The Eighth Congress of the CPI(ML) has been held successfully in Kolkata. Held in the 150th anniversary of the First Indian War of Independence and the birth centenary of Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh, the 8th Congress boldly underlined the glorious anti-imperialist legacy of the Indian people. On the morning of December 10, a delegation of Congress delegates and guests from abroad went to Barrackpore to pay homage to the memorial of Mangal Pandey, the first martyr of 1857 and then returned to Kolkata to garland the statue of Bhagat Singh, whom the Congress recognised not only as rashtra nayak, the ever-inspiring national hero of the Indian people but also as a great communist pioneer. And then on the eve of the Congress, delegates and guests all assembled in a mass convention that denounced imperialism as a “War on Freedom, Democracy and Development” and resolved to resist imperialism in every sphere of life. Attended by more than 1200 delegates, observers and guests, the 8th Congress was much bigger in scale than all the previous Congresses of the Party, four of which had to be held in extremely challenging underground conditions. Apart from discussing and adopting the Political-Organisational Report placed by the outgoing Central Committee, the Congress also adopted three specific resolutions dealing with the current international situation, developing national situation and the raging agrarian crisis. The Congress also updated the Party’s General Programme as well as the Agrarian Programme after fifteen and twenty-five years respectively and thus enriched the Party’s strategic understanding regarding the Indian society and the ongoing pattern of narrow and predatory capitalist development overshadowed by both stubborn feudal remnants and imperialist dictates and interests. Several key themes have emerged from the Congress deliberations. In order that the CPI(ML) can intervene more powerfully in the deepening agrarian crisis it was resolved that the Party must now pay more attention to the peasant front alongside the core revolutionary agenda of mobilising the rural poor in militant struggles. If neo-liberalism is wreaking havoc in the countryside, impoverishing and expropriating sizeable sections of the peasantry and pushing people to suicides and starvation deaths, revolutionary communists must organise and lead a powerful counter-offensive by these victims of neo-liberalism. Signs of a massive rural unrest are already visible in almost every corner of the country and the 8th Congress of the CPI(ML) has called upon the entire Party to prepare in every way for the impending storm of people’s resistance. The Congress also discussed other major aspects of the current situation – large-scale destruction of jobs and livelihood in urban India, the growing shadow of US imperialism on India’s foreign policy and the systematic assault on democracy by every organ of the Indian state. The closure of old labour-intensive industries, the growing corporate takeover of the entire service sector, and commercialisation and privatisation of key sectors like education and health have pushed large sections of the urban population into a life of growing hardship and insecurity. And as real life becomes more miserable and insecure for more and more people across the country, the ruling elite keeps selling the ‘dream’ of turning India into a US-sponsored regional power riding high on nuclear energy and a soaring Sensex! The more the people are deprived of their basic democratic rights and divorced from resources that belonged and must belong to them, the louder gets the rhetoric of democracy and empowerment!
Such a situation definitely calls for a powerful Left and democratic movement in defence of land and livelihood, liberty and dignity – individual as well as national. But the growing derailment and degeneration of the CPI(M)-led government in West Bengal, especially the arrogance and audacity with which the CPI(M) leadership have sought to justify their policies and conduct regarding Singur and Nandigram have tarnished the image of the Left and may push the democratic forces away unless there is a resurgence of the real Left. The successful conclusion of the Kolkata Congress and the massive turnout at the December 18 rally has sent out that message of Left resurgence at a most appropriate juncture. The Congress did not merely symbolise ideological, political and organisational consolidation of the CPI(ML), it held out the promise of a resurgent Left forging closer ties with broader democratic forces to save India from becoming a neoliberal laboratory and a strategic pawn of Washington.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Clarion Call of the CPI(ML)’s Kolkata Congress: People’s Resistance, Left Resurgence
Thursday, August 9, 2007
The Indian State’s Killing Squads
In the familiar pattern, within hours of the Mecca Masjid blasts, the police miraculously tell us which militant groups are involved. Almost every day our media obediently beams out images of ‘terrorists’ triumphantly displayed by their captors. For years since 2002, IPS officer Vanzara similarly displayed his trophies – young men and women (Sameerkhan Pathan, Ishrat Jehan, Javed from Kerala, Sohrabuddin Sheikh…) killed in supposed attempts to target Modi or other top Sangh Parivar leaders. Now we have an admission that one of those killings was staged (and linked to it, a trail of other murders of Sheikh’s wife and another eyewitness). Vanzara has defended all the killings as an act of ‘deshbhakti’ – a sentiment well in line with the notion of patriotism that scripted the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat.
