The
upcoming presidential elections have thrown up a kind of political turmoil
which is unprecedented for the election to an insignificant rubber-stamp post like
that of the president. The
presidential post is widely considered to be a last refuge for loyal ruling-
class politicians who are given an honorable retirement from active political
life. Congress’s decision to send Pranab Mukherjee to political asylum by
nominating him for the president’s post appears to be an exception from the rule,
given that he has been a key cabinet minister of the ruling UPA and one of its
most powerful troubleshooters till recently. In his political career as a
Congress functionary and a cabinet minister, Pranab Mukherjee has served as a
loyal lackey of the ruling classes of the country and continued to prostrate
before imperialism – be it US imperialism, social-imperialist USSR or the
European powers. Of late, however, he antagonised the big Indian and foreign
corporations, and hence the imperialist powers, by introducing certain policy
measures through the Union Budget 2012, most importantly being the GAAR
(General Anti-Avoidance Rule). For this, he was removed from the post of
finance minister by the ruling clique under the diktats of US imperialism.
Congress’s choice of the presidential candidate also needs to be understood as
a symptom of the growing contradictions within the ruling classes and as one
more proof of their complete servility to the imperialist interests.
The
farcical drama surrounding the presidential polls has once again exposed the
political bankruptcy of parliamentary ‘left’ parties like CPI(M) and CPI(ML)
Liberation. All ruling-class
parties in parliamentary politics have taken the alliances built around the
presidential candidates to be the precursor to the next general elections
scheduled for 2014. This explains the intense lobbying among the parliamentary
parties of all hues and the media frenzy created around this time’s presidential
poll. The official ‘left’ parties of the country too – being representatives of
the Indian ruling classes – are very much part of this rabidly opportunist and
politically bankrupt electoral game. CPI(M)’s justification for supporting
Pranab Mukherjee, for instance, is purportedly to drive a wedge between
Congress and Trinamool Congress, keeping in mind the prospects of the next
assembly elections in Bengal. This ‘tactical’ move, CPI(M) believes, will help
it to come back as the ruling party of Bengal! So its decision is based on pure
electoral calculation aimed at coming back to power in Bengal. Such
considerations have always dictated the practice of social-fascist CPI(M) throughout
its fifty years of history. Therefore it is hardly surprising to find CPI(M) opportunistically
tailing behind the Congress candidate.
CPI and
CPI(ML) Liberation on the other hand have declared that for the sake of
‘strengthening Left unity’ they must take the ‘principled’ stand of
‘abstaining’ from the vote.
Liberation-AISA has criticized CPI(M) for betraying this ‘alliance of
abstainers’, even though it also knows that their abstention is going to be
totally inconsequential in determining the outcome of the polls. Nor such a
position by Liberation is based on any class politics that goes beyond the
arithmetic of parliamentary elections. Liberation is miffed with CPI(M) because
its long-cherished dream of having an all-India electoral alliance with CPI(M)
and other ‘communist’ parties under the garb of ‘Left unity’ has met another
setback due to CPI(M)’s refusal to buy its bogey of ‘abstention’. It hardly
matters for Liberation and other ‘left’ parliamentary parties that the sham
‘debate’ of whether to ‘support’ Pranab Mukherjee or to ‘abstain’ from voting
has no relevance whatsoever for the oppressed people of the country. It is a
drama enacted by the ruling classes to delude the masses and to divert attention
from their life and death struggles. The parliamentary ‘left’ has faithfully
played its role in this facile ruling-class drama, albeit as insignificant
characters.
AISA
and SFI in JNU are the miniature versions of their degenerate, anti-people and
reactionary parent parties CPI(ML) Liberation and CPI(M). This has been proved once again by the recent
developments in the students’ politics in the campus surrounding the
presidential polls. The ‘debate’ in the campus was triggered by the resignation
of Prasenjit Bose, a former leader of SFI-JNU, ‘criticising’ certain ‘mistakes’
of CPI(M) from 2007 onwards. Bose argues that CPI(M)’s support to Pranab
Mukherjee will ‘damage’ the party and compromise ‘Left unity’, and hence
suggests that CPI(M) should abstain from the presidential polls. Since this was
exactly what CPI(ML) Liberation was desperately trying to tell CPI(M), AISA in
JNU and Liberation outside the campus went all out to ‘welcome’ with open arms
the ‘principled’ and ‘daring’ act of ‘Comrade’ Prasenjit Bose! AISA brought out
posters in the campus hailing Bose without uttering a single word of criticism
against his reactionary role of publicly defending and justifying every
repressive and anti-people act of CPI(M). The manner in which Liberation-AISA
fell head over heels to hailing Prasenjit Bose describing his latest stand as
‘political’ and ‘principled’, etc. only goes to show the level of
Liberation-AISA’s degeneration, willfully ignoring that till yesterday Bose was
a rabid CPI(M) mouthpiece. Not stopping at that, AISA through a series of
posters launched a sustained campaign to instigate SFI-JNU to support Prasenjit
Bose’s stand and to ‘revolt’ against CPI(M).
