The Communist Party of India (Marxist) lost many seats in the recent elections. Mark Booth looks at what lies behind this and shows how India's workers and peasants need a new leadership
After recent elections in ‘the world’s biggest democracy’, Western leaders and media welcomed the return to power of the ruling establishment’s Congress party. The right-wing Hindu chauvinists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered its worst result since 1991. But India’s Communist parties also lost many seats.
The main reason for Western approval of the Indian election result is that they believe that Congress, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, will continue with the process of “reform” - privatisation and opening up India to world finance capital. There they are right.
At the same they think Singh can keep the peace between the vast country’s caste, national and religious communities better than the Hindu communalist BJP-led coalition, which has always inflamed tensions with the country’s huge Muslim minority.
In addition Congress has suggested a series of limited reforms to meet the seething discontent in India’s countryside, where Maoist guerrillas have spread a rural insurgency to wide areas over the past decade. For the US, its new ally India is vital as a counterweight to its potential rival China. The new government was seen as the best option at a time when the world economic crisis is affecting India more severely than the capitalists had previously expected.
While the elections have strengthened Congress in the directly elected house of the Indian parliament (the Lok Sabha),they have weakened the Left Front of Stalinist parties, made up of the Communist Party of India– (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (CPI) and several smaller left parties. They have seen their number of parliamentary deputies slashed to an all time low of 24 (CPI-M with 16, CPI with 4). So have the Indian masses abandoned both the left and the hardline Hindu right and opted for the centre ground?
In fact the picture is more complex than this. At the same time as the Communist parties lost seats in key areas, overall the CPI-M’s share of the vote fell only marginally from 5.66 percent in 2004 to 5.33 percent, while the CPI increased its overall share of he vote slightly from 1.41 to 1.43 per cent. So why the resounding losses of seats?
The answer is simple. The CPI-M and its allies are being punished by the workers and peasants in the states of West Bengal and Kerala where they held power, because they implemented vicious anti-working class policies. But outside those areas, where they are in opposition, workers and peasants have rallied to the Communist parties under the impact of the crisis, hoping that these mass parties will give a lead to their resistance.
The Left Front
In 2004 the capitalist Congress-United Progressive Alliance coalition list swept the BJP from power. The CPI-M led Left Front, as part of the UPA government, provided left camouflage for Congress with its Common Minimum Programme, a list of basic social-democratic reforms meant to ameliorate the intense suffering of the Indian peoples. Meanwhile Congress continued with the same policy of neo-liberal reforms and accommodation to US imperialism and the world market as its BJP predecessor.
While at national level the Left Front criticised the worst of these neo-liberal policies, where they held power in the state of West Bengal and in Kerala they vigorously implemented them, claiming that they were the only means for “development”. The CPI-M promoted West Bengal as a site for the development of Chinese style Special Economic Zones where Western capital could invest and return lucrative profits from cheap unprotected labour . Land was forcibly purchased for the private developers; peasants were brutally driven from the land.
This policy came to a head in West Bengal in 2007 when, in the town of Nandigram, thousands of peasants rose up against the sell-off of their land by the CPI-M led government to build a car factory for Tata, India’s largest car manufacturing corporation. They drove the CPI-M and its representatives out of the town. In response the CPI-M sent in the police and army, aided by CPI-M party thugs, to smash the peasants resistance. Scores were killed and hundreds wounded. Dragging the name of Marxism through the mud, in the aftermath CPI-M ‘cadres’ went wild, savagely beating villagers and raping women.
In 2008 once again this happened in the town of Singur, when peasants protesting at the sell-off of their lands were viciously attacked by the police and army, resulting in dozens more dead and injured.
It is therefore no surprise that the vote for the Left Front in West Bengal fell from 50.72 percent in 2004 to 43.3 percent in 2009. In Kerala the vote fell from 39.41 percent in 2004 to 37.92 percent in 2009. Nevertheless their vote rose substantially in several other states, offsetting the major fall in their votes in the key states where the Left Front had held power.
The election was not a rejection of left or anticapitalist policies. Indeed the vote showed large sections of the population still opposed to the neo-liberal pro-privatisation policies pursued by the Indian ruling-class and a rejection of the poisonous dead end of Hindu chauvinism represented by the BJP. The Left Front suffered wherever it identified itself with neoliberal policies, i.e. in the states where it governed. In states where the left parties were in opposition their vote rose, reflecting the growing radicalisation of sections of the masses as they are further impoverished by the economic crisis.
The biggest problem that workers and the rural poor faced at the ballot box was the lack of a consistent working-class political alternative. This vote was not a defeat for the Left but for the Stalinist reformist policy of taking office as junior partners with the main party of the Indian capitalists and then carrying out neoliberal “reforms”. What the Indian masses need is a revolutionary workers’ party; one which stands in elections to win workers to a programme of action and intransigently opposes all the capitalist parties.
But above all it must be a party of the class struggle, fighting alongside workers against Indian and foreign capitalists, fighting alongside peasants defending their land from SEZs or the landlords, fighting alongside women, indigenous peoples and Dalits for democractic rights. Its action programme must link all these struggles to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state and the creation of one where power lies in the hands of workers’ and peasants’ councils. In short India needs a party not based on the ideas and practice of Stalin or Mao but on those of Lenin and Trotsky.
