[L-I] [ INDIA ] : ML Update Vol. 7 No. 30 28 Jul-3 Aug 2004

ML Update
A CPI(ML) Weekly News Magazine
Vol.  7     No. 30      28 Jul - 3 Aug 2004


Red Salute to the Legendary Revolutionary Leader and Founder of CPI (ML )

In the course of a protracted struggle between its opportunist and
revolutionary wings, the Communist Party of India underwent its first split
in 1964 and a new party was formed in the shape of the Communist Party of
India (Marxist). It did not however take long for the revolutionary wing to
realize that the leadership of the new party had been seized by the centrist
trend of the movement, which was bent upon pursuing the same opportunist
course. An inner-Party struggle ensued throughout the party. However, in a
concentrated form, it was conducted by Comrade Charu Mazumdar through his
famous Eight Documents, written between 1965 and 1967.

Marked by a nationwide outburst of mass movements, this was also the period
that saw the first major turn in post-1947 Indian politics. In West Bengal,
the CPI(M)-dominated United Front was swept to power and the party
leadership completed its transition to the opportunist strategic course. As
its antithesis, the revolutionary wing went beyond the parameters of
inner-Party struggle and strove to orientate the mass struggles, the peasant
movement in particular, towards the revolutionary strategic course. The
peasant uprising in Naxalbari, organised by the Charu Mazumdar-led wing of
the Party precipitated the first showdown between the two strategic
perspectives and tactical lines within the CPI(M).

True to the tradition of social-democratic betrayal, the party in power
responded with bullets, and the simmering revolt within the party spread
like wildfire. With revolutionary communists throughout India detaching
themselves from the party and rallying around the emerging centre, the All
India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), the
CPI(M) suffered its first major split. The formation of the Communist Party
of India (Marxist-Leninist) on 22 April, 1969, gave an organised and
centralised shape to this new centre. The CPI(ML) held its First Congress in
Calcutta in May 1970 and Comrade Charu Mazumdar was elected the General
Secretary of a 21-member Central Committee.

The history of the next two years is a saga of heroic sacrifices
unparalleled in the annals of the Indian Communist movement. Following the
pattern of the Chinese revolution serious attempts were made to develop
guerrilla war, a red army and base areas in selected areas in the
countryside. Backing it up was a powerful movement of students and youth,
particularly in West Bengal and the city of Calcutta, which sought to
challenge the entire foundations of the ideology of the Indian ruling
classes that had begun to take shape with the advent of the so-called Bengal
Renaissance.
However, despite its amazing revolutionary spirit and intensity, this first
phase of the CPI(ML) movement could not provide detailed and comprehensive
solutions to the complex problems of revolutionising Indian society. Amidst
unprecedented state repression, the movement soon faced a disastrous
setback.

Comrade Charu Mazumdar did assess the changed situation. This was reflected
in his last article "It is the people's Interest That is the Party's
Interest", which gave a clear indication for a shift in emphasis. However,
he did not find time to develop it further. Meanwhile, he was arrested and
the sick and ailing leader braved the death of a martyr facing inhuman
tortures in Kolkota's Lalbazar police lockup on 28th July 1972.
It was the CPI(ML) Liberation which grasped the essence of the new
realisations of the late leader, inherited and developed it suited to the
changing situations and kept the Party alive.




                        Three Glorious Decades of Reorganisation : July 28,
1974 - July 28, 2004
                    CPI(ML)-Liberation: True Inheritor of India's
Revolutionary Communist Legacy