Prasenjit
Bose’s resignation drama has nothing to do with principles or genuine
self-reflection as Liberation-AISA wants us to believe. A moribund symptom of the present crisis-ridden
ruling class is that many arch-opportunists within the parliamentary ‘left’
have emerged from its ranks with their newfound ‘critiques’! Prasenjit Bose is
one of such individual who has cleverly couched his opportunistic abandoning of
CPI(M) in an ideological-political rhetoric. Bose, a former leader of SFI in
JNU and a mouthpiece of CPI(M) till very recently, resigned from CPI(M)
supposedly opposing his party’s decision to support Pranab Mukherjee, which later
led to his expulsion from CPI(M). He seems to have suddenly woken up and realised
that certain acts of CPI(M) from 2007 onwards were wrong and had alienated the
party from the “basic classes”. As Bose writes in his resignation letter, “I
consider [CPI(M)’s support to Pranab Mukherjee] to be a grave error which will
harm the Party and disturb Left unity. The
Party leadership has committed one mistake after another since 2007 -
coercive land acquisition in West Bengal, the Nandigram police firing, allowing
the UPA government to approach the IAEA with the nuclear deal, giving a call
for a non-Congress secular government in 2009…”. He also complains that CPI(M)
has failed to learn from its ‘mistakes’ or to ‘rectify’ itself in the last five
years, leading to one electoral defeat of CPI(M) after another. According to him,
the culmination of CPI(M)’s politics of ‘right-deviation’ is the party’s
support to Pranab Mukherjee for the titular presidential post. But in taking this
self-styled ‘principled stand’ on the presidential elections, Prasenjit Bose has
willfully covered up CPI(M)’s criminal past, during which it emerged as a
social-fascist force representing the Indian ruling classes, serving imperialism
as a loyal agent, and repressing the oppressed classes through ruthless
violence. It is none other than Prasenjit Bose himself who had publicly
defended each and every act of fascist repression perpetrated by CPI(M) and its
Harmad gangs not merely since 2007 – be it in Nandigram or in Lalgarh – but
from 1960s onwards. His ‘critique’ of CPI(M) on the non-issue of presidential
polls and Liberation-AISA’s subsequent celebration of ‘Comrade’ Bose therefore
smacks of crass opportunism and hypocrisy.
Prasenjit
Bose’s latest political gimmick and Liberation-AISA’s continuous incitement
prompted SFI-JNU to pass a GBM resolution against CPI(M)’s support to Pranab
Mukherjee. SFI-JNU’s resolution,
following the cue from Bose and Liberation-AISA, has predictably ‘criticised’
CPI(M) for ‘disrupting Left unity’. Describing CPI(M)’s position as
‘unconvincing’, SFI-JNU implicitly declared its support to Liberation-AISA’s
position of ‘abstention’, stating that “The decision to abstain taken by other
Left Parties would have been appropriate in the given situation” (SFI-JNU
resolution of 5 July). SFI-JNU went a step ahead and in its pamphlet of 7 July justified
its right to have a position ‘independent’ of CPI(M), and pointed to the
so-called “structural break” in SFI’s history in JNU from 2007 onwards. The
marker of this “structural break” for SFI-JNU is nothing but its defeat in
JNUSU elections in 2007, a trend which it believes has continued till 2012.
