Rethinking and regroupment on the Left
Q. So that's what led to the campaign against the Biharis. How long has it been going on?
It has lasted for two years. It has been a persistent and sustained movement. It pervaded all classes of society, from illiterate Assamese in the remotest part of
Vibhuti Patel, a leader of the Communist League, Indian section of the
Fourth International, was invited to participate in a conference on the role of nongovernmental organizations in rural Asia held in Dakar, Senegal, in February. On her way back from this conference, she gave the following interview to Gerry Foley in Paris.
Question. Since Indian political life through fraudulent elections there, comhas already been pe ece roar the pells and to rape the o is the contest shaping up?
Answer. The lines are very unclear. sible for all that.
At the time of the State of Emergency
(1) there was a clear difference between the government and the opposition. But today everyone is using the same jargon, the same populist slogans.
itself, the alliances are con-
There is no consistency.
What's going on is a lot of very crude bargaining about the distribution of seats.
There were mass The Indian army was respon-
Q. What were the reasons for all the conflict and killing in Assam? It was presented in the world press as an outbreak of savage antiforeignism against the Bihari (4) refugees from Bangladesh who
A. Fundamentally, it is a problem of an oppressed nationality, the Assamese.
Assam to people in the capital city. The leadership was in the hands of the intel. ligentsia, mainly professors and students. The Assamese Literary Society played a very important role in drafting the program of the movement.
Q. What were the concrete demands?
First, they wanted to deport all people from Bangladesh who came into Assam after a certain date. They pro-
The Indian government accepted the principle of a deadline, but after that there was a lot of bargaining, with the government proposing 1960, then 1955, and so forth.
Then the movement demanded econ-
The Sixth Five Year Plan has no allocation for Assam. The Northeast
The Indian central government has always has never been treated as a priority.
Q. There are no clear issues or polarization at this point?
A. No. But on the other hand, the
Congress-Indira is more systematic in presenting its economic program, and, in particular, in playing up its role in the treated the Northeast as a colony. There has been hardly any economic development. There is a very high rate of youth
Moreover, there is no for the emerging Assamese petty
They asked for a quota of jobs in the public sector and government offices for
They demanded educational
Another demand was for protecting the interests of Assamese in the areas
Nonaligned Movement and its proposals Assam under British rule, the where they have become the minority. for Third World economic alliances. fact, this has won the approval even of the two Communist parties, the CPI and the CPM. (2) They have adopted resolutions saying that they support Mrs Gandhi on international issues, while continuing to have their reservations as regards her domestic policy.
Indira Gandhi was able to take effective advantage of this to throw them off balance. She argued that there is always a connection between domestic policy and international policy, that the two cannot be separated, and so the CPs were inconsistent to say that they supported her foreign policy but not her domestic one.
The prime minister has rebuilt her image very skillfully, making statements opposing the US invasion of Grenada and the Pakistani regime's repression in Sind. She has also made statements decrying the attacks on the Tamils in Sri Lanka.
The Indian press and bourgeois politicians in fact are having a field day with the situation in Pakistan. They love to make invidious comparisons between the setup there and India, "the World's Largest Democracy." But this is rank hypoc-
The Indian treatment of oppressed nationalities can be quite as brutal as the Pakistani treatment of the Sindhis. This is true in a number of cases in the Northeast Indian states, in particular in Assam. (3) The Indian government forced International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
Bengalis were the first to get education. Many of them found their way into the British administration. After the British left, the Bengalis dominated the bureaucracy. The Bengali language was imposed. The Bengalis always considered themselves as a civilized and superior race, looking down on the Assamese as tribals. It was rather like the attitude of Vietnamese toward Cambodians. And so bitter resentments developed among the Assamese toward Bengalis.
Then on top of all this you had the influx of the Biharis fleeing discrimination against them in Bangladesh. became very strong in the agrarian sec. tor. In the plantation sector also, nonAssamese — Tamils and people Orissa - are very strong.
A feeling developed among the Assamese that they were being pushed out
Indira Gandhi in the face of an expected court ruling, June 1975, which ushered in a period of arbitrary rule and extensive repres
In 1977, her Congress Party was badly defeated in the national elections. ever, returned to power in 1980. - IV.