As Comrade Vinod Mishra put it in "CPI(ML)- The Firm Defender of the
Revolutionary Legacy of Indian Communists" (A popular booklet published in
1991) -- summarising the experiences of the formation of CPI(ML) and its
reorganisation in July 28, 1974, after the martyrdom of Comrade Charu
Mazumdar -  that the CPI(ML) Liberation is the only CPI(ML) group
(a) which has maintained its continuity and unity since its reorganisation
in 1974;
(b) which has got an all-India organisational network covering Assam,
Tripura, West Bengal, southern Orissa (Koraput-Ganjam area), coastal Andhra
Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, southern Kerala, Bangalore, Bombay, Chhattisgarh,
Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar;
(c) which has held regular Party Congresses and Conferences up to regional
and district levels and is run by duly elected bodies at different levels;
(d) which conducts regular Party education and rectification and
consolidation campaigns to raise the level of consciousness of Party ranks
and ensure their increasing involvement in the running of various Party
affairs;
(e) which has regular central organs in English and Hindi backed by a
network of state organs in regional languages, Party pamphlets and various
periodicals;
(f) which practises various forms of struggle ranging from armed resistance
to parliamentary agitation and runs a whole set of organisations varying
from the secret and the underground to the widest possible open mass
organisations, conducts mass activities on all fronts and in all spheres of
life and undertakes joint action with political forces of different kinds,
combining them all into a growing current of mass struggles; and
(g) which maintains fraternal and friendly relations with communist and
democratic movements of several countries,
we claim ourselves to be the true inheritors of the revolutionary wing of
the Indian communist movement in general and the CPI(ML) in particular, as
the Party, representing and acting on behalf of the CPI(ML).



Charu Mazumdar's writings will continue to kindle the dream of revolution in
many more hearts in the new century

(We reproduce here the preface by Dipankar Bhattacharya to the Hindi edition
of Charu Mazumdar's Collected Works published in July 2001 by Samkalin
Prakashan -Ed.)

The Hindi edition of Comrade Charu Mazumdar's Collected Works is being
reprinted after a gap of twenty-five years. Days before he was killed in
police custody in Calcutta on July 28, 1972, in his last write-up Comrade CM
had asked revolutionary communists to cling to the masses, uphold their
interests and ensure the Party's survival through the setback all around.
Two years after CM's martyrdom, the Party Central Committee was reorganised
and one of the first things the reorganised Party did was to publish the
writings of CM. The Party succeeded in withstanding the setback and the
collected works of CM proved an invaluable treasurehouse of inspiration and
insight in this mission of saving and strengthening the CPI(ML). The
reactionary dream of banishing the spectre of CM and CPI(ML) by killing him
proved yet another nightmare for the Indian ruling classes. Three decades
after his martyrdom, Charu Mazumdar lives on as the indomitable spirit of
revolution. Murder apart, CM has also been sought to be destroyed by
another, no less lethal, means. By reducing him to dead slogans and
distorted images. While the infamous police official responsible for the
murder of CM and hundreds of revolutionaries was subsequently rewarded and
promoted by the state, even under West Bengal's Left Front rule, CM has been
sought to be portrayed as a blood-thirsty demon, as a man of crazy ideas and
whimsical action. Ironically, many of CM's admirers have been equal
participants in this process as his detractors. Various brands of anarchists
who still invoke CM in defence of their absurd actions and empty phrases,
unable to see him  in motion, in the specific context of the revolutionary
juncture between the '60s and the '70s, are also contributing to the
vulgarisation of his great historic legacy. Against this backdrop, CM's
writings stand out as the most authentic refutation and repudiation of all
attempts to vulgarise the history of the first major dress rehearsal of
revolution in post-colonial India.

