In the tradition of a Communist Party, the party congress is the highest assembly to chart the course of the party in any given situation. The situation right now in India is the most challenging that the communist movement, indeed post-independence India, has ever faced. Against such a backdrop, the Eleventh Congress of the CPI(ML) in Patna gave a dynamic demonstration of the party’s innate strength, expanding organisation and growing political initiative and intervention to intensify the people’s resistance against the fascist Modi regime and the Sangh brigade. From the 15 February “Save Democracy, Save India” rally on the eve of the inauguration of the Congress to the late evening concluding session on February 20, the Eleventh Congress turned into a weeklong exhibition of the great revolutionary legacy and reassuring strength and potential of the CPI(ML) at today’s crucial juncture.
In its sequence of events and range of resolutions, the Eleventh Congress represented the diverse dimensions of the party’s ongoing praxis and the tasks and priorities of its developing tactical line. The rally on the eve of the Congress not only demonstrated the party’s organisational strength and expanding presence in new areas and growing appeal among newer sections of the people including sections of the middle classes in urban Bihar, it also highlighted the party’s continued commitment to carry forward wide-ranging struggles for people’s rights even as the party plays its role as a constituent of the grand non-BJP alliance in Bihar and supports the government from outside. The strength of the party lies in its close ties with and continuing work among the masses and in the resilient struggles of the people against all odds. Accumulation and assertion of this core strength of the party is the key to the party’s committed role in anti-fascist resistance and the wide-ranging tasks and initiatives that such a line necessarily calls for.
The formal proceedings of the Congress began with the message of closer unity and cooperation within the Left camp. Alongside parties like the CPI(M), CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc, with which the CPI(ML) is associated in an all-India coordination, delegations of communist organisations like the Marxist Coordination Committee of Jharkhand, Lal Nishan Party of Maharashtra, Satya Shodhak Communist Party of Maharashtra and the RMPI of Punjab, long-standing allies of the CPI(ML) on diverse fronts, all addressed this inaugural session with their messages of unity and solidarity.
The Eleventh Congress also witnessed an inspiring expression of international solidarity with the presence of guests from countries as far as Venezuela and Australia as our nearest neighbours Bangladesh and Nepal. The Congress also heard a Ukrainian professor teaching in India and a representative from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. There were also several video and written messages from progressive parties and movements in Latin America, Africa, Europe and neighbours like Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Members of the Indian diaspora also enriched the Congress with their experience of developing international solidarity against imperialist aggression and the rise of neo-fascist forces as well as challenging the devious designs of the Hindutva right.
In a possibly first-ever move for a Communist Party Congress, the proceedings were also observed by a number of guests from the civil society including author and activist Arundhati Roy and several members from the worlds of journalism and academia who all took their turns to address the delegates. Some of our guests were present all through the deliberations as the Congress adopted political resolutions and organisational review report, discussed the challenge of climate change and elected the new Central Committee through secret ballot. The presence of seventeen hundred delegates and observers from 27 states and UTs, translation of all speakers in several languages, discussion over comments and amendments received from more than a hundred comrades to finalise half a dozen resolutions and reports and finally election of 76 members (Chairperson of Central Control Commission becomes an ex officio member) from a list of 82 names made the Congress a truly massive exercise in inner-party democracy.
Also unconventional was the hosting of a political convention from the Congress podium involving opposition leaders. The presence of Bihar CM and JDU leader Nitish Kumar, Deputy CM and RJD leader Tejaswi Yadav, senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid and VCK chief and MP Thol. Thirumavalavan from Tamil Nadu in the “Save Democracy, Save India” convention and the message of greetings from Jharkhand CM and JMM leader Hemant Soren underlined the urgent need for determined all-inclusive opposition unity to save India from the clutches of the fascist Modi regime and the rampaging Sangh brigade.
The speeches of Nitish Kumar and Salman Khurshid were predictably marked by some light-hearted exchanges as their respective parties grapple with the challenge of evolving an effective paradigm of opposition unity on the all-India plane. A serious point that however emerged amidst the banters of the speakers concerned the resonance of the Bihar model vis-à-vis the disastrous Gujarat model that the Modi regime desperately seeks to replicate across India.
The contrast between the two models does not merely lie in the fact that while the BJP has been dominating Gujarat for the last three decades, it currently finds itself ousted from power in Bihar. It runs far deeper into the historical evolution of politics in the two states. At the centre of the Gujarat model lies the 2002 Gujarat genocide of Muslims. The centrality of the genocide was underscored for the umpteenth time during the recent Gujarat elections when the perpetrators of the gangrape of Bilkis Bano and the murderers of her family released prematurely to a hero’s welcome right on the 75th anniversary of India’s independence and when Amit Shah described the 2002 genocide as a befitting lesson to ‘rioters’ that brought ‘permanent peace’ to Gujarat.
Bihar too has experienced a series of brutal massacres. From Rupaspur Chandwa in Purnea to Laxmanpur-Bathe in Arwal, Bihar has been periodically brutalised by massacres of Dalits and other oppressed people. The Bhagalpur riot remains one of the most shocking instances of communal carnage in post-independence India. But Bihar has never accepted caste massacres or communal violence as a political model. The resilience with which the CPI(ML) has successfully withstood feudal violence and state repression since its inception in Bihar has been a hallmark of what can really be called the Bihar model. It is also pertinent to remember that the loudest voice of opposition to the communal fascist expedition launched by Advani in the name of replacing the Babri mosque with a grand Ram temple emerged from Bihar. If the horror of genocide has been central to the Gujarat model, in sharp contrast, the Bihar model has grown around the rejection of and resistance to feudal-communal violence.