In 1964, the Communist Party section formed the Communist Party Marxist (CPM). The CPM aligned with Peking but never became fully ideologically Maoist. The ideological Maoists in the usua sense are generally identified with the Naxalite movement that favored armed struggle. That is, the two terms are synonymous in Indian
Bengalis are now in a majority in many areas in the state, and the Bengalis have demanded that these areas be treated as a
What was the attitude of the Indian section of the Fourth International
A. In the beginning there was a controversy about it. Obviously, it is a difficult question. But now the great majority consider that the fundamental problem is the national oppression of the
This became clearer in the second phase of the struggle that started last year, when the government called elec
The leadership of the Assamese mass movement called for a
The Indian government's reaction was just to try to impose everything although they refer to a whole specon Bangladesh, and this area of India was isolated to a certain creation of East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971). Over the past year, it came into the international news in connec with communal riots involving massacres settled in East Pakistan in the context of the population movements that followed the partition of India in 947 at hakes tin With the rise of ethnicbased nationalism they became increasingly the object of resentments of the Bengali majority and were subjected to more and more pressures. - IV.
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INDIA
by military force.
What was the objection of the Assamese movement to the elections?
They argued that the election was just stage managed. The repression had been very extensive. Assamese were being butchered by the Indian army. The state regime was quite militarized. before that there had been governor's rule
The Assamese masses were The Assamese leaders said that unless there was serious consideration of setting a deadline for citizenship rights, they were not prepared to cooperate with the central government. ample, the 1981 Indian census does not carry any information on Assam, because the census was boycotted.
What did the Indian section propose with respect to this demand by the Assamese for deporting the Biharis?
We proposed that all the states of the Indian Union share the burden of providing for the Biharis. Bangladesh is economically
Bihari Muslims are treated as second-class citizens in Bengladesh by the Bengali majority. They are mainly manual laborers. They have lived in Bangladesh for generations but the worsening crisis there is making their situation desperate. As a result, they come to Assam or Tripura, or north Indian states. But these states are economically the most backward in the whole of India. So, our demand is that all states should try to absorb them, that it should not be left to Assam alone.
What sort of political effects do you think the conflict in Assam has had
One of the most immediate effects is on the other states and peoples in the region. As a result of the Assam struggle, people in other states of the Northeast are trying to build a coordinating committee. There are seven states in the area. They all face the same prob-
Since Indian independence, they have all faced prolonged military rule.
movements are developing among a lot of peoples. For example, there is the area of Charkand in Bihar. Actually, it extends into three or four
A Charkand Liberation Front has
Such questions tend to become a political dividing line both at the all India level and locally. There is a left coalition government, for example, in the Northeast state of Tripura. It has taken the same attitude to the Assam struggle as Indira Gandhi, that it is a communal riot problem. That is also the attitude of the two CPs nationally.
The CPM, the stronger CP, and the government it controls in West Bengal applies a gross double standard toward the struggle in Assam. They call it com-
At the same time, they support Dal movement in Punjab, which really is communalist. The Sikhs are not an oppressed nationality. They have been a very powerful group in Indian politics, they are strong in the military, many of them are well-to-do traders. Moreover, a lot of Sikhs have emigrated and so a considerable amount of money from abroad comes into the Sikh com-
CPM is openly collaborating with this movement. They are prepared to make electoralist alliances with communalist parties such as the Hindu RSS and the Muslim League, or with Christian Democrats in Kerala.
What is the evolution of the Indian left now? How do you expect the left parties to do in the upcoming gener.
There is a lot of cynicism about the left in government. You take the experience of the left-wing government in
What did it do? It made alliances with Christian Democrats, with the Muslim League, with RSS. Compared with that Indira Gandhi offers at least the prospect of stable rule.
The major forces on the traditional left are the CPI and the CPM. The Social Democracy has disintegrated. There are some personalities with a base of their own in trade unions or other mass organizations. But it's not a cohesive
In West Bengal, the left coalition gov. vernment has offered a number of popufor example an agrarian But the rich peasants got all Without supporting programs, the people became demor-
We have a strong unit in one of the West Bengal districts, Shantipur, where our comrades are in the leadership of a union of agricultural laborers and margin-
They report that there is a lot of repression of the struggling masses. In some respects, the CPM government is more repressive even than the bourgeois intolerant to the other groups that have come out of the Maoist are 16 formally organized Maoist groups and forty grouplets, mainly in West
When the CPM government took over in West Bengal, the first circular it issued was on the need to curb the so-called ultraleft groups. There are some 8,000 Maoists in prison, and torture is a frequent practice. This state of affairs was exposed in a very widely circulated journal, Sunday, and its editor was subjected to persecution as a result.
