Since the 8th Congress, the entire Party has been moving steadily and confidently in this direction. Work among the rural poor has acquired greater momentum in almost all our areas of practice, and determined attempts are on in several places to restructure and rejuvenate our peasant organization so as to suitably intervene in the present state of agrarian crisis. The central trade union organization has successfully held its national conference with an increased membership, and the womens organization and agricultural labour organization are getting ready for their forthcoming national conferences. Party committees on all levels have responded energetically to the action calls and mass political campaigns announced by the Party Central Committee, and bold political initiatives are being unleashed on a regular basis on issues of national and regional importance. In the midst of these hectic activities, Party state conferences have also been held wherever due.
While the Party has moved on, some comrades obsessed with the liquidationist idea have however slipped further into the morass. Comrade Akhilendra refused to accept the verdict of the Congress and continued to insist on being allowed to launch a national peoples party. The 8th Congress had once again elected him on the Central Committee, hoping that he would accept and implement the Congress decisions while continuing his debate through appropriate processes. But he chose not to attend the meetings of the CC held in March and June. In fact, right from December 18, when tens of thousands of Party members and supporters went back from the rally with the resolve to realize the war-cry of the 8th Congress (Peoples Resistance, Left Resurgence�), Comrade Akhilendra had begun to talk about resigning from the CC!
The CC suggested that he should work on the peasant front and explore the possibilities of united front work primarily on the basis of our intervention in the agrarian crisis. He dismissed that proposal as economism and insisted that he should be allowed to launch a national peoples party. And when the CC refused to grant his whim, he simply deserted the Party. A few other comrades from Uttar Pradesh including Comrades Dinkar Kapur and Lal Bahadur Singh have followed in his footsteps and they are currently busy floating a Jan Sangharsh Morcha� (peoples struggle front) to conduct a Daam Bandho, Kaam Do� campaign in UP which in turn is expected to serve as a launching pad for what they call a national peoples party in the coming days.
With these practical moves, Comrade Akhilendra and his associates have started demonstrating beyond any doubt what liquidationism is really all about. All conscious members of the Party can now clearly judge for themselves whether liquidationism is a mere bogey as our liquidationist friends have been claiming or a real trend as pointed out by the Party Congress.
In the course of pre-Congress deliberations in the PB and CC, Comrade Akhilendra had initially mooted the idea that the political role of the Party should be exercised through a national level mass political platform while the Party should confine itself to the role of organizing the masses through basic struggles and providing ideological direction to the movement. Subsequently, he chose to repackage his views in terms of an auxiliary political platform that would ostensibly supplement and strengthen the Partys role as a national opposition.
Behind this terminological camouflage, the essential postulates all however remained intact. Is the Party not playing the role of a revolutionary opposition? Comrade Akhilendra held that on this score the Party had been reduced to irrelevance because of the Partys absence within Parliament. How would the proposed platform enable the Party to become instantly relevant as an electoral force and as a revolutionary opposition? Comrade Akhilendra had no answer to this riddle. He said the Party had limited acceptability among democratic forces. In fact, he flippantly argues that it is not possible for the CPI(ML) to demarcate itself either from the Maoists or the CPI(M) and willy-nilly, the Party becomes the repository of the notoriety earned by these two streams on account of whatever they are doing. In other words, the platform is intended to lend credibility or acceptability to the Party which it has failed to win or can never possibly win through its own independent role. But if the Party is not acceptable to democratic forces, which forces is he going to mobilize and lead under the banner of his proposed platform? Comrade Akhilendra never bothered to answer this most obvious practical question even though he claimed that the platform would be a revolutionary democratic platform and would be led by the Party.