Let us look at some of the major dimensions of this history. First, the
process of emergence of Naxalbari and the CPI(ML). Many academics and
perhaps many more activist view Naxalbari as a sudden spontaneous outbreak
of a peasant rebellion in an obscure village in the northern part of Bengal.
The emergence of CPI(ML) is also presented similarly as an obvious sequel to
Naxalbari. And if at all some process is sought to be discerned behind these
landmark events, we are transported immediately to the Cultural Revolution
in China, to America's war in Vietnam, to the worldwide student-youth
revolts of the 1960s. CM's writings, on the contrary, repeatedly acquaint
the readers with the roots of Naxalbari and CPI(ML) in India's own history
of peasant militancy and revolutionary communist movement.
Behind Naxalbari lay years of sustained and conscious attempts by sections
of CPI(M) cadres to draw lesson from such unforgettable chapters of militant
peasant struggles as the Tebhaga movement in Bengal, Telangana in Andhra and
so on. And this in turn grew as an integral part of a powerful inner-party
struggle between the revolutionary and opportunist wings of Indian communist
movement which had not ended with the formalisation of the CPI-CPI(M) split
in 1964, but continued to simmer within the CPI(M) itself. The celebrated
Eight Documents written between February 1965 and early 1967 which form the
core of CM's entire writings reveal the real roots of Naxalbari and CPI(ML).
A thorough and uncompromising struggle against modern revisionism runs like
a scarlet thread through all the eight documents and many subsequent
writings of CM. What are the key features and causes of this revisionism? CM
discusses three principal parameters: confusion in grasping the
private-public nexus in Indian economy; inability to uphold people-oriented
patriotism in opposition to the chauvinism of Indian bourgeoisie, and
failure in emphasising the landless poor as the pivotal force of agrarian
revolution within a differentiated peasantry. And this yardstick remains
remarkably valid till today, more than thirty years later, even as the
prevailing economic policy has shed its erstwhile socialistic pretensions to
opt for a declared new-liberal agenda of market liberalisation,
privatisation and globalisation.
CM also applied this polemic to a situation when the CPI(M) first assumed
power in West Bengal. While the CPI(M) leadership remained busy castigating
the CPI for having joined coalition governments in several states as a
junior partner, CM emphasised subjecting the CPI(M)'s role as a major
coalition partner in West Bengal's first united front government to a
Marxist scrutiny. He pointed out how the party leadership had begun drawing
the wrong lessons from the Kerala experience where the first communist-led
government had been promptly toppled by the then Congress government at the
Centre. The UF government in West Bengal was desperate to prove itself
responsible to the system. It was quick to adopt the motto of industrial
peace, asking the trade union movement to shed militancy. On the
all-important question of land reforms, the peasant association was directed
to surrender its initative to revenue officials of the government. Naxalbari
was brutally suppressed and the CPI(M) central organ congratulated the state
government on this 'success'. And on the sensitive issue of food policy, on
which the state had witnessed militant struggles of the masses, the new
government continued to follow the old anti-poor policy of the previous
Congress regime, laying the entire blame at the doorsteps of the non-Left
ministers in the coalition cabinet. This provoked CM to raise this most
pertinent question: if non-Left ministers can defend the interests of the
classes they represent, what prevents Left leaders from championing the
cause of the rural poor? Did we not see this farce on a national scale at
the time of the united front government in mid-'90s, when the CPI and CPI(M)
first acquiesced on the question of economic policy by drafting a common
minimum programme containing provisions like the setting up of a
disinvestment commission and the opening up of the insurance sector etc. and
then began to blame it all on Mr. Chidambaram, the bourgeois finance
minister?

While the inner-party struggle against opportunism and efforts to unleash
militant peasant revolts had been going on for a long time, it was the rapid
development of the extraordinary situation of the late '60s which set the
ball rolling for the post-Naxalbari revolutionary journey. CM's writings
must be read in the context of this revolutionary situation. A true
Leninist, he was no worshipper of the concept of gradual revolution and a
rigid hierarchy of stages, a theory which only belittles the conscious
element in communist practice and misses the revolutionary logic of
development through leaps. And for him the late '60s marked precisely such a
leap in the situation which could not be comprehended by a gradualist. The
unprecedented defeat of the Congress in several states in the 1967 elections
in the background of an acute economic crisis heralded a critical juncture
and there was a palpable yearning for change among the people. CM was not
alone in appreciating the intensity of this juncture, but he stood out in
his vision of utilisation of this juncture and leading it to a revolutionary
culmination. Somewhere he likened this situation to an over-ripe mango,
elsewhere to a dynamite about to explode, but he was always concerned about
taking matching steps to meet the need of the hour.
Naxalbari happened in May 1967 and with the state government resorting to
brutal measures of suppression, a confrontation between revolutionary
sections of the party and the official leadership of the state unit became
inevitable. The showdown intensified after the central leadership began to
laud these suppressive measures openly in the party's central organ, and
November 1967 witnessed the emergence of the All India Coordination
Committees of Communist Revolutionaries. The next decisive moment came in
April 1969 with the formation of the CPI(ML). At every step, CM fought
against gradualism, against the perfectionist and pedantic outlook which
always threatened to promote passivity and spontaneity to the neglect of the
conscious active core of communist practice.