SFI-JNU has squarely blamed CPI(M)’s repression of Singur and Nandigram
movements as the reason for its defeats in JNUSU elections, claiming that “these
developments have eroded the SFI’s support base among the progressive and
democratic minded students”. In the name of ‘forthright positions’, SFI-JNU
even tried to sum up the experience of the international Communist movement by
claiming that “one of the major shortcomings of the socialist experiments of
the 20th century was to address the questions of democracy, civil liberties,
freedom of expression and tolerance towards political dissent” – an argument
repeated ab nausium by the
revisionists and opportunists all over the world. All such assertions leave no
one in doubt that SFI-JNU’s ‘critique’ of CPI(M) is entirely based on its
calculations for the JNUSU elections. SFI-JNU believes that to reverse the
defeats in JNUSU elections, it has to now distance itself from CPI(M) and its
past crimes.
Even
with this latest ‘distancing’ and ‘dissident’, SFI-JNU is nothing but a new
avatar of its old self. SFI-JNU
is unable and unwilling to break the umbilical chord that ties it with the
reactionary and social-fascist politics of CPI(M). Nor SFI-JNU’s present anti-CPI(M)
stance a reflection of any genuine attempt at self-reflection and
rectification, because its ‘dissent’ is dictated purely by the considerations
of victory and defeat in JNUSU elections. It is nothing but crass opportunism to
conveniently put the entire blame of SFI’s electoral defeat in JNUSU elections
from 2007 on the ‘mistakes’ of its parent party, without accepting its own dark
history of anti-student politics in the campus. The students of this campus
will not allow SFI-JNU to conveniently forget its past betrayals. While in
JNUSU, SFI-JNU facilitated the entry of the Nestle outlet into JNU in 2004 and
defended the corporatization of the campus, it sided with NSUI and ABVP in
opposing the students of the campus who showed black flags to Manmohan Singh
when the World Bank-appointed PM visited JNU in 2005. SFI-JNU betrayed the
united struggle of workers and students in 2007 by demanding Proctorial enquiry
and punishment for protesting students. JNUSU office bearers from SFI submitted
apology letters to the VC along with AISA’s office bearers in JNUSU after the
registrar was confronted by students demanding worker’s rights. SFI-JNU
betrayed the struggle against the imposition of user charges and electric
meters in 2010. It backstabbed the united anti-Lyngdoh struggle by surrendering
to the Solicitor General in the name of ‘negotiations’ and helped impose
Lyngdoh on JNUSU elections. These are only a few glaring samples of SFI’s
‘glorious legacy’ within this campus!
Can it put the blame for such opportunist and anti-student acts on CPI(M)? Students
of JNU have rejected SFI as much for
its misdeeds in the campus as for the crimes of social-fascist CPI(M) outside.
Now
that ‘SFI-JNU’ has been summarily dissolved and its four leading members
expelled by SFI’s all-India committee, ‘SFI-JNU’ is crying hoarse against CPI(M)
brand of ‘authoritarianism’. But this is the method in which CPI(M) and its affiliate organisations
have dealt with political opposition within its ranks and outside all along in
its history. Why have SFI-JNU realized only now that they have been treated in
an ‘authoritarian’ and ‘undemocratic’ manner? Does it believe that CPI(M)’s
actions against the Naxalites in the 1960s-70s, against the people of
Marisjhapi, Singur, Nandigram, Chengara, Lalgarh etc. were democratic? What is
their position on CPI(M)’s support to the UPA government in 2004, in which Pranab
Mukherjee was a key player and one of the prominent cabinet ministers? Will not
now SFI-JNU accept that CPI(M) was willfully complicit in all the anti-people
and reactionary policies of the Indian state, be it the passing of the
notorious SEZ bill or the rampant sell-out of the public sectors in the name of
disinvestment, the passing and strengthening of the draconian UAPA and AFSPA,
witch-hunt of Muslims in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, implementing the
fascist Operation Green Hunt in West Bengal, and so on? Is SFI-JNU also opposed
to CPI(M)’s complete surrender to imperialist capital and its luring of MNCs to
make investments in CPI(M)-governed states at the cost of the land and lives of
peasants and workers? Shouting from rooftops about ‘authoritarian’ and
‘undemocratic’ nature of CPI(M) when forced into a corner, but not raising even
a whisper of opposition against CPI(M)’s social-fascist policies from 1960s
till 2007 and thereafter, is sheer opportunism and political bankruptcy which
both SFI-JNU and Prasenjit Bose are guilty of. Their latest political
somersault is symptomatic of the bickering and power struggles that have
afflicted all ruling-class parliamentary parties in India.