The question also naturally arose as to what would be the tactical line of the proposed platform. Of late, Comrade Akhilendra had started branding the Partys tactical line Left sectarian, but when asked to point out what precisely he meant by Left sectarianism, he said the line was all right, but its dominant articulation had turned Left sectarian. A few examples would help us understand his thesis of Left sectarianism. He found it Left sectarian that the Party should highlight the link between the legacy of 1857 and the revolutionary peasant upsurge of Naxalbari, that the Party should recognise Bhagat Singh as a pioneer of the communist movement in India, that the Party should criticize and condemn the CPI(M) on the national level for its role in perpetrating and legitimizing the serial massacres in Nandigram, that Kolkata should be chosen as the venue for the Partys 8th Congress Indeed, he could never comprehend the Partys historic mission to dislodge social-democracy from its currently dominant position in the Left movement and hence he has only ridicule for the Partys consistent attempts to intensify the battle against the opportunist Left.
Our experience clearly tells us that the battle against the opportunist Left has enabled the Party to find a growing and receptive audience within the Left ranks. Over the last two decades the Party has continued to attract serious cadres and bases from the fold of the CPI(M) and CPI in almost all our major states Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal, Punjab and now also in southern states like Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. Interestingly, while Comrade Akhilendra does not see any merit in intensifying the battle against opportunism within the Left camp, he sees all kinds of wishful contradictions within bourgeois parties. In his address to the UP State Conference in April, he discovered a link between the growing political crisis in the country and a presumed unease within the Congress with a neo-liberal pro-American Prime Minister like Manmohan Singh, and waxed eloquent as to how the political crisis had forced an internal debate within the Congress on the issue of the Prime Minister! Comrade Akhilendra sees himself as a great practitioner of politics and one wonders what he thought about his own discomfiture when the entire Congress recently rallied so aggressively around Manmohan Singh over the issue of the nuke deal and the trust vote!
So, organising the class struggle of workers and peasants is economism while politics consists in wishful speculation about, and intervention in, contradictions within the ruling classes and their representatives. Comrade Akhilendra is of course not alone or the first to make such a demarcation between economism and politics. In his writings, Lenin has graphically shown the opportunist thread that ran through the economists, Mensheviks and liquidators. And in our own country, we have seen the CPI(M) excel all these years in politics divorced from the struggles of the basic masses and the outcome is now there for all to see. The CPI(M) devoted itself to a whole range of political coalitions in the name of secularism and democracy while confining the issues and struggles of the workers and peasants to the arena of mass organizations and economic struggles. But when the decisive hour came all its secular allies whether the DMK in Tamil Nadu or the RJD in Bihar or the SP in UP sided with the Congress accusing the CPI(M) of weakening the secular camp and playing into the hands of communal forces! And deserted by its erstwhile allies, the CPI(M) can now think of no better option than helping Mayawati utilize the present juncture to her advantage.
It is not our case that there are no contradictions among the ruling classes, or that contradictions among bourgeois parties should not be utilized. The point is that a communist party must have sufficient strength to be able to do that and that such contradictions must always be utilized from the point of view of furthering the peoples own revolutionary democratic agenda. The basic task facing revolutionary communists is to intensify the struggles of the basic classes and raise them to new political heights. It is only from the commanding height of the revolutionary struggles of the working people and the democratic masses that communists can hope to make any effective use of the contradictions within and among bourgeois parties and the bourgeois system. Any other notion of mastering the art of politics can only prove to be a fatal delusion of grandeur!
If the Party is not yet strong enough to win parliamentary representation, the Party obviously has to be strengthened. If democratic forces are not yet ready to accept the Party and its leadership, the answer to that too lies in accumulation of greater strength. The Party never underestimated the importance of either winning electoral victories or expanding its relations with democratic forces. But the point is that these objectives can only be achieved on the basis of, or in recognition of, the Partys independent revolutionary role, and no shortcuts are available.
Comrade Akhilendra talks about making a third historic experiment on the lines of the short-lived communist-led experiments like the Peasant and Workers Party during the freedom movement and the Indian Peoples Front experience of our own Party. Leaving aside other conditions associated with these projects, the question of Party leadership and recognition of the Partys role was clearly of paramount importance in our own IPF experience. It was the revolutionary peasant movement and social awakening led by the underground CPI(ML) in Bihar which served as the ideological-political magnet and organisational basis for the IPF. Of course, the IPF too played a big role in the Partys expansion and enabled the Party to evolve its political line through rigorous practice.
