratic revolution in
their programme. This PDR had nothing to do with any revolutionary effort.
Apprehensive of the fact that such a call for revolution might send a wrong
signal to the ruling classes and might invite their wrath, the party sent its
general secretary Sundaraiyya to the then central home minister, Guljarilal
Nanda. Sundaraiyya assured the home minister that he should not be misled by
this programme of revolution, and that the tactics of the party is to establish
people’s democracy and socialist transformation through ‘peaceful means’.
Another CPM leader, Basavapuniaha, in a letter to G.L.Nanda, reiterated the same
view stating that their opinion on the issue of the transition to socialism
through ‘peaceful means’ was no different from Dange’s.(Reply to Nanda, People’s
Democracy, 06-02-1966). It clearly shows that like the Dange-led CPI, the CPM
also was Khruschevite. The reality is that, neither in the past did the CPM
leadership have, nor at present do they have any hesitation to hoodwink and
misguide the people. In the name of making revolution through ‘peaceful means’,
they in fact seek to forestall revolution and help perpetuate this man-eating
system.
Secondly, Yechuri finds is difficult to accept the characterization of the
Indian big bourgeoisie by the CPI(M-L) as "comprador" and tends to hold that it
was "national" in character. Nothing can be further from the truth. Over the
last three decades, sharp debates had taken place among academicians as also
among political activists over this question. The fact is that the Indian big
bourgeoisie had piled up huge fortunes by exporting opium and raw cotton to
China as intermediaries of the British. The Currimbhoys, Petits, Wadias, Tatas,
Readymoneys, Birlas and many others were intimately tied to British interests.
It was the profits earned from opium and raw cotton and from contracts with the
commissariat of the British army when it attacked Iran in 1857 and Ethiopia in
1868 that gave Tata the much-needed capital. During the First World War, TISCO
supplied steel rails and grenade shells to British troops so that they could win
the war.
In 1943, the first automobile plant was set up in India by the Nuffields of the
UK for Hindustan Motors—a Birla company. Over the years, the Birlas have entered
into numerous collaboration agreements with different transnationals for
manufacturing cars, light commercial vehicles etc. Even today after more than
half a century, for re-designing old models of cars or fitting new engines to
them or for introducing new models, HM abjectly depends on various
transnationals. The Birlas, Tatas, Hirachands(PAL), Mahindras, Shri Rams as well
as India’s public sector have tied up with the different automobile giants of
the world—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler of the USA, Daimler Benz of Germany,
Fiat of Italy, Suzuki of Japan, Daewoo of S.Korea, Peugeot of France and so on.
DCM-Daewoo had been permitted by the Government of India to import 20,000 cars
in CKD condition for assembling them in India, worth Rs.350 crore.(Business
Standard, 15 JUly 1995).
Even after the Indian big capitalists turned to the domestic market in a major
way after 1914, they did not sever their ties with foreign capital. In fact,
they depended on imperialism—both British and US—for capital equipment,
technology, spare parts, market, expertise, selection of sites for factories and
building plans and finance. The political goal of G.D.Birla was, as he wrote to
J.M.Keynes, the British economist on 28 May, 1932, was to get "a decent place in
the household of King George the Fifth"— in other words, self-government within
the British empire. When in the early 1930s the relationship between Gandhi and
the British raj became strained, Birla acted as mediator between the two parties
and told Samuel Hoare, the secretary of state, that "Gandhi and men of his type
are not only friends of India but also friends of Great Britain, and that
Gandhiji is the greatest force on the side of peace and order. He alone is
responsible for keeping the left-wing in India under check. To strengthen his
hand is…to strengthen the bond of friendship between the two countries". Birla
was quite categorical when he said that an understanding between the raj and
Gandhi and other Congress leaders was necessary so that the latter could teach
the people that "the government is their own institution, which should be mended
and not ended". Such an understanding would also create the proper atmosphere in
which the Constitution could be worked. Birla then warned that in the absence of
such an understanding a violent revolution might spell "the funeral" of both
Britain and India. In fact, however surprising it may sound, Birla was the chief
architect of Congress policies and was instrumental in leading Gandhi from the
path of struggle even of the satyagraha type to the purely constitutional path
after 1935. Such compradorial ties continued throughout the colonial period and
after not only between the Birlas and imperialist capital, but also after India
became formally independent. CPM leaders like Yechuri either do not know the
past history, or if they do, they try to suppress it in order to hide the ugly
role they have been playing.