There is also a lot of infighting in the CPM dominated cludes the Revolutionary Socialist Party,
Revolutionary the CPI, CPM, the Forward Bloc, in all a lot of groups.
Q. What do you think the chances are for the left-wing state governments hanging onto to power in the general
A. The CPM might win in West
Bengal just because the Bengali masses want to avoid any repression of the kind they witnessed during the Congress regime under the State of Emergency. They went through very horrifying ex-
The memory of that will keep them from voting for the Con-
In Kerala, it is hard to say. Because of the sort of alliances the government has made, Christian Democratic Forces, the Muslim League or other opposition groups might win ground.
In Tripura, as I indicated, the left government has been becoming seriously discredited and the outlook is not
The problem with the traditional left as a whole is that it has been unable to
"our generation?" you mean exactly by
A. People in their twenties and
The old left parties cannot attract them. A number of the old left personalities have big bases in the unions, it is true. When you have that, you have facilities so people come to your for economic advantage. Or if they are in government, they can offer jobs or some facilities, and so people are attracted to
But as soon as they are out of government, the followers go too. They have no consistent following.
What is the relationship between the two CPs today? Is there any change in their relative strength?
A. Broadly speaking, they don't have have any ideological differences any more. The CPM has been talking about equidistance from Moscow and Peking. In fact, both parties are competing for Kremlin support.
There are differences on some issues. The CIP supports job reservation for women. The CPM doesn't. There are a lot of polemics about that. also deep rooted personality problems. I think that this is the main thing that stands in the way of their unification. between them, the CPM remains stronger and its lead has increased as a result of a new split in the CPI.
The CPI made a self-criticism because they gave full support to the State of Emergency, time that its purpose was to curb the rightist forces. The section of the party most attached to the old line quit. included a pioneer CP leader and pioneer unionist, Dange.
This new party, the All India Comsupports Indira Gandhi completely. a wonder that they don't merge with the Congress-I.
After this split the CPI lost its trade-union base in most major cities. general the young working class is not either with the CPI or the CPM. Bombay textile strike is a graphic il-
The CP were the pioneers of union-
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
ization in the textile industry. Now the
The crown of the CPs' in the union movement, the National Campaign Committee 16 all-India and 58 local federations has
During the textile strike, the National Campaign Committee did hardly solidarity work. It just passed a few
So, in Bombay, when it issues a call, it is hardly able to attract 5,000 or 10,000 people at the most. But when Datta Samant [the leader of the textile strike] issues a call, it's always 100,000 minimum and up to
What is the Campaign Committee exactly? What does it represent?
Well, it mainly just passes resolutions. It was formed as a response to the defeat of so many strikes. After the of the 1974 railway workers strike, there has not been a single major strike where the workers have achieved
There was a 1,400,000 government employees. lasted for seven or eight months, but it ment develops, they declare it a "disturbed area," and that means all actions - sit-ins, strikes, meetings — are illegal.
have the Essential Services Act, workers. For example, they declared an emergency in the railroads when there was a strike of local running staff. large proportion of the young workers were suspended or dismissed.
textile workers broken by the defeat of the strike?
No. Moreover, there were some political gains from it. Datta Samant is now talking about the need for a labor
Samant has expanded his base now in Gujerat, outside Bombay, and in other parts of Maharashtra. He is looked
In that sense, the outcome of the texdefeat is very different than that of the last big strike that was defeated, the railway strike in 1974. nandez, who was the leader of that strike, was discredited. There were a lot of feelings of suspicion and betrayal.
But the textile workers do not blame Samant for the defeat. They say that than 30 days, and often many months. So, they were prepared. demand was for repeal of that black act, the Bombay Industrial Relations Act. They knew that that would not be
The management was willing to make economic concessions. But the workers were not willing to accept anything less than getting rid of the bosses' union, winning the right to have a union of their own.
Q. What about the basic union organization? Is it still there?
A. Definitely, in Maharashtra.
Despite the fact that most of the activists have been fired?