The Party never rules out any form of united front suited to our conditions. But whatever the level or form of the united front, it has to be led by the working class and the Communist Party. The IPF fully satisfied this necessary condition. Any fresh application of united front practice, whether on the lines of the IPF or on any other pattern, will also have to meet this cardinal condition without which any peoples platform is bound to get reduced to an appendage of the bourgeois opposition. We can clearly see this through our experience with the Autonomous State Demand Committee in the hill districts of Assam. As long as the ASDC was led by the Party, it retained its revolutionary democratic orientation and maintained close ties with the democratic movement all over the country. But following the split in the Party in the hill districts in early 2000, the independent ASDC today has become just another small regional party which works in alliance with the BJP.
Comrade Akhilendra wanted us to believe that the proposed platform would play an auxiliary role and the principal role would be reserved for the Party. When the highest forum of the principal organization the 8th Congress of the CPI(ML) did not agree to the thesis of such an auxiliary organization at the present juncture, what should have been the course for any sincere communist advocate of an auxiliary platform? Clearly, he or she should have waited till the majority opinion in the Party could be convinced. Out of more than 1100 delegates attending the 8th Congress, only 16 delegates had voted for his position. Action speaks louder than words. Comrade Akhilendra has left no one in doubt as to what is principal and what is auxiliary for him.
Comrade Akhilendra had promised not to disturb the Party, he said he would only use the services of a few peripheral comrades and work in areas currently peripheral to the Partys map. He and his associates are now busy trying to confuse the Party ranks and the struggling mass base of the Party primarily in the districts of Chandouli, Sonebhadra and Mirzapur the main base of the Party in the eastern region of UP. Like the principal-auxiliary camouflage, the central-peripheral smokescreen is also getting shredded in practice.
Having forfeited their vantage position of working among democratic forces as communist leaders and activists, Comrade Akhilendra and his associates are now desperately trying to secure a democratic foothold within communist ranks and masses. Everywhere they are trying to sell their line in the name of the Party, even trying to peddle their so-called action platform as a communist-led initiative. The distinction between ex-communists and communists, between individuals and the Party organization may have lost all meaning for them, but these are important distinctions that the communist ranks and the fighting masses of workers and peasants have grasped through decades of hard struggle and they will certainly not be misled by any amount of clever phrases and anti-Party slander campaign. To cite just one example, recently these ex-communists had mobilized a few people for a dharna in Mughalsarai of course invoking the name of the Party but when some women comrades noticed that the red flag had been surreptitiously replaced by a red-green-white combination, they promptly left the dharna and reported to the local Party office and organizers.
Comrade Dinkar, who was re-elected as a member of the UP State Committee by the Party State Conference held recently in Mirzapur, was issued a show-cause notice by the State Committee for his role in launching a platform without any authorization by the State Committee and for carrying out disruptive activities within the Party organization. He has now accused Comrade Sudhakar Yadav, the newly elected State Secretary and a member of the Party Central committee, of changing colours like a chameleon. For the last several years, Comrade Sudhakar has been a key Party organizer in the Chandouli-Mirzapur-Sonebhadra region. According to Comrade Dinkar, he should have therefore sided with Comrade Akhilendra and stood up in support of his wounded honour and he attracted the epithet of an opportunist chameleon by not doing so. Comrade Dinkar on the other hand claims to have upheld his communist conscience by resisting the inducement of membership of the UP State Committee and Central Working Class Department of the Party!