CPI(ML)
Liberation-AISA’s opportunist and bankrupt politics of fishing in the troubled
waters needs to be unmasked. As if they were waiting with bated breath for the occasion, Liberation-AISA
‘welcomed’ wholeheartedly SFI-JNU’s anti-CPI(M) position without uttering a
single word of criticism for the ‘dissenting’ SFI-JNU, much like they welcomed
‘Comrade Prasenjit Bose’ (AISA’s poster, 8 July). AISA probably was hoping that
the ‘dissident’ SFI will split from CPI(M) and join the rag-tag NGO-ised ‘Left
movement’ fabricated by its parent party CPI(ML) Liberation! It was only when
SFI-JNU retorted back at AISA’s holier-than-thou sermonizing on the need for “a
resolute struggle for a Left movement”, CPI(M)’s “right deviation” and its
“erosion of mass base”, CPI(M)’s intolerance of political opposition etc.
(SFI-JNU pamphlet, 9 July), that AISA-Liberation made a u-turn from their
earlier position of blindly eulogizing SFI-JNU’s ‘opposition’ to CPI(M), and
made some ‘critique’ of SFI-JNU. AISA thereafter took the responsibility of
imparting lessons of ‘correct Marxist politics’ and ‘rectification classes’ to
the ‘independent’ SFI-JNU unit, while declaring in a self-congratulatory mode
that “thankfully, we [Liberation-AISA] we do not have to correct any right-wing
policy deviation that has crept into our line” (AISA, 10 July)!
AISA
shamelessly peddles such self-serving lies even after its parent party
Liberation has opportunistically betrayed the political line of
Marxism-Leninism and armed agrarian revolution ushered in by Naxalbari. This was done in order to enter the quagmire of
parliamentary politics. Is it not
right opportunism – in other words, revisionism – in the garb of Marxism,
‘comrades’?! Has AISA forgotten about Liberation’s electoral alliance with the
same CPI(M) in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, etc., whom they are now claiming
to be “right-deviationists”? Why have they allied with CPI(M), which is guilty
of Singur, Nandigram, “murder of TP Chandrashekhar”, etc.? When AISA accuses of
CPI(M)’s alliance with Jayalalitha, Chandrabau Naidu, Naveen Patnaik – all
former NDA partners – do we need to remind them that Liberation too had allied
with Samata party in 1990s in Bihar headed by Nitish Kumar – presently an
important NDA ally? In ‘criticising’ SFI-JNU for the compromises it has made in
the campus, does AISA want the students to forget about their own dark history
of betrayals of the students’ movement, almost on every occasion in connivance
with SFI-JNU? Who doesn’t know about AISA-SFI’s joint efforts to impose the
draconian Lyngdoh regulations on the JNUSU elections and the betrayal of the
JNUSU Constitution? This is just the latest example of AISA’s understanding of
‘Left unity’! The shadow-boxing of these two revisionist organisations, AISA
and SFI-JNU, first indulging in unrestrained bonhomie and camaraderie while
‘critiquing’ CPI(M), but soon breaking into an opportunist slanging match to
outdo each other, cannot hide AISA-SFI’s shared political basis of ruling-class
opportunism and hypocrisy.
It is this degenerate and unscrupulous politics
of revisionism and opportunism that allows Liberation-AISA to remain shrewdly
silent on the dissolution of the ‘dissident’ SFI-JNU unit and the expulsion of
its four leading members. Why has AISA not stood with their ‘comrades’ in
SFI-JNU or even ‘Comrade’ Prasenjit Bose when they were ‘penalised’ for
opposing CPI(M) in a ‘principled’ manner, which AISA had so wholeheartedly
welcomed? Is this the sample of Liberation-AISA’s much-touted idea of ‘Left
unity’? Such opportunism of Liberation-AISA stems from betraying the cause of
the oppressed classes to serve ruling-class interests through parliamentary
politics. The truth is that Liberation-AISA is just another variant of
CPI(M)-SFI in the garb of Marxism-Leninism, mired neck-deep in the
parliamentary quagmire. This brand of reactionary ‘left’ politics has to be relentlessly
and resolutely exposed and finally defeated for the success of the struggle for
a revolutionary social transformation.
Democratic
Students' Union (DSU), Jawaharlal Nehru University Unit. DSU is an
independent students' organisation active in JNU and Delhi University in
the state of Delhi. It is a constituent of the All India Revolutionary
Students' Federation (AIRSF), and works towards attaining the ideals of
the New Democratic Revolution.
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