8th Conference of CPI(ML) Uttar Pradesh unit held in Varanasi
"Say no to starvation, unemployment and suicide deaths! Intensify the struggle for jobs, social security and democracy! Bring about a Leftward shift!" This was the banner of the 8 th conference of the Uttar Pradesh unit of the Party which was held at Com. R.N. Upadhyay Sabhagar (inauguration session in Nagar Nigam Hall and delegate session in Acharya Ramchandra Shukla Shodh Sansthan) in Rahul Sankrityayan Nagar ( Varanasi ) on 9-11 October, 2004. The hall was decorated with red flags, revolutionary poems and slogans and also by a banner portrait of Comrade Nagbhushan Patnaik, to mark the 6 th anniversary of his demise.
The inaugural session of the conference was attended not only by delegates and Party members from different parts of the state but also by a broader section of Left activists and intelligentsia from the city. Comrade Prashant Shukla, Town Committee Secretary of Party’s Varanasi unit delivered the welcome address. Freedom fighters and veteran communists and trade union leaders including Com. Ishwarchandra Tyagi, Com. RK Shukla, Com. Brij Bihari Lal (Mahashayji), Com. Harivanshi Ram Master, Com. Vasudev Tyagi, Com. Shambhu and Com. Ramnaresh Singh were honoured and conference memento was presented to them by Party General Secretary. Following Comrade Dipankar’s inaugural address, the session was also addressed by Professor Dipak Mallik, Jan Sanskriti Manch General Secretary Ajay Singh, Party MLA from Bihar Rajaram Singh and Party’s UP State Secretary Comrade Akhilendra Pratap Singh. The speakers drew attention to the spectre of starvation haunting different parts of the country and called for a powerful communist-led movement of the rural poor for a resolution of the growing agararian crisis. They also strongly condemned the repression unleashed by the Mulayam Singh government on democratic forces in the state, especially the booking of the leaders of Lakhimpur land struggle under the notorious Gangsters Act.
The delegate session started in the evening of 9 October with the presentation by Comrade Akhilendra Pratap of the draft work report on behalf of the outgoing state committee. A lively and vibrant debate followed, which was divided in three sections to focus on three parts of the report, namely, political situation in the state, mass organisations and mass movement, and the affairs of the Party and the task of Party building. It continued till the morning session of 11 October, during which altogether 117 comrades out of 265 delegates and observers expressed their opinions. The proceedings were conducted by a 5-member presidium comprising Comrades Krishna Adhikari, Lal Bahadur Singh, Ajanta Lohit, Jaswant Singh and Shyam Bihari Singh.
By noon on 11 October, the report was adopted unanimously by the house following the reply to the debate by Comrade Akhilendra. The house also unanimously approved the panel presented by the outgoing state committee and thus elected a 29-member state committee. The new state committee reelected Comrade Akhilendra as its secretary.
The Conference resolved to intensify the struggles of the rural poor, further expand and strengthen the Khet Mazdoor Sabha and Kisan Sabha, take all round initiative on democratic issues while focussing on peasant struggle, and build a militant people’s movement against the repressive and anti-people Mulayam Singh regime.
(Excerpts from the concluding speech delivered by Com. Dipankar Bhattacharya at the UP State Conference in Varanasi)
Uttar Pradesh has quite a high rate of rise and fall of political parties. Before every election we find a number of new parties coming up in the state. While some just disappear unnoticed, some are able to attract a reasonable amount of attention and go on to survive for a length of time. It is important to develop a Marxist, class-based analysis of these parties.
If we look at the mass base of most of these parties, the votes they get in numbers that run into hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions, we will find a great deal of commonality among them. Most of the votes they secure belong to the working people, the peasants, workers and lower middle classes. After all, they are the ones who constitute the overwhelming majority of the country’s electorate. But as long as the working people are not organised along class lines, caste operates as the primary unit of social mobilisation. And the caste base is manipulated by the dominant power groups within different castes.
The dominant political discourse in the state revolves around the concept of social engineering of caste equations. While this reveals the link of the parties with their respective electoral bases, the nexus of these parties with big capital and powerful landed interests remains mostly in the background. To understand the class character of a political party we have to take a close look at its programme, especially when it is in power, and the kind of relation it has with big property.
Let us take the Samajwadi Party for example. The votes the party polls come mostly from peasants, farmers and artisans belonging to the Yadavs, Muslims and increasingly also Rajputs. The power groups of these castes comprising contractors, bureaucrats, traders and criminals have a big say in this party and derive immense benefits from its rule. Being a minority community, Muslims of course have very limited bargaining power. But to understand the real character of the Samajwadi Party, we have to look beyond the caste-based power groups and examine the excellent links the party has with the Ambanis, with the Sahara group and so on.
Most of the new regional parties seem to enjoy the backing of some particular powerful caste or group of castes. This trend of growing political assertion on the part of backward or extreme backward castes is generally described as a socio-political fallout of the Mandal Commission. Initially these parties articulate the grievances or aspirations of a section of well-to-do peasants or petty-bourgeois sections of these castes. But as they grow bigger and inch closer to power, they are invariably drawn into the maze of organic relations with the ruling classes.
From the point of view of the ruling classes, the TDP of Andhra, the NCP of Maharashtra and the Samajwadi Party of UP are quite reliable political formations for carrying forward their present economic agenda of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. The BSP, RJD and JMM too have shown the potential to prove very good business propositions for the ruling classes. With a slightly different configuration in Parliament, Mulayam Singh Yadav could have indeed emerged as the frontrunner for the Prime Ministerial chair. And such an arrangement would surely have enjoyed the general support of corporate India.
Indeed the Samajwadi Party has come a long way from being just another Lohiaite formation. While still displaying certain characteristic traits of the Lohiaite tradition of so-called ‘indigenous socialism’, it has transformed itself into a standard bourgeois party wedded to economic neo-liberalism. One can call it corporatisation of Lohiaism. Both the SP and BSP have moved away considerably from the original ambit of backwardism or Ambedkarism. The main agenda for both these parties is now to make inroads in the upper caste support of the BJP and the Congress. To facilitate this intrusion, they have considerably softened their position on the issue of ‘secularism’; the BSP has repeatedly allied with the BJP to share power in the state while the SP too has a tacit understanding with the BJP to keep the Congress at bay.
It is important to expose the true face of ‘social justice’ and ‘secularism’ as practised by the SP and BSP, but we must remember that a revolutionary communist party cannot effectively intervene in the political situation primarily on the strength of such a critique. In the ultimate analysis, our capacity to intervene depends on our organised strength and that in turn depends primarily on our painstaking practice among the working people, the rural poor in particular.
Through years of practice we have developed a few pockets of rural work in the state. Some of these pockets have acquired a degree of stability and are also steadily expanding, but in many areas our work is still at a very primary stage. The impact of the agrarian crisis is now beginning to be felt quite widely in the state, and we must put in our best efforts to intervene in this crisis from the position of the rural poor and the crisis-ridden middle peasantry.