But the issue goes beyond the one-dimensional tales of good cop-bad cop, and far deeper than the question of communalization of the State machinery by BJP Governments.
To refresh our memory:
The first recorded fake encounter is said to date back to the repression on the Telengana peasant movement. In the 60s and 70s, custodial and extra judicial killings of Naxalites became standard police practice. In the days of insurgency in Punjab, thousands of youth were similarly butchered.
In counter-insurgency operations in all the states of the North East and Kashmir, in the anti-naxal operations in Andhra Pradesh, fake encounters became routine. In a rare candid moment, ex DG, BSF EN Rammohan has admitted that …”In Kashmir, only a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (of the sort South Africa set up after apartheid ended) will enable India to make peace with the Kashmiri people.” (HT, May 4, 07)
The recent massacre of tribals in Chhattisgarh who, according to the police, were ‘naxal sympathisers’ recalls to mind the Bhawanipur massacre of March 9, 2000, after which the DIG (Mirzapur) told the PUDR/APDR team that ‘it is justified if they die or get killed. They are criminals’. The 16 agrarian labourers shot dead at Bhawanipur were not even charged with any crime, let alone convicted; they were ‘criminals’ because they dared to organize for their wages and rights. These are examples of the familiar phenomenon of the police policy of “shoot and label the corpse posthumously as naxalite”. And lest we think Left-ruled states to be better off – the Left Front-ruled Tripura Government (which implements that excellent cover for killers in uniform - AFSPA) faces allegations of 103 tribals killed in fake encounters since 1993. (Zee News, May 16)
Given the long history of encounter killings in India, naturally an entire discourse has developed to defend summary executions by the police and armed forces. Some of its pet positions are as follows:
“Do it but don’t talk about it”
On December 30, 1991, VG Vaidya, director, IB, wrote a letter to the then Punjab DGP KPS Gill regarding some press interviews in which police officers had defended and given detailed accounts of staged encounters to the international press.
“Their professional compulsions in executive action should not get reflected in their public utterances, which should be correct and responsible,” Vaidya wrote. (HT, May 4, 07) In other words, he was saying murder is a ‘professional compulsion’, but the killers must be discreet rather than boastful.
“If we insist on human rights for terrorists, the police cannot fight terror or organized crime”
There are many who argue that Kauser Bi’s killing was somehow worse than that of Sohrabuddin’s; and many media reports have harped on the fact that Sohrabuddin was a ‘criminal’ who extorted money from marble dealers, not an ‘innocent man’, and that therefore the police was justified in killing him. BJP’s deputy leader V K Malhotra said that Sohrabuddin and others gunned down by police were not “innocent” and should not be “glorified” so. (HT, April 27) One wonders: would it be ok by Malhotra if Babubhai Katara, caught red-handed committing crime, was gunned down? Why bother with fair trial and proof and the right to appeal and benefit of doubt, Mr. Malhotra – we know he’s guilty, let’s just execute him. Ok, we can make a concession and torture him first to make him confess to trafficking and a sex racket and rape to boot – and then shoot him. We can always say he was escaping, or that he attacked the police.