In our Party, comrades are never victimized or sidelined for subscribing to ideas that are held wrong and erroneous by the Party. It is only when those wrong ideas are translated into practice in defiance of Party discipline and basic communist norms that disciplinary measures are initiated against concerned wrong-doers. The Party was fully aware of the ideas of Comrade Akhilendra or Comrade Dinkar. Yet the Party Congress elected Comrade Akhilendra to the CC and UP State Conference of the Party elected Comrade Dinkar to the State Committee. The Party Central Committee expected Comrade Dinkar to develop as a communist organizer on the working class front and accordingly he was made a member of the Central Working Class Department. If Comrade Dinkar looks at assignments given by the Party as an inducement intended to wean him away from Comrade Akhilendras fold, he is only revealing his factional mindset and unfortunate political degeneration.
Comrade Dinkar has accused the Party of denying democracy to Comrade Akhilendra and suppressing his views! At the Party Congress, Comrade Akhilendra had submitted an amendment to the political-organisational report demanding deletion of the paragraphs dealing with the liquidationist trend (the relevant paras are reproduced after this article.) All delegates submitting amendments were allotted a specific time by the Presidium to speak in support of their positions. Comrade Akhilendra spoke for more than half an hour in support of his amendment the maximum time given to any delegate submitting an amendment. The outgoing CC did not ignore any amendment, Comrade Akhilendras amendment was rejected and the document put to vote with explanations and opinions of the outgoing CC on every amendment submitted to the Congress. As already mentioned, all but 16 delegates endorsed the Congress document and the explanations offered by the outgoing CC. The entire Congress also saw how some of these dissenting delegates behaved, crossing all limits of democratic decency and decorum and yet the Presidium and the House responded in a very considerate manner without suspending any of their rights as delegates.
Comrade Dinkar accuses the Party of engaging in character assassination for terming Comrade Akhilendras ideas as liquidationist! He finds it unconstitutional and undemocratic that minority opinion is not allowed to prevail in the Party. And his own understanding of the ideal communist party prompts him to treat a close comrade as a chameleon for asserting his own independent judgement and behaving in a responsible communist manner!
Like a classic conciliator, Comrade Lal Bahadur wanted the Party to bridge the differences with Comrade Akhilendra. But what did Comrade Lal Bahadur think of the differences? Comrade Akhilendra was at least candid enough to admit that he had developed deep ideological, political and organizational differences with the Party. His only problem was he could never describe or analyse the difference in precise theoretical terms and when the Party did it for him he could not accept the Partys characterization of his ideas as liquidationism! He finds it difficult to come face to face with his ideas in the mirror of communist ideas and concepts, preferring to entertain everybody with phrases like auxiliary platform and principal organisation, peripheral and mainstream cadres, and describing his difference with the Partys tactical line only as a difference with its dominant articulation. Obviously, Comrade Lal Bahadur shares the same ideas as Comrade Akhilendra, but instead of owning those ideas he chose for himself the role of an advisor, blaming the Party for brushing aside Comrade Akhilendras concerns and debates as liquidationism and hampering the cause of the Partys unity.
Well, the unity of a Communist Party is rooted in its ideological and programmatic perspective; it grows in the course of the political development and implementation of the Partys tactical line, and is reinforced by the material embodiment of the Party organisation and Party discipline. There can be no eclectic give-and-take between correct and wrong ideas, no peaceful coexistence of factions and trends in the name of preserving the Partys unity. The Party Congress and the Central Committee have upheld the principled and militant approach to Party unity, it is unfortunately comrades like Akhilendra and Lal Bahadur who have failed to show the minimum respect necessary for the basic ideological and organizational tenets of Marxism and a Communist Party.
In my concluding remarks at the Party Congress, I had expressed the hope that we would be able to work together in spite of our differences. Comrade Akhilendra and his associates now accuse me of going back on my words! What I had said at the Congress was an expression of collective hope and confidence that very much included Comrade Akhilendra and the 16 comrades who endorsed his position. When I used the expression in spite of the differences I was being realistic that differences could not be expected to disappear overnight and I was also expressing the confidence that while no comrade would be victimized for his or her opinion, comrades holding differences of opinion would surely behave in a responsible manner and duly implement the majority decision while utilizing opportunities available in the framework of inner-Party democracy to argue in favour of what they thought was correct. Little did I realize that it would be understood as a division of labour whereby Comrade Akhilendra would be free to impose his own ideas on the Party while the Party would have to go on proving that it could work together with Comrade Akhilendra in spite of the differences! It would indeed be interesting to see the proposed peoples party apply in practice this creative sense of collective functioning!