Thirdly, Yechuri laments that the main targets of the Naxalites during the 1970s
were the CPM members and in the last few years they are being killed as
"informers". This also is a distortion of history. It is quite well-known that
in the late-1960s and early-1970s, the revisionist (CPI) and neo-revisionist
parties (CPM) joined hands with the Indian ruling classes to unleash the most
barbarous repression on the revolutionary masses. When in the 1970s, the country
was aflame with revolutionary outbursts, they joined hands with Siddhartha
Ray-led Congress regime to identify revolutionaries in different localities,
hand them over to the police if possible, or simply kill them. In the
Cossipur-Baranagar area of north Kolkata, in August 1971, they, along with
policemen and Congress hoodlums, perpetrated massacres on the people, killing
nearly 200 in one single day. Their leader, Promod Dasgupta, at a public
meeting, charged the police with being lenient in their dealings with the
Naxalites. "Are contraceptives mixed with police bullets; why are the Naxalites
not dying?", he thundered. This he declared at a time when revolutionaries were
being butchered in cold blood on the streets of Kolkata, in the jails and other
areas everyday. Who had butchered whom, Mr. Yechuri? Whether you know it or not,
many of your party members acted and act as police informers both in the past as
also at present at least in West Bengal. In the last two or three years, 8 or 9
of your party members were wiped out by the guerrillas, not because they were
CPM activists, but because they were police informers, as the police officials
themselves admit.
Fourthly, Yechuri alleged that in the name of making revolution, many ordinary
people were killed by the Maoists. It is important to make it clear that some
people, who were ‘ordinary’ by their class position, might have been killed. But
here their role in the class struggle rather than their class position should be
taken into account. There are cases where common villagers were bribed to act as
informers or former squad members were intimidated to act as state agents. In
such cases, their class position might have remained unchanged, but their role
had changed. Of course, there are cases when the guerrillas unknowingly blew off
busloads of passengers taking them to be paramilitary forces in plainclothes.
Whenever such incidents took place, and these took place only on rare occasions,
the party openly tendered an apology to the members of the bereaved families.
Yechuri’s fifth charge against the Maoists is that "they seek to replicate the
pre-revolutionary Chinese experience in modern India", that they seek to
"universalize the Chinese experience and impose it under modern conditions. He
is also very critical of the Maoists’ describing ‘Mao Tse-tung Thought’ as
‘Maoism’— a term the Chinese Communist Party itself never used." Let us discuss
all these charges as a whole, as these are interrelated.
