[Reader-list] Fwd: Signals from Vijayawada and Lalgarh – and Challenges before Revolutionary Communists

[Venugopalan K M]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kavita Krishnan <kavitakrish73 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 1:23 PM
Subject: Signals from Vijayawada and Lalgarh – and Challenges before
Revolutionary Communists
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*Signals from Vijayawada and Lalgarh –*

*and Challenges before Revolutionary Communists*

- Dipankar Bhattacharya

Contrary to media speculations predicting a veritable showdown between the
so-called Bengal line and central line in the CPI(M), the Vijayawada
‘mini-Congress’ of the CPI(M) ahead of the crucial West Bengal and Kerala
polls of 2011 turned out to be a rather tame affair, saving the real
fireworks maybe for a later-day post-mortem. The much-hyped ‘rectification
campaign’ was quietly forgotten and the revived ‘anti-Congressism’ on the
national level was carefully calibrated by Prakash Karat himself with his
remark ‘never say never’ regarding a possible future alliance with the
Congress. And of course, weaning the Congress away from the TMC remains the
ultimate tactical dream of the comrades in both Alimuddin Street as well as
AKG Bhavan.



The Vijayawada session adopted a special resolution on West Bengal and
Kerala which seeks to once again describe the CPI(M)-led governments in
these two states as products of history and decades of struggles. The
resolution would like to appropriate every development in these states –
from increased rice production to reduced infant mortality – as a CPI(M)
achievement, and demand popular sympathy as a besieged and beleaguered
victim at the receiving end of a grand conspiracy of the ruling classes.
Imperialism, the Indian big bourgeoisie, foreign-funded NGOs, the corporate
media, the Maoists and the ‘so-called intelligentsia’ are apparently all
colluding to oust the CPI(M) from power because of the CPI(M)’s opposition
to neo-liberal policies.



What the resolution does not do is to explain the paradox as to why and how
most of these conspirators who were all praise for the CPI(M) model in West
Bengal till the other day suddenly turned against it. The DFID, ADB and
World Bank have been closely involved in both West Bengal and Kerala; Ratan
Tata’s press conference with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the full-page
newspaper advertisement praising the dynamism of CPI(M)-ruled West Bengal
are too recent to fade from even the proverbially short-lived public memory;
and the corporate media’s love affair with the charming ‘Buddhadeb Babu’ and
the Bengal intelligentsia’s organic ties with the ‘ministry of culture’
administered personally by the ‘culture’-loving Chief Minister have never
been a secret.



Regarding Kerala, the resolution talks of the threat of fundamentalist
forces and an anti-CPI(M) ganging up of casteist and communal forces. Here
again, the CPI(M) is silent about its own selective policies of covert and
even overt alliances with the same casteist and communal forces. In the last
election, the CPI(M) was busy courting some Muslim organisations and now the
CPI(M) Chief Minister invokes Hindu fears and prejudices by talking of a
conspiracy to turn Kerala into a Muslim-majority state! Vijayawada
resolution is eloquent in its attempt to project the CPI(M) as a great
champion of the democratic rights of the Muslims, but conspicuously silent
about its own Chief Ministers (both in West Bengal and Kerala) periodically
invoking the communal prejudices propagated and nurtured by the RSS whether
in the name of combating Bangladeshi infiltration, fundamentalism or
terrorism.



Clearly, as long as the going was good, the CPI(M) never adopted a
resolution to explain all this in the light of the glorious communist legacy
it claims to inherit and follow! Today when the tide has turned, the CPI(M)
is trying to fall back on history and portray itself as a beleaguered victim
of a grand anti-communist offensive. The CPI(M) says the ruling classes
never gave up their conspiratorial offensive, but how come they are able to
sway the people today in a way they could never in the recent past? The
resolution says the CPI(M) has detected a few errors in its system and is
fixing them and the people can once again trust the CPI(M) establishment. So
much for the CPI(M)’s grand ‘rectification’ rhetoric!



But if one reads between the lines, the truth does have its own way of
asserting itself here and there – the main resolution, for instance, has
this to say with regard to strengthening the CPI(M)’s independent role: “The
Party’s work among the basic classes should be given priority. The lag in
the work amongst the peasantry and the rural poor in building class and mass
struggles has to be overcome. … This is necessary to give a struggle
orientation to the organization.” Here one can read the confession of fear
of a party which knows it has only been paying lip-service to the idea of
struggle and is facing serious isolation from the basic classes. But giving
‘a struggle orientation to the organisation’ is not a linguistic question –
it has never been achieved just by inserting two sentences and paragraphs in
resolutions which are otherwise mortally afraid of facing up to the truth.



While the CPI(M) was busy brainstorming in Vijayawada, on August 9 Mamata
Banerjee held a professedly ‘apolitical’ rally at Lalgarh accompanied by the
likes of Medha Patkar and Swami Agnivesh, addressing masses mobilised
primarily by the Maoist-backed PCAPA. Her address was meant primarily for
the Maoists – she asked them to rethink their boycott strategy (which she
says only benefits the CPI(M)), promised them ‘development’ (school,
hospital and jobs for all in railway factories!) and dialogue, hinted at a
possible conditional moratorium on the operation of joint forces and had a
word of grief for the killing of Azad (“the way Azad was killed was not
right”). The CPI(M) keeps asking the Congress to explain Mamata’s ties with
the Maoists – but she is merely pursuing the strategy already perfected by
the Congress in Andhra Pradesh. The Maoists had readily played ball in
Andhra and paid a heavy price. They seem to be ready to repeat the course in
West Bengal, busy as they are eulogising Mamata even as her government
spearheads the Operation Green Hunt.



Mamata Banerjee has been around in West Bengal politics for several decades,
her dramatic rise began as a young Congress MP way back in 1984, but her
brand of maverick populism never really got a broad support in rural Bengal
as well as among the urban intelligentsia till Singur and Nandigram
happened. Ever since, she has acquired an iconic status as the only
immediate alternative to a thoroughly discredited and considerably
degenerated CPI(M) establishment in West Bengal. While all kinds of forces
are marketing her as the personification of change (Swami Agnivesh, for
instance, concluded his 9 August speech at Lalgarh with the categorical
exhortation “Naya Zamana Aayega, Mamata Banerjee ka Zamana Aayega” – Bengal
will witness the birth of a new era, the era of Mamata Banerjee),
revolutionary communists will have to summon all their perseverance and
courage to expose and challenge her politics precisely on the touchstone of
‘change’ – the most popular political word in Bengal today.



The CPI(M) is not wrong in talking of a concerted anti-Left offensive on the
part of the ruling classes. But it is surely wrong in hoping that it could
selectively use one part of the offensive (Operation Green Hunt – the entire
CPI(M) resolution is not only conspicuously silent about it but also tacitly
endorses it) for its own benefit (the CPI(M) talks so much about the
semi-fascist terror of the 1970s but has hardly learnt anything from it).
And the CPI(M) is completely dishonest about what has triggered the
anti-Left offensive – what has enabled the ruling classes to go on the
offensive is not the CPI(M)’s professed opposition to neo-liberalism, but
its readiness to embrace it even at the risk of alienating and antagonising
the peasantry and the working people.



The CPI(M) will have to pay the price for its opportunist sins and
revolutionary communists can have no sympathy for it on this score. Any
meaningful defence of the legacy and gains of the Indian communist movement
and resistance to the anti-Left offensive of the ruling classes necessarily
calls for a firm and decisive rejection of and struggle against the CPI(M)’s
opportunism.


(The author is General Secretary, CPI(ML) Liberation))



-- 


You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a
nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the
foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
-AMBEDKAR



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