Yes, a lot of the activists have become full timers. Some have migrated to rural areas. Some are working in the Employment Guarantee Scheme that the government has provided. They are continuing to fight there, since textile workers are very militant. They are fighting corruption in government contracting, they're unionizing, they're organizing rallies in different villages.
ended in defeat. Then, we had the local running staffs' strike. We had a public sector strike. In none of these could It was not Samant who initiated the after the defeat?
their demands. These actions were all ruthlessly crushed, with most of the activists being pended or dismissed.
So, in this context, workers from all the major unions pressurized their leadership to form one campaign committe. In the late 1970s also, the whole series of new repressive laws began to come down. The fight against the Industrial Relations Bill marked the first time that the working class from all over India came together around a common plat-
There was a demonstration of than a million workers in Delhi in front of the government building. an attempt to overcome tarian and craft divisions. actual, concrete struggles developed, the old sectarianism and paralysis took over
And this organization badly failit was because the other unions did not support us that we were defeated.
The workers went to him. 25,000 workers in 8 textile mills had already gone on strike in October 1982 They had been functioning through area committees, since the sorts of ghettos, called "textile villages." The workers appealed to Samant to organize a struggle. did not know the history of the textile workers movement. He had mainly worked in engineering, pharmaceuticals and other modern industries where the bargaining power of workers is high. He did not know how to work in the textile industry. So, the workers told him that if he did not declare a strike within 24 hours, they would do it on their own. So, he agreed.
textile workers know that all textile strikes in India have been long drawn out. They have all lasted more
Q. Wasn't there any demoralization
A. There is a certain sense of defeatism among broader layers, since in spite of such a heroic strike by 250,000
18 months, Now the communalist forces are gain-
Did the Communist League gain anything from its work in the strike?
We were able to recruit some workers who were looking for an alternative to the Communist parties. role the National Campaign Committee played in the strike badly alienated the textile workers.
We were also able to win the confidence of a lot of workers affected by moods that were strong before. Their attitude was that anyone who talks about politics is
Sikh demands for autonomy-one of Mrs Gandhi's problems (DR) ed the test of the Bombay textile workers strike, as I said.
What have been the results of the defeat of the textile strike?
About 100,000 workers are out of a job. There is a flight of capital from Bombay. Many of the mills have been taken over by the government because the private capitalists are not prepared to run them. A very extensive rationalization and mechanization of the industry is in progress. Nearly all the activists have been victimized.
The Indian government has a massive arsenal of repressive acts. They have a preventative detention act. There is Article 151 on antisocial elements. It was used against all of us during the textile strike. They have the National Security Act. They have the Disturbed Areas Act. Wherever a mass move-
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
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NEW SURAJ TRANSPL 15
sectarian, less dismissive about other They have formed women's caucuses in that they are just trying to use the workers for their electoral ambitions. But because we were active in the strike, we are on good terms with these workers now.
The party that gained the most from the strike was the Lal Nishan party, regional party that has a rather strong historical base in the state.
the Lal Nishan Party? What does it represent politically?
It goes back to a breakaway from the Communist Party. In 1942, in the framework of the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the imperialist powers, the CP decided to support the founders split and lined up with the na-
Since then they have had a strong base in Maharashtra, both in the industrial cities and in the villages.
Their politics are a weird combination of right-wing and ultraleft deviations. They don't have any consistent program. They can come out with a call for boycotting elections or very radical programs. Then, a big section supports arguing that she is the only available to fight communalist and rightist forces in India.
In the countryside, they do not support the peasants movement and focus exclusively on agricultural laborers and marginal farmers. is for extending the minimum wage to
Have the difficult experiences of the last decade in India had any positive effect on the left groups? Are there any tendencies that are favorable to revolutionary Marxism?
There have been very rapid evolutions in the Maoist movement. hit very hard by the effects of the deMaoification, the modernization drive of the new regime, the debate around the Gang of Four and the persecution of the opposition, the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. Bettelheim's break also came as a big shock, because his book, Class Struggles in the USSR, was sort of a bible
They have also been affected by the capitalist development of India. cause before they just talked about international questions or the monopoly bourgeoisie. This did not make any sense to the masses. Nor did their line of a Bloc of Four Classes in the countryside, which meant supporting the rural rich. Now they have had to stait thinking about Indian realities.