Building on the horrifying foundations of the 2002 genocide of Muslims, the Sangh-BJP establishment went on to write its Gujarat model script where Modi and Shah emerged as the leaders of the political orchestra and Adani and Ambani grew as corporate giants. 2014 brought this Gujarat model to Delhi and the whole country is now reeling under the economic, political and social disaster unleashed by this fascist model. After nine disastrous years, marketed first as ‘achchhe din’ and now as ‘amrit kaal’, we now see definitive signs of this model imploding with the Adani empire being jolted and the Modi-Adani nexus being exposed and challenged like never before. The holding of the Eleventh Congress in Patna showed the potential of a counter-offensive that the Bihar model could mount against the imploding Gujarat model.
As the Modi regime intensifies the assault on the opposition and on the entire framework of parliamentary democracy and constitutional rule of law, comparisons are constantly made with the Emergency era of the mid 1970s, the only occasion when India had to confront a ‘constitutional’ suspension of democracy. Back then, India had witnessed the rise of two powerful youth movements against corruption and soaring prices. Gujarat and Bihar were the two epicentres of this youth movement. The Gujarat agitation came to be known as the Nav Nirman Movement and the Bihar movement guided by JP became the iconic Sampoorn Kranti Andolan. The RSS student wing ABVP emerged as the main organisation of the movement in Gujarat and in Bihar it played second fiddle to the socialist stream. This was the precursor to the formation of the Janata Party and the rise of the Janata Party government, which gave India the first Prime Minister from Gujarat in Morarji Desai and marked the first big break for the RSS to go mainstream and gain legitimacy and legalised access to hitherto inaccessible levels of state power at the all-India level.
While the RSS managed to tilt the balance in its favour, the communist movement in Bihar suffered an unfortunate marginalisation because of the flawed CPI decision to oppose the Sampoorn Kranti Andolan and join hands with the Congress. From a record tally of 35 seats in the elections to the undivided Bihar Assembly in 1972, the CPI started losing ground. The Janata Party experiment of course proved short-lived with the RSS trying to subvert and dominate the party from within and a section of socialists opposing the continued allegiance of former Jan Sangh members to the RSS. The RSS then used the Janata Party experiment as a launching pad for the BJP while the old socialist movement regrouped as the Janata Dal and secured a relatively lasting political influence and social base with the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendation on OBC reservation.
Beyond the proliferation of regional parties and identity-based formations in recent decades, historically the political landscape in post-independence India has been marked by the evolution of four key trends – the Congress, socialists, communists and the Hindutva right. During the period of domination of the Congress, the Hindutva right took advantage of the environment of anti-Congressism to emerge as the growing aggressive pole against the Congress. In spite of its political growth, the organisational unity of the socialist camp broke down in the post-Mandal period not only on regional lines but also on the key question of the socialist response to the rise of the BJP. The BJP made it convenient for sections of socialists to join hands with it under the NDA banner by agreeing to defer some of its core issues. By 2014 it became clear that the BJP no longer needed to maintain the early NDA era pretence or tactical restraint, and with Modi’s return for his second successive term in 2019 the fascist regime accelerated its drive to concentrate all power and turn India into an opposition-free republic. BJP leaders now openly proclaim their ambition to turn India into a single-party state and rule for fifty years.
This new juncture has made it necessary and possible for communists, socialists, Ambedkarites, Gandhians and Nehruvians to join hands against the fascists in a concerted resistance. And the Eleventh Congress convincingly highlighted this compelling necessity and the kind of impact it could produce when it is backed by the power of revolutionary ideology, organisation, initiatives and struggles that define the communist legacy in a state like Bihar. It marked a telling contrast between the Bihar of mid 1970s and the Bihar of today. Fifty years ago while Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar were leading the student movement of the day in Patna, the CPI(ML) was engaged in militant revolutionary struggles in parts of rural Bihar, especially in Shahabad and Magadh regions close to Patna. Yet the two trends did not converge on the ground. It is another thing that activists of both trends often met in jail and the quest for ‘total revolution’ inspired sections of activists of the JP movement to join the CPI(ML), especially in the wake of the disillusionment triggered by the collapse of the short-lived Janata party and government experiment.
From the 1990s onwards, the CPI(ML) movement started making its presence felt in the electoral arena. As governance passed into the hands of the inheritors of the mantle of the JP movement, with the BJP too turning into a ruling party of Bihar after stitching a rewarding alliance with Nitish Kumar’s JDU, the CPI(ML) continued to champion the interests of the most oppressed and deprived people of Bihar, upholding the banner of the revolutionary opposition in the Bihar Assembly. Today while carrying forward this battle of social transformation and people’s rights, the CPI(ML) is determined to discharge its revolutionary responsibility of defeating fascism which has emerged as the biggest impediment to the onward march of the people. Yesterday’s battle for land, wages and dignity against locally dominant feudal forces has thus grown into today’s battle for saving democracy and saving India from the clutches of the fascist marauders.
The Eleventh Congress has underlined the goals and the way ahead to reach them. It is now for the entire party to rise to the occasion harnessing the full strength and energy of people’s resistance and drawing upon the glorious legacy of India’s communist movement and everything progressive in Indian history.