Comrade Lal Bahadur is shocked that Comrade Akhilendras seminal contribution to the Partys development in Uttar Pradesh has been dismissed by the Central Committee in the course of just a brief resolution relieving him of membership of the CC in view of his persistent refusal to accept and abide by the 8th Congress decisions and discharge his role as a responsible CCM! The CC resolution pertained only to Comrade Akhilendras role following the Congress and was by no means intended to serve as an evaluation of his entire stint with the Party. Communist historians of the future will be best placed to evaluate the accomplishments of todays leaders. Revolutionary communists have their hands full with all the current tasks and challenges, and it is absolutely important to uphold the communist solidity of work and discipline in pursuing this goal. No member of a revolutionary communist party can ever be too tall for the basic tenets of democratic centralism.
For the liquidationists, working class leadership over a democratic front is a superfluous feature which they believe is anyway fulfilled by their being at the helm of the democratic front they are building. They claim to form the communist core of their proposed democratic front for, have they not earned lifelong communist credentials by devoting years and decades to the service of the Party? For revolutionary communists, staying communist is a lifelong mission and not a qualification earned for ever in lieu of a certain number of years of communist service. And communist leadership over a democratic front and over the entire phase of democratic revolution is exercised not by a few gifted individuals but by the working class organized under the banner of the Communist Party, by the revolutionary masses fighting primarily under the banner of communist-led mass organizations.
Can any communist ever swap a communist party leading a democratic revolution for an issue-based democratic forum or for that matter a so-called multi-class peoples party that swears allegiance to peoples rights, national dignity and social justice? For communists, the answer is a loud and clear NO; and for liquidationists, the answer is a very easy YES, and this is what they hold out in the name of politics and creativity. Treating the Communist Party as a superfluous entity for the phase of democratic revolutions in todays world is equivalent to duping the people with the illusion of winning democracy without a revolution. Renouncing the Communist Party in the name of democracy is nothing but renouncing peoples democracy for a crumb of bourgeois democracy.
An utter loss of communist moorings - this is the real meaning of the word liquidationism. A revolutionary communist party can only emerge stronger by shedding any liquidationist flab it is liable to acquire especially in the course of working in a parliamentary democratic context. It is in this revolutionary spirit that the entire Party must wage an unrelenting battle against liquidationism and root it out both in theory and practice.
Box
Excerpts on Liquidationism from the Political-Organisational Report Adopted at the 8th Congress
50. The most important key-link to Party-building lies in consistent ideological struggle against alien ideas and trends. Just as we consistently fight against opportunist deviations in the communist movement as a whole within the Left movement in general we treat right opportunism as represented by the CPI(M) as the main ideological adversary while within the M-L movement we have the anarchism of our self-styled Maoists, which we have also termed as anarcho-militarism given their near-exclusive identification with armed activities, as the main challenge we must also be consistent in our struggle against deviations within the Party.
Since the reorganization of our Party in 1974, we have had two major phases of inner-Party ideological struggle. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Party fought against metaphysics and dogmatism in our outlook and established the supremacy of dialectical thinking in the Party through a thoroughgoing rectification campaign. This also had its implications for our Party line as it enormously expanded the Partys mass work and unleashed all-round political initiatives including participation in elections. In the late 1980s and early 1990s we had to fight against the liquidationist danger. Initially, it looked like a mere difference on tactical line, but the real dimensions of the problem soon became clear as liquidationism revealed itself quite comprehensively in the given ideological environment dominated internationally by the collapse of the Soviet Union and domestically by the rise and consolidation of liberal-bourgeois forces under the banner of the Janata Dal and other non-Congress regional formations.
