Four Decades of People’s Democracy

 Harkishan Singh Surjeet

FOUR decades have now gone by since we began the publication of People’s Democracy, the central weekly organ of our Party, with its first issue appearing on June 27, 1965. But the main thing is that the Party cadres of today, whose majority joined the Party after 1992, will have to realise as to what kind of a situation we of the CPI(M) faced when our paper made its first appearance. It was an extremely excruciating situation for us, to say the least.

GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION

THE gravity of the situation may be gauged from the fact that when the paper made its appearance, more than a thousand of our first and second rung of leaders and other active cadres were behind the bars, for their ‘crime’ of defending the legitimate interests of our people. Yet another ‘crime’ we committed was to advocate that the border dispute with China must be solved through peaceful negotiations --- in the interest of both the peoples and in the interest of world peace. Beginning with the Rajiv Gandhi government in the second half of the 1980s, however, all our governments have attempted to improve India’s relations with its northern neighbour and to pave the way for an amicable solution of the border dispute. This is all quite welcome. But, four decades ago, we were dubbed as traitors for advocating the same line of action vis-à-vis China.  

The so-called White Paper, issued by the government of India, was nothing but a pack of lies --- issued with the aim of maligning us and of seeking to create a justification of the attack that the bourgeois landlord government had launched against us.

The gravity of the situation may be gauged from the fact that when the paper made its appearance, most of the newly elected Polit Bureau (in fact, seven out of nine members) were behind the bars.

What lowly depths the bourgeois landlord government of the day could stoop down to, may be gauged from one simple fact. At that time, the so-called White Paper accused us of receiving money through the Bank of China that was operating in the country till it was forced to close down in October 1962. The game was simple --- to portray as so many agents of China, as being on its payroll. It was against this accusation that, from behind the bars, late Comrade P Sundarayya (our general secretary at the time) and four other Polit Bureau members (including myself) wrote a strong letter to the union home minister. What we demanded in that letter, among other things, was that since all the papers of the Bank of China were in custody of the government of India, the latter could very well go through them and substantiate the accusation made against us. It is another thing that the government has not been able to substantiate the baseless charge made against us.

While we were still in jail, the Party published our challenge to the union home minister as an eight-page booklet titled Letter From Prison. This publication was no doubt quite necessary at the time. But such stray publications also pressed upon us the necessity of bringing out a regular organ in order to counter the enemy propaganda. It was thus that the Party brought out People’s Democracy in the last week of June 1965.

Incidentally, the governmental attack against us further intensified after an Indo-Pak war broke out two months later, in September 1965. Our ‘crime’ that invited this fresh bout of attack was the same --- we were virtually the only Party to advocate that the disputes with Pakistan should be resolved through peaceful negotiations. Happily, the government of India is committing the same ‘crime’ today and here we reiterate our welcome and support to the ongoing peace process.

INNER-PARTY STRUGGLE

HOWEVER, People’s Democracy was also the product of a long history of struggle against the revisionist trend within the Party.

Let’s recall this history in brief. A serious inner-party struggle erupted immediately after the (united) Party withdrew the Telangana armed struggle in October 1951. This struggle concerned some basic questions like the class content of the Indian state, the nature of our revolution, the class alliance needed to replace the existing regime with a pro-working people regime, and so on. But, after gaining temporary ascendancy at the extraordinary, fifth Party congress (Amritsar, April 1958), a section of the leadership began to resort to organisational steps to gain ascendancy in a dispute that was of a purely political and ideological nature. In order to push their line of class collaboration through, they began to expel active cadres at various levels, capture Party committees, etc. At the same time, they spurned all our offers for a principled resolution of the differences. A patch-up was somehow effected at the sixth Party congress (Vijayawada, 1961), but it broke down soon after the death of general secretary Ajoy Ghosh.

The situation worsened after the border dispute with China in October 1962. Though the Party was still united formally, a section of the leadership supported the jingoistic stand of the government of India. What was worse, however, was that when the government incarcerated a number of comrades on cooked-up charges, this section of leadership refused to fight for the release of the detenues. In Maharashtra, several leading comrades were suspended or expelled from the Party after a procession demanded release of late Comrade B T Ranadive. The revisionist section of the Party leadership also sought to utilise the situation created by the official attack to capture the Party in some states. They sought to disband some duly elected committees or replace them by nominated ‘organising’ committees packed with their trusted men. For example, in West Bengal and Punjab. 