Mao Tse-tung made revolution in his own country by creating new Marxist theories
and creatively applying those theories to the concrete condition of China. After
the New Democratic Revolution, he initiated the Cultural Revolution which
essentially was a revolution in the realm of the superstructure and without
which socialism cannot be consolidated. By so doing he had made new
contributions to Marxism-Leninism and helped in the process of the development
of human civilization. Lenin before him also made a revolution in his own
country and replenished the Marxist theoretical basis. If Lenin’s teachings
could be universalized, as is amply clear from Yechuri himself quoting
extensively from Lenin to justify their party’s stand, why should the Indian
Maoists be blamed for universalizing the Chinese experience and justify their
revolutionary programme? If the communist revolutionaries could describe Lenin’s
teachings as "Leninism" after his death, why should the Maoists be at fault for
describing "Mao Tse-tung Thought" as "Maoism"? We will see later that Lenin’s
stand justifies not the revisionist policy of the CPM, but the revolutionary
line of the CPI(Maoist). In course of the Chinese revolution, Mao stood against
the Soviet model of revolution based on the most industrially developed urban
areas, the working class and the insurrection in the cities and developed the
Chinese model of revolution based in the backward countryside and relying
primarily upon the peasantry. Many years ago, when the heroic peasants of
Telangana or later Charu Mazumdar raised the slogan "China’s path is our path",
they highlighted the necessity of agrarian struggle in India on the basis of the
study of the concrete conditions of India. No doubt, they took to the Chinese
path because this path had a universal application at least in such agrarian,
primarily semi-feudal countries like India. But that does not mean that it would
be a mechanical application of that path. What the Indian Maoists seek to do is
the creative application of Marxism-Leninism. In fact, in course of making the
revolution, they are learning from their own experience, rectifying their
mistakes and making Marxist theories bear fruits in the Indian condition.
Yechuri seems unprepared to accept the term ‘Maoism’. If, according to Yechuri,
Maoism is not acceptable for its being specific to the Chinese situation, why
should ‘Leninism’ be acceptable as it was specific to the Russian situation
alone? In reality, the revolutionaries all over the world have much to learn
from both Mao and Lenin. The problem of Yechuri, Anil Biswas and others is that
they have learnt from none of them. They take the name of Lenin, but have
cleverly rejected his revolutionary teachings. They quote at length from Lenin’s
writings to drive home the fact that the parliamentary path, rather than the
path of armed struggle is the road to salvation. Let us now turn to what Marx,
Engels and Lenin had to say on this.
The founders of Marxism declared: "Communists disdain to conceal their views and
aims. They openly declare that their aim could be attained only by the forcible
overthrow of the existing social order". Lenin had time and again emphasized the
inevitability of the application of revolutionary force. In Two Tactics of
Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, he wrote: "In the last analysis,
political independence and the major problems of class struggle could be
resolved only through the application of force and our task is to get prepared
for this application of force, to organize it and actively put it into practice,
not only for the purpose of self-defence but also for the purpose of attack". In
the State and Revolution, Lenin stated that without armed revolution, the
proletarian state cannot overthrow the bourgeois state. Mao stated in the Hunan
Report that "revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence with which one
class overthrows another".
Revisionists like the CPM whom Sitaram Yechuri represents, participate in
Parliament not to make revolutionary propaganda among the people, not to prepare
them for armed struggle, but to form ministries as trusted lieutenants of the
ruling classes and their imperialist masters. Apparently, they seek to bring
about what Yechuri describes as the "socialist transformation through peaceful
means". As we have pointed out earlier, neither Marx, nor Lenin nor Mao spoke of
peaceful transition to socialism. All of them emphasized that there was no
substitute for the forcible overthrow of the existing capitalist order. It is a
Khruschevite distortion of revolutionary Marxism.
Sitaram Yechuri, like his revisionist fathers tries to deceive the people. In
his opinion, the Maoists represent the "wrong side of red". There is no "wrong
side of red" here Mr.Yechuri. There is only Red and Black. While your party,
like the Congress or the BJP, represents the Black, the Maoists actually
represent the Red, however unacceptable it may appear to you. How long will the
Sitaram Yechuris and Anil Biswases try to deceive the people by sticking to
their role as vote-beggars for joining Parliament which Lenin himself described
as a ‘pigsty’? One day, which is not far-off, will they find themselves kicked
down from the ivory tower and sent into the dustbin of history?
1.
These letters, written by S.A.Dange in 1924 after his conviction in the Kanpur
Conspiracy Case and found in the National Archives, New Delhi in 1964, when
Dange was chairman of the CPI, included two addressed to the Governor-General-in
Council. While praying for his release, he expressed in these letters his
willingness to serve as a police-agent.
|