51. This experience of inner-Party ideological struggle has a very crucial lesson for us the struggle has to be both comprehensive and consistent. While concentrating the fight against one wrong trend we must not leave the other flank open. In other words, while fighting against left deviation we must not yield any quarter to deviations from the right and vice versa. For example, in the first phase when we directed the fight against Left sectarian deviations or dogmatic outlook we also fought against the liquidationist approach and this was the crucial difference between our rejection of Left adventurist and sectarian theory and practice and the anti-anarchist campaign of ML streams led by Com. SN Singh or Com. Kanu Sanyal. Our approach has been well vindicated in practice while the other trends have now been reduced to a pale shadow of their past. Similarly, our entire battle against liquidationism in the late 1980s and early 1990s was waged not on the basis of our old Party structure and practice, but it was accompanied by a sustained campaign for Party restructuring which culminated in the opening up of the Party. The Party thus emerged bigger and stronger as it overcame the liquidationist idea.
The Fifth Congress had very correctly stressed this inseparable connection between the two struggles. Looking at the struggle against these two erroneous trends metaphysically and seeking their eclectic combination will lead us nowhere. The error of judgement on the part of a thinking section of the Party in the struggle against liquidationism came precisely from their failure to grasp this crucial link. Real life has proved that a decisive struggle against liquidationism has not taken the Party back to anarchism. It has rather facilitated our forceful entry into the arena of practical politics with all its ramifications. Persons with die-hard anarchist world outlook, if not reformed, have only deserted us and in many a case they have joined the liquidationist camp,� observed the Fifth Congress. While recognising the decisive initial victory scored by the Party in its battle against liquidationism, the Fifth Congress with great foresight cautioned the Party not to lower its guard against this danger: In the coming days, the Party shall go on making bold experiments in the arena of practical politics and hence, dialectically, there will be greater need for exercising consistent vigilance against liquidationism within the Party body.�
52. Today, once again we can see certain signs of a liquidationist tendency within the Party,and the Party must wage a serious struggle against this suicidal thought process. This time round, the advocacy is not for an outright dissolution of the Party, but for relegating the Party to the background while handing over the immediate political role of the Party to a national political platform to be sponsored by the Party. The proponents of such a platform are predictably vague about the prospective concrete forces who are expected to join such a platform; but we are reminded that there has been a decisive shift in political discourse since the 1970s. The focus in the 70s was on radical social transformation whereas the contemporary focus is on competitive participation within the system! The hint is quite clear we should accordingly shift our emphasis and adjust our orientation and slogans. The idea of the platform is premised on the assumption that the Partys acceptability is very limited so much so that the Party has become politically irrelevant. The only way the Party can gain greater legitimacy is by operating through a platform in collaboration with a whole range of liberal-democratic social forces. Ironically, the advocates of this approach also talk about the platform being led by the Party. How the Party can exercise leadership on forces that are not prepared to accept it is anybodys guess.
These comrades measure the Partys relevance or irrelevance in terms of the Partys electoral success or the lack of it. Once we accept the number of MLAs and MPs as the yardstick to measure the relevance of a revolutionary communist party, we will have to arrive at the conclusion that since its inception the CPI(ML) has never really been relevant! The CPI(M) on the other hand will then appear to be hugely relevant with its considerable strength in Parliament and seventh successive return to power in West Bengal. But real life shows that today the CPI(M) is passing through a phase of acute isolation and disrepute while there is increasing acceptability for our political positions. Our supposed lack of acceptability is also attributed historically to the legacy of Naxalbari and the flawed understanding that the Maoists have appropriated this legacy. In other words, these comrades believe in the thesis of polarization between the CPI(M) and the Maoists and see little space for the Partys independent identity and assertion. Apologetic about the Partys own past and identity and having no hope or faith in the future of the Party, how on earth can one exercise the leadership of the Party on any democratic platform?
53. The IPF was indeed a very different kind of platform. It was a p