Thus the Party was now faced with a piquant situation that was perhaps never before witnessed in the history of the international communist movement. While the government of the day was mounting an attack against a section of the Party, the dominant Party leadership was extending support to the same government. 

In sum, the then dominant leadership of the Party made it virtually impossible to remain and work in the same Party. In October 1963, we made one more effort to restore the Party unity on a principled basis. In this regard, the proposals put forward by late Comrade M Basavapunnaiah and others suggested the following: (1) the duly elected committee in West Bengal should be restored, (2) a regular state conference must be convened in Punjab after a majority of imprisoned comrades were released, and (3) the next Party congress should be held on the basis of membership at the time of the sixth Party congress. Yet these rational proposals were rejected. We made yet another effort to restore the Party unity on July 4, 1964, but its fate was no better either. By now, it was perfectly clear that the revisionist section of the leadership wanted to make use of the ruling party’s attack to capture the Party in order to push through its line of class collaboration. As I have dealt with these developments elsewhere, there is no need to go into the details.

It was thus a third of the National Council was forced to come out and reorganise the Party on Marxist-Leninist lines. This was how first the Tenali convention and then the seventh Party congress took place. The latter opened at Kolkata on October 31, 1964 and concluded on November 7, the day of the Great October Revolution.

AFTER THE PARTY’S REORGANISATION

THE seventh congress of our Party proved eminently successful. It was now clear that while a majority of the leaders elected at the Vijayawada congress remained with the revisionists, a majority of members (over one lakh out of 1,75,000) sided with us. This unnerved the government as well, which further intensified its attacks against us.

The first major test of our line came in February 1965 when elections to the Kerala assembly were held. In those polls, the CPI(M) secured more than 40 seats while the CPI had to remain content with 3. However, the government played its dirty game again, refused to withdraw the cooked-up charges against our members who had fought and won the assembly polls from behind the bars, and refused to release them. The result was that the state assembly could not be constituted at the time. 

In the meantime, there was also the constant propaganda that we had split the Party at the behest of China. As Comrade Jyoti Basu noted in his signed editorial in the first issue of People’s Democracy, even our strategic slogan of a people’s democracy was construed as a Chinese construct, in order to ‘prove’ that we were Chinese agents. Needless to say, this motivated propaganda did not pay any attention to the gist of the concept of a people’s democracy, much less to the long history of inner-party struggle that lay behind this concept. But that was not the government of India’s intention either.

This was also the time when we were facing attacks not only from the government and not only from the rightist formations like the Swatantra Party and Jan Sangh but also from Left formations like the SSP and CPI. At the same time, most of the communist parties around the globe rallied behind the CPSU in calling us names. It was in such a crucial situation that when I met late Comrade Rajani Palme Dutt in Europe, he solemnly advised us not to bother about international recognition but to forge vigorous movements on the issues facing various sections of our masses.

It was in such an excruciating situation when People’s Democracy made its appearance and, even though badly deprived of resources, consistently championed the cause of the people at every turn of events. This became very clear from the role the paper played during the mighty food movement in West Bengal. Defence of the nation’s unity and integrity has also been a major task of the paper.

Thus, to highlight the people’s grievances and protect their interests as well as to defend the purity of Marxism-Leninism has been the paper’s motto in every phase of our struggle. During the liberation struggle of Vietnam or that of Bangladesh, the Emergency, the Janata Party interlude, the Saur revolution of Afghanistan, the setbacks suffered by socialism in East Europe and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the rise of terrorist and secessionist agitations in various parts of the country, the so-called new economic policy regime that was initiated in the early 1990s and the temporary ascendancy of communal forces in the second half of the last decade --- there was not a single development in which the Party and the paper did not intervene. During the last four decades, People’s Democracy has creditably discharged the role assigned to it and unified the CPI(M) ranks on the Party line.

This is not to say that the functioning of the paper is free from lacunae. Far from it. But I have no doubt that, given the commitment and dedication of the leadership and the cadres associated with the paper, these lacunae may well be removed and the difficulties overcome. On this occasion now, as a person who has long been associated with the paper in one way or another, I wish further successes for the paper in discharging the agit-prop tasks assigned to it by the Party.