Torture and murder in uniform, and the convenient habit of branding dissenters as ‘terrorists’, gets legal sanction through a host of laws past and present – TADA, POTA, AFSPA, MCOCA, et al. Take the case of the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act – which has been deployed recently to arrest the veteran civil liberties activist, PUCL Vice President Dr. Vinayak Sen, who had been exposing the fake encounters and state terror in the wake of the ‘Salwa Judum’ in Chhattisgarh. In a recent interview KPS Gill suggests that to tackle insurgency and terrorism, the police can’t afford to have their hands tied by considerations like human rights. So, he laments that laws like TADA and POTA are opposed – forcing the police to opt for staged encounters. In other words, according to Gill, we need laws that can brand people as criminals/terrorists and execute them…so that the police can keep things legal! (Outlook, May 14, 07)
This sentiment is echoed by none less than West Bengal CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya who chose World Human Rights Day to declare that “human rights need not apply for terrorists”. (Indian Express Kolkata Newsline, December 11, 2006) Without custodial torture and the special licence to kill, how would convenient confessions be extracted and culprits punished? It helps when you know in advance that an entire social section or ideological group is by definition “terrorist” and “anti-national” – then you can draft confessions in advance and pin them onto likely candidates picked at random. It helps if courts are not too fussy about things like ‘evidence’ and ‘human rights’ where terrorism cases are concerned.
In a recent instance, a young man Arun Ferreira, a bright graduate of St. Xavier’s College Mumbai, was picked up from a meeting at Deekshabhoomi in Maharashtra. According to the police, literature relating to SEZs and Khairlanji, as well as ‘pamphlets carrying excerpts of an interview of Arundhati Roy’ were found on his pen drive and person – clear indication that he is a Maoist with malafide intentions! A raid on his wife’s home revealed – horror of horrors- 24 sociology textbooks – further proof of guilt no doubt. When he was produced in court in Nagpur, there were lacerations on his body and he complained that the police placed ice on his genitals. The Magistrate took no notice of this, and gave permission for him to be subjected to the dubious method of ‘narco-analysis’. This latter form of torture allows the police to suggest things to the victim in a sub conscious state, and then rest their investigation, quite literally, on whatever the subject dreams up. Of course, the police can do the dreaming too, and edit or sex up the dreams to suit their needs. Once a person is branded as ‘guilty’, prior to any investigation, based on political beliefs, or social identity, our system, including in most cases the courts, gives an almost unlimited free hand to the police to extract confessions and concoct criminals to fit crimes. Small wonder if this extends to a license to indulge in staged ‘encounters’.
“Encounters are a form of vigilante justice, filling the vacuum caused by the failure of judicial justice”
“Extra-judicial killings are akin to murder,” says former Punjab and Mumbai police Chief Julio Rebeiro. (HT, May 4, 07)
But in the same interview, Ribeiro suggests that extra-judicial killings get public and political support because of judicial delays in justice, and that if speedy justice were possible there would be no extra-judicial killings. KPS Gill, master of encounter murders in Punjab, elaborates this position without any apologetic note: “When the conduct of judges themselves is questionable, the police officers begin to think, who will implement the laws, who will protect society.... “And in this noble mission of “protecting society, “in fighting militancy and organised crime, mistakes are bound to happen. Take the (May 1997) shootout case in Delhi’s Connaught Place where two businessmen were mistakenly killed by the police; the cops are still facing trial for it. A similar thing happened in London after the 7/7 bombings, when an innocent Brazilian immigrant, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot by the police. Nobody raised a hue and cry over that incident, and the officers responsible have subsequently received promotions and there is no stigma attached to their action. It’s important that the intentions and motives of the officers are correctly assessed in such cases.” (Outlook, May 14, 07)
Well, in this view, what better “intentions and motives” could Vanzara have – it was “deshbhakti”, after all, that spurred him to eliminate potential terrorists. And if one “innocent” anti-national got killed …what’s one Muslim more or less?
But the nature of the killings does not support this thesis of a few excusable ‘mistakes’ in a well-intentioned quest for justice. Despite all the propaganda, ‘encounters’ are not a form of vigilante justice spawned by righteous frustration of the failure of speedy judicial justice. They are not comparable to a vigilante hero taking law into his hands and eliminating a threat to society because ‘the system’ will not deliver. Rather, fake encounters, custodial torture and branding of dissent as “terrorism” in order to justify violation of rights – these are the system. After all, if frustration with legal delays and failures are a justification for vigilante justice, who has better right to it than the victims of the massacres by police at Arwal or Hashimpura, for whom justice has either been delayed for twenty years or denied? The judicial enquiry into the Kalinganagar firing has now been dissolved midway – on the pretext that the Supreme Court forbids sitting Judges from heading commissions of enquiry. The court has backed out from its promise of justice for the victims of Nandigram. Would Gill and Co. support, or at least excuse, the people of these areas if they lost faith in the legal process and decided to become agents of justice?