So, now there are many Maoist groups that think that the concept of a two-stage revolution is irrelevant for India. After 1977, they started thinking that the industrial working class also has a
So, they have tended to give more priority to trade-union work. They have started rethinking about the concept of armed insurrection, about the definition of armed insurrection, about how to go to the masses. They are less
Maoists to our party. a lot of the Maoists are interested in our analysis of imperialism, in our analysis of postcapitalist societies. We have a lot of debates with different Maoist groups. We exchange literature. Some of these Maoist groups with very ultraleft histories are ready to sell our literature in their bookstores. They invite us to take part in united fronts.
For example, in Shantipur, we have been working in a mass front with Maoists for some years and our comrades put out a thick journal together front includes dissident CPM members (this party is not considered Maoist any more), dissident Mao-
We can collaborate with such Maoists and former Maoists on many concrete issues, labor struggles, democratic struggles, women's struggles.
The Fourth Internationalist movement has also acquired more credibility in the past period. The idea that these people coming from a Maoist background had was that Trotskyists were Euro-centric, that they were interested only in world issues, not in Indian reality. Now that
They have seen Trotskyists who are rooted in the masses, who are active in mass fronts, for whom India is
We are gaining credibility the new radical groups, among the Maoist groups. hopeful because these people are young revolutionaries with a lot of idealism.
We could also see a lot of rethinking in the Marx centenary conferences organized by the CPI and the CPM. A West Bengal State Committee member of the CPM has questioned the two-stage theory, saying that he cannot understand why we have a directly socialist revolu-
Writing in the Economic and Political one of the main ideologues of the CPM has said, for the first time to my that the main problem the Soviet Union is that there is no work-
The CPM has had a bad attitude to the Europe up till now. For example, they consider Solidarnose a CIA operation, and Lech Walesa a CIA agent. When a Solidarnose representative, Henryk Szlajfer, came to India, they tried to rag him and disrupt his meetings.
He came in June 1982. I was his
We organized a meeting of workers to hear him and the CPM people came and tried to act like hooligans.
Just about a month ago, a gathering of CPM ideologues at a Marx centenary symposium made a criticism about their party's past position on the women's the student movement. They have denounced the women's movement in the past as a nonclass movement that divides the working class. Now they are ready to admit that rape, violence against women, are not nonclass issues.
the unions they control. They have formed a women's organization of their own.
One of the main differences we have with the CPs is that we have a clear-cut position on caste, the women's question, tribal questions, a position of support for the struggles of oppressed castes, the oppressed sex and oppressed nationalities. Whenever such struggle have occurred, we have supported them, actively intervened in them, as for example during the caste riots that took place in 1,200 villages in Maharashtra where the ghettos of the Untouchables were ransacked and burned.
There was arson, looting and mass rape. All the comrades went there. We visited these areas, we publicized their struggles, we supported them. We are active in the mass fronts on the caste issue.
When the women's movement developed in the mid-1970s, we intervened in it. We never called it a nonclass petty-bourgeois movement. Our attitude and work on such questions has brought us a lot of gains.
Q. What are the prospects for fusion with other revolutionary groups?
Right now, we are headed for fusion with the Bolshevik Leninist Group (BLG). We have been engaged in merger talks with them for a year, and we will hold a joint conference in May this year.
One of the key points in the discussions was the question of the Fourth International. There are a number of independent Marxist groups in India who are very close to us programmatically on the questions of the Indian revolution. But they want to avoid the label of Trot-
They argue "What do you need this Fourth International for?" the BLG comrades were influenced by arguments of this type.
Our answer was that it was important to be in an international organization, since we are involved in a world-
This is important to develop mutual solidarity and exchange experiences. We pointed to the example of Poland and the work done by Fourth International sections in other countries on the question of sex and national oppression. It was the experience of other sec. tions of the Fourth International that enabled us, for example, to understand the women's movement when it arose and to take the correct attitude toward it. So, the BLG comrades now agree that the united organization should be the Indian section of the Fourth International.
The fusion will have one respect in particuThe BLG has contacts in southern India, where we have never done any
None of our comrades know Dravidian languages. very hard to learn, since their structure is completely different from that of the Indoeuropean languages of northern
So as a result of this fusion, we hope to make a big step toward working on an all-India basis for the first time.
International Viewpoint 26 March 1984
PHILIPPINES
islands, creates many logistical problems for the NPA and makes it impossible for it to set up "sancutaries" in remote bord-
Liaison among the various regions is difficult, and the political-military leaderships of the various guerrilla zones have