Yet with CM, revolutionary urgency never meant impatience and desperation
and all through his writings he keeps emphasising the protracted nature of
people's war. In his last few writings he clearly acknowledges the shift in
immediate situation and the whole stress is also accordingly shifted on
keeping the Party alive, and on forging a broader front of Left forces
against the Congress rule on the basis of people's struggles. The same
leader who articulated the vision of transforming the 1970s into the decade
of liberation was now grappling with an extremely adverse turn in the
situation, he ackonwledges the shift and calls for adjusting party policies
accordingly, and yet he pins his hope on the next round of upsurge which he
was sure would come on a bigger, national scale. The situation obviously has
its unmistakable imprint on the entire body of CM's writings, but what
stands out even more prominently is his revolutionary attitude and communist
sensitivity towards the situation.

CM's views on the question of communist party organisation have also been a
subject of much distortion. It is often said that mass organisations and
even party organisation had little priority in his scheme and he essentially
acted in an arbitrary, whimsical manner. Refuting all such simplistic views
CM stands out in this collected works as a leader who paid utmost attention
to the details of struggle and organisation building. If mass organisations
were de-emphasised it was only because CM insisted on a complete rupture
with economism. He repeatedly makes it clear that peasant associations and
trade unions would continue to exist, but a break will have to be made with
the economistic way mass organisations are understood and run. One of the
most disastrous consequences of this economism is that the communist party
is reduced to play a complementary role and  politics takes the back seat.
CM insisted on bringing back the leading role of the party and put politics
in command. Even while the CPI(ML) itself did not organise trade unions, CM
emphasised broad-based workers' unity and made it clear that in the name of
combating revisionism, passivity cannot be promoted and rifts should not be
created in working class struggles. He welcomed the militant form of gherao,
a working class response of the '60s to the bourgeois order of hire and fire
and stressed the question of working class dignity in contrast to the
social-democratic practice of economism. In his appeal to students, he
repeatedly stresses the paramount importance of integration with the masses
and learning from them and wages a bitter struggle against all notions of
bourgeois individualism and careerism.

In his attitude to parliamentary struggles, CM was no boycottist. In his
early '67 writings, he talks about utilising the elections to carry out
revolutionary propaganda and it was only subsequently when class struggle
became intense and revolution itself became the immediate central agenda of
the party that he called for boycott. Of course the forms of struggle which
came up as a specific revolutionary response to the concrete situation were
soon sought to be generalised for the entire period and many tactical
questions were thus elevated to the level of strategy, thereby opening the
floodgates for many a distortion. But his final writings suggest that he had
begun to grapple with the new situation of setback and the idea of
broad-based front against the Congress and the accompanying emphasis on
largeness of the communist mind appearing in his last article perhaps
indicate the beginning of a possible rethinking on certain tactical
questions or what we may call extrication of elements of tactics from
questions of strategy. By no means can CM be bracketed with anarchists and
exponents of the so-called 'New Left'.

The explosive situation of the late 60s, the intensity of struggle and
severity of state repression did not allow any breathing space for the newly
formed CPI(ML) to consolidate itself. But the key guiding principles of the
party were laid down in this stormy phase itself and CM played the leading
role in this. The emphasis on establishing the leadership of the landless
poor in the agrarian revolution, on unleashing the revolutionary energies of
the masses and on developing a revolutionary style of work for the party
based on close integration with the people, which soon became a defining
feature of the party's identity, dates back to this formative phase. CM gave
us a new definition of a revolutionary - a revolutionary is not just one who
has dream of better society but one who share this dream with the landless
poor.
Naxalbari did not succeed in realising its direct aim. The glorious first
phase of the CPI(ML)'s revolutionary campaign met with a setback. But this
first major dress rehearsal of revolution in post-colonial India has
acquired an indelible significance akin to the 1871 Paris Commune or the
'failed' Russian revolution of 1905. Successful revolutions have always been
and can only be accomplished on the historical basis of such 'failed'
rehearsals.
The first edition of CM's writings was published on the eve of Emergency.
Today, twenty-five years later, the country is faced with the spectre of
India's own saffron variety of fascism. The spectre of fascism can only be
effectively banished by the dream of revolution and CM's writings will
continue to kindle that dream in may more hearts in this new century.
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