It just isn’t enough to nail a stray police officer in Ganderbal or Gujarat and pat ourselves on the back for justice done. Not police officers alone but political forces that rule must be held accountable for every police or army murder. At the very least, we need a comprehensive National Truth and Reconciliation Commission – to acknowledge and investigate each and every act of torture, murder, massacre by the state machinery.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Beleaguered Bush: Heightened Opposition at Home and Abroad
THE Democratic Party in the 2006 US elections won a comfortable majority in the House and a narrow majority in the Senate. They also secured a majority of the state governorships. The mid-term elections take place every two years in November to elect representatives to both the House and the Senate. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, was elected to the Senate from Vermont - the first self-described socialist to do so.
Even if the Democrat victory cannot be expected to usher in serious changes in imperialist policies and even domestic policies, the elections have been a major setback to the section of the ruling elite led by the Bush/Cheney administration.
Crisis of Imperialism
This election year Iraq was the main reason that the US electorate voted against the Republicans. Since the Democratic Party did not have an alternative peace plan either, it was largely a negative vote. The cumulative effect of lies about weapons of mass destruction, torture at Abu Ghraib, detention at Guantanamo Bay, secret CIA prisons, no bid contracts to Halliburton and Bechtel, billions of dollars of missing cash and latest attack on habeas corpus became too difficult to manage.
According to recent estimates, more than 655, 000 Iraqi people and 3000 US soldiers have died and more than 20000 US soldiers have been wounded. General Maples testified that in Iraq, the attacks on occupation troops have increased from 70 per day in January to 170 per day in September to 180 per day in October [1]. This made 2006 October one of the deadliest months since the occupation started. The forecast for 2007 is worse for not just Iraq but also Afghanistan.
Drawing parallels with the Vietnam War right wing columnist Tom Freidman of the New York Times said “what we’re seeing in Iraq seems like the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive.” General John Abizaid, top American military commander for the Middle East, has warned of the possibility of occupation going out of control. The incoming Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee accused the Bush administration of ignoring the reality that ‘‘we’re getting deeper and deeper into a hole’’ in Iraq. As the Iraqi resistance and anti-war movement intensify, the imperial crisis deepens and the occupation becomes untenable.
The US ruling elite is now hard at work in an endeavour to formulate a strategy for ‘success in Iraq.’ Several potential presidential candidates including Republican John McCain and Democratic Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have called for more troop deployment. Despite massive public opinion against the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, before the elections, the Senate passed (100-0 vote) the record $447 billion US military budget along with a supplemental $70 billion bridge fund for the next six months of occupation. The entire ruling class establishment is in it together.
The first casualty of the elections was Defense Secretary “shock and awe” Rumsfeld. Bush chose his father’s CIA director Robert Gates as the replacement. Before his appointment, he was also a member of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), the ‘bipartisan commission’ co-chaired by Republican James Baker, former Secretary of State, and Democrat Lee Hamilton, former Chairman of House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Both Republican and Democratic leadership are working closely with the ISG. It has been meeting with numerous political and military leaders, including George Bush, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The ISG is slated to release its ‘policy recommendations’ to prevent the US Empire from sinking in the Iraqi quicksand.
The unpopularity of the Iraqi occupation in the US and the anti-imperial resistance of the Iraqi people have forced the ruling class to rethink its Iraq strategy. This pressure is also being felt by elected politicians who are part of the Democratic Party’s Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) with about 71 members. They have introduced the “End the War in Iraq Act of 2005” that would prohibit further use of Defense Department funds to deploy United States Armed Forces to Iraq. Since both the Republican and Democratic parties are not interested this bill is gathering dust.
Jobs and Scandals
Iraq was however not the only issue. Although gay marriage was banned in several states but in South Dakota a referendum to ban virtually all abortions was easily defeated. After Enron, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal maligned the Republican elite in a major way. The Center for Public Integrity reports that lobbyists spent $4 billion in 2004. The organic relationship between big business, lobbyists and politicians was exposed. Most politicians connected with the scandal either resigned or were defeated in this election. Flooding after Hurricane Katrina was on everybody’s mind too, especially people of colour.
The economy was also an important issue. Millions of jobs have been lost in the last few years. In Ohio alone 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost since Bush came to power; it was the decisive factor there. Nationally, with people spending $1.1 trillion more than they earned, the negative personal savings rate is unprecedented since the Great Depression. This when the total 2005 US debt was nearly three and a half times the US’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that is close to world’s GDP of $44 trillion [2].
Even though the official unemployment rate in July 2006 was 4.8 percent it is estimated that more than 8 percent of the potential labour force is underemployed or unemployed [2]. The minimum wage of $5.15 an hour has not been increased for more than 10 years. Six states that had a referendum to raise the minimum wage overwhelmingly voted to raise it. The main labour unions played a major part in this. They spent more than $100 million and had 100,000 volunteers to increase voter turnout in the election for the Democratic Party [3]. This nexus with a party of the ruling class has been an impediment in building a more militant labour movement.
Challenging the System
History informs us that progressive legislations, in a capitalist political system, are the fruits of a vigorous movement. They have never been a gift. Now is the time to connect the struggles against exploitation in the US with the occupations abroad to re-energize this movement. These will include the struggles of workers, people of colour, undocumented immigrants, gays and women for an egalitarian and just society.
Progressive forces have called for anti-war marches on Washington in January and March. Momentum is building to demand universal health coverage, minimum wage increase, investigation of war crimes, impeachment of Bush, worker’s right to organize, Katrina victims’ right to return and ending the occupation from Iraq to Palestine. Active duty soldiers are also resisting the occupation by becoming conscientious objectors. This should also be the time for the anti-imperialist struggles to introspect on protest tactics and movement strategies to intensify the struggle.
It is clear that the invasion of any country, corruption of politicians, reign of big business and attack on the working class will not end with this election. These problems are endemic to the capitalistic political system. It cannot be reformed. A new society has to rise from the ashes of imperialism and capitalism. Building a movement which does just that is the challenge.
End Notes
1. Michael Gordon and Mark Mazzetti, General Warns of Risks in Iraq if G.I.’s Are Cut, New York Times, November 16, 2006.
2. Fred Magdoff, The Explosion of Debt and Speculation, Monthly Review, November 2006.
3. Steven Greenhouse, Labor Movement Dusts Off Agenda as Power Shifts in Congress, New York Times, November 11, 2006.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
2007: A Time to Reclaim Our Country, Our History, Our Freedom, Our Rights
The year 2007 marks the 150th anniversary of India’s First War of Independence. It is also the centenary year of Bhagat Singh’s birth, and the fortieth anniversary of the Naxalbari rebellion. The Central Committee of the CPI(ML) has called for celebrating the confluence of these three great anniversaries with a countrywide “Our Country, Our History – Our Freedom, Our Rights” campaign. A big Inquilab rally has been planned in Delhi on 23 March, the day Bhagat Singh and his comrades Sukhdev and Rajguru embraced martyrdom seventy-six years ago with the clarion call “Inquilab Zindabad! Samrajyavad Murdabad!” (Long Live Revolution! Down with Imperialism!). The campaign will be aimed at rekindling this spirit of history in the midst of the ongoing popular struggles of the present and for this purpose the campaign will highlight a ten-point people’s charter comprising the key demands of these struggles.
Why is it important for us to celebrate this history? The current Indian ruling elite is afraid of, and at any rate uncomfortable with, this history and this is why they want us to forget this history or know it only in a distorted and mutilated manner. So celebrating this history is not just remembering the past but waging a struggle against the present-day rulers who have a different historical inheritance and who want our history to remain subordinated to their history.
British colonialists had dubbed 1857 as a case of ‘sepoy mutiny’ when fanatic Indian soldiers driven by blind religious passion and hatred had attacked their European officers and other British civilians. They would like us to believe that the mutineers had no sense of what they were doing and were just a bunch of killers who had to be and were brought under control by the superior military and ‘civilisational’ might of British colonialism. Western historians today are also tempted to see 1857 as a case of ‘Islamic jehad’ against Christianity and Western civilisation. The official Indian history today does recognise 1857 as the First War of India’s Independence, but it does its best to try and suppress the distinguishing features – the militant anti-colonial spirit, the popular participation and the emerging national character – that made the war of 1857 so greatly remarkable.
The insurrection of 1857 had certainly been initiated by the soldiers from the barracks of Bengal, but in no time it had spread not only among armed regiments across the country but most importantly among peasants, small traders and other sections of the Indian people. It was not a revolt of a few disgruntled kings and feudal rulers – rather many kings and feudal rulers collaborated with the British and helped them put down the rebellion. It was not an attempt to restore Muslim rule in India, much less was it an Islamic jehad against Christianity. The majority of the soldiers and the peasants and traders backing them up were Hindus and it was they who got an old and reluctant Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal ruler, to provide a symbolic leadership to the revolt. And the revolt was characterised by its conscious and concrete expressions of unity between the two communities with the rebels defining themselves as ‘Hindus and Muslims of Hindustan. In fact, an integral aspect of the new strategy of control forged by the colonialists in response to 1857 was the deliberate fomenting of communal hostilities.
The revolt did not succeed in its goal of overthrowing the British rulers, the mutineers obviously did not have the kind of organisation and preparation needed for that kind of victory, and the objective conditions too were not ripe enough. But the fact that they succeeded in holding on for nearly two years in different parts of the country clearly shows that the revolt was far from being just a sporadic or accidental outburst of mass anger. History tells us that the mutineers had their own committees which issued directives for the people, they had their own song which emphasised people’s unity and the goal of freeing the country from British plunder. The soldiers most of whom were essentially peasants in uniform struck a chord of ready resonance with the peasantry and this gave the whole revolt a powerful peasant content and ensured popular participation on a significant scale. Even militarily the war of 1857 moved on from regular warfare to guerrilla warfare with the British Army holding in large parts of the country “nothing but the towns” while the insurgent armies gradually dissolved into “smaller bodies of from two to six or eight thousand men, acting to a certain degree, independently of each other, but always ready to unite for a short expedition against any British detachment” (Frederick Engels, July 6, 1858). 1857 thus went much farther than being merely a reaction of pre-modern India to British occupation and plunder, it gave us the first glimpse of a modern India in its embryonic stage.
Let us not forget that we are here talking about a period that was indeed quite early for the kind of powerful national liberation struggles that eventually ended the colonial era in the 20th century or the revolutionary battles of the working people that the world saw in the form of the Paris Commune in 1871, or the workers’ and peasants’ soviets that appeared in the course of the Russian Revolution in February-November 1917. For colonial India in the mid-19th century, the revolt of 1857 had indeed reached an extraordinary height and given the British rulers their first major shock. Benjamin Disraeli who went on to become Prime Minister of Britain in the 1870s told the British parliament on July 27, 1857 that what had been happening in India was far more than a military mutiny, it had all the signs of a national revolt prompting him to deliver a long speech on his “considerations on the decline of the Anglo-Indian Empire.”
The British rulers were quick to learn their lessons from the shock of 1857. The East India Company was abolished, changes were made in the mode and method of British rule in India, and in the form of the Indian National Congress the British developed a safety valve mechanism so that India did not explode ever again. From the high of armed insurrection, India had been brought down to the lowest political level of petitioning for petty relief and reforms. For sections of the Indian elite, political awakening may have its genesis in the art of petitioning taught by the British, but the great majority of the Indian people had already made a political beginning with the national revolt of 1857 and all the local revolts that preceded and followed it. In subsequent years, this difference between these two trajectories grew often into sharp contrasts between the revolutionary and reformist schools within the freedom movement.
The difference was not confined to the question of methods of movement, it pervaded the entire understanding of the vision of India, the definition of India’s national identity. While the insurgents of 1857 rose against the colonial plunder of India, the Congress essentially saw British colonialism as the harbinger of modernity in India. It saw the plunderer as nurturer and Manmohan Singh acknowledged as much during one of his recent speeches at Oxford University. The ideological predecessors and founders of the Sangh Parivar went one step further and they saw British occupation in terms of liberation of so-called Hindu India from centuries of perceived Islamic domination. This is why the RSS kept aloof from the entire quest for India’s independence. This umbilical cord of dependence, this craving for imperialist blessings, continues to define the Congress-BJP attitude to today’s American empire-builders, they cannot think of an Indian future beyond the strategic umbrella of American domination, let alone throwing up any kind of resistance or challenge to US imperialism’s campaign of global war and global plunder.
The insurgents of 1857 would never brook such bankruptcy that equated independence with a shameless surrender to and collaboration with imperialist powers. It would have never allowed communal division to determine the history, geography or politics of the country. Bhagat Singh and his comrades resurrected the spirit of 1857 and gave it a firm socialist, anti-imperialist orientation, completing the conceptual transition from Gadar to Inquilab (revolt to revolution). They visualised independence as a combination or convergence of political liberty and social emancipation and when they saw the dominant Congress leadership waver and betray on both scores, they warned us against the consequence of the bhure Angrez or the brown sahibs usurping power and monopolising the fruits of freedom for a few robbing the majority of their resources and rights. Today the brown sahibs in power are naturally mortally afraid of the memories of 1857 and the trail blazed by Bhagat Singh and his comrades. It is not surprising that a police official in Maharashtra should see even the act of selling the books of Bhagat Singh as a criminal offence and act of sedition.
Neither the British nor the Indian rulers could however ever destroy the spirit of 1857 or the legacy of Bhagat Singh. Following Gandhi’s withdrawal of the movement after the Chaurichaura incident, peasants have repeatedly organised and revolted under the communist banner. From Tebhaga in Bengal, Telengana in Andhra to Punnapra-Vayalar in Kerala, the history of India’s freedom movement was full of glorious instances of peasant power and militancy. The people also never forgot the military tradition of 1857 and just before the British left they were once again confronted with the great naval mutiny of Bombay and the heroic campaign of the Azad Hind Fauj or the Indian National Army. The tragic communal bloodbath and partition of 1947 and the consolidation of a pro-imperialist bourgeois-landlord rule in post-colonial India did mark a setback for the quest for real freedom and democracy, but powered by the relentless and determined struggles of the peasants and workers, the Indian people did not allow the rulers to dictate terms and kept up the revolutionary banner of anti-imperialist resistance and radical social transformation. Forty years ago, Naxalbari signified the most concentrated and courageous expression of this revolutionary quest in post-colonial India.
Like 1857, Naxalbari too did not succeed in winning ultimate victory in the revolutionary campaign it had unleashed, but the fire lit by Naxalbari has definitely turned into a new light for the Indian people to challenge the darkness in which the rulers want to drown the country. It was Naxalbari which taught us to look at the oppressed people not as victims but as fighters and heroes, and rediscover the history of the people by rejecting the history of the rulers.
Today when the rulers have teamed up with the US imperialists and are waging a desperate joint war on our resources and rights, it is surely time for us to rediscover our glorious history and rekindle the great spirit of people’s resistance against loot and oppression, injustice and imperialism, Let the imperialists and our rulers tremble before our history, we are here to reclaim our country and our history, secure our freedom and win all our rights. Let us welcome 2007 in all its glory.
Ten-Point Campaign Charter
The people’s charter to be highlighted in the course of the campaign will comprise the following major points:
(i) scrapping of SEZ policy and defence of peasants’ inalienable right to cultivable land;
(ii) stopping peasant suicides and starvation deaths (iii) strict implementation of NREGA, and its extension to the whole of the country on improved terms;
(iv) legal guarantee for right to education, right to work and right to health;
(v) restoration of alienated tribal land and rehabilitation of all project-displaced people;
(vi) embargo on indiscriminate entry of foreign investment, especially in sectors like education and retail trade;
(vii) regularisation of unorganised workers and guaranteeing their basic rights;
(viii) end to violence and discrimination against dalits, adivasis, women and minorities and ensuring greater opportunities for all disadvantaged sections;
(ix) scrapping of black laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act and end to state-sponsored violence against the people like Salwa Judum in Chhatisgarh;
(x) scrapping of Indo-US nuclear deal and reversal of pro-US foreign policy.
