1. Since our last Congress in October 1997, we have faced two Lok Sabha elections and one round of Assembly elections. In the March 1998 Lok Sabha elections, we contested 41 seats in 11 States and polled 9,13,871 votes. While we retained the
Autonomous Territory seat from Assam under the banner of ASDC, we could not win any other seat. Compared to the 1996 polls, our votes went up only marginally. One year later, in the 1999 elections we fielded 58 candidates in 13 States. This time round our total votes went up by more than 40 per cent.
However, this growth is explained primarily by two factors, (i) as directed by the Varanasi congress, we contested and won the Autonomous Territory seat directly under the Party’s banner and (ii) our votes increased considerably in two particular seats in Bihar, viz, Siwan and Aurangabad. In Siwan we managed to push the BJP back to a distant third position to finish second while in Aurangabd we put up a spirited fight to finish third by polling nearly one lakh votes. By contrast, our votes went down sharply in some constituencies, particularly in Jehanabad where we polled an all-time low, a little less than one lakh. On account of our victory in Assam, the Party secured the status of a recognised state party which has entitled the Party to have a reserved symbol for contesting elections.
2. In the last Assembly elections in Bihar held soon after the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, we had a seat-sharing arrangement with the CPI. In earlier elections we had often unilaterally extended support to CPI candidates in certain seats, but this was the first time our two parties had an electoral understanding. The understanding was however not complete and ‘friendly contests’, as the term goes, were witnessed for nearly ten seats.
The number of seats won by the Party in this election remained the same as in the previous elections. Of the six seats we held in the previous Assembly we succeeded in retaining four and while we lost one seat each in Bhojpur and Siwan, the losses were compensated by the two seats we won from Karakat in Rohtas district and Barsoi in Katihar district. Altogether we polled 9.2 lakh votes (from 105 seats), marginally more than the 1995 total of 8.25 lakh votes (from 92 seats).
The CPI finished with a tally of five seats, way down from the party’s strength of 23 seats in the outgoing Assembly. The CPI(M) once again contested in alliance with the ruling RJD and managed to win two seats, down from the five seats it held in the previous Assembly. In terms of seats, we thus emerged as the biggest Left party in Bihar. After the bifurcation of Bihar, the CPI is now left with only two members in the Bihar Assembly while we now have five members. However, in terms of vote share the CPI is still ahead of our party, it contested nearly fifty seats more than we did and polled nearly 3.5% of total votes as against our share of 2.5%.
3. Our electoral performance in most other states continued to remain rather weak and insignificant. In Assam following the split in the party and ASDC in the hill districts, the ASDC(P) lost all the five seats it held in the outgoing Assembly. Our votes in the tea-garden-dominated Behali constituency of Sonitpur district however crossed the 10,000 mark. In Uttar Pradesh, our votes doubled in the last Assembly elections crossing the 50,000 mark in the state. For the first time we were able to poll more than 5,000 votes in six seats, the highest being just short of 10,000 in Mughalsarai. Five of these six 5,000-plus seats were in the eastern districts of Chandouli, Mirzapur, Ghazipur and Balia. This was preceded by a sustained movement and impressive mobilisation of the rural poor against intense semi-feudal coercion and heightened police repression. In UP too first the BJP and then the BSP-BJP governments have started targeting Naxalites and implication in false cases, third-degree torture and even fake encounters are becoming quite rampant. Even in the electoral battle we had to face the wrath of the state apart from a fierce political contention with dominant non-BJP parties like the BSP and SP.
While we still contested nearly thirty seats in the eastern districts, the CPI and CPI(M) put together were allotted only ten seats by the SP. But even with the backing of SP, the CPI failed to win a single seat and its votes declined drastically in most constituencies while the CPI(M) tally came down from four to two. The BSP, on the other hand, was able to further consolidate its strength and made impressive electoral gains by roping in kulak-mafia elements often with an upper caste background. Against this backdrop our performance carried a lot of promise and the Left ranks in the state, especially in this crucial eastern region adjoining Bihar, now increasingly look to our Party for bringing about a communist resurgence and wresting lost ground from the BSP’s influence.
4. We also faced panchayat and municipal elections in most states. After more than twenty years, panchayat elections were held last year in Bihar followed by municipal elections early this year. These elections were however held on a non-party basis and there were no reservations for women or dalit candidates for the posts of panchayat heads or for the chief posts of block development councils or district councils. The elections still generated great enthusiasm at the grassroots and became a vehicle for widespread assertion of the poor and the oppressed even as the old dominant forces, the neo-rich kulaks and private armies and mafia gangs made desperate attempts to consolidate their grip. Even as the state seeks to acquire a new legitimacy with its new slogan of decentralisation of power, the ruling classes seek to co-opt the growing disillusionment and dissent of the masses with illusory empowerment and capital seeks new market in the name of rural development and employment generation, the panchayats have all the potential for being utilised as a major site of class struggle to advance the democratic mobilisation and assertion of the poor and the oppressed. We managed to win nearly three thousand panchayat wards, more than one hundred thirty mukhia (panchayat head) seats, more than two hundred twenty-five panchayat samiti seats and twenty seats in district councils, five of them in Bhojpur, four in Patna, and three in Jehanabad. In the non-party format of elections it proved quite difficult to avoid a division of our mass base especially in the election for mukhias.
In the second phase of panchayat elections there ensued a desperate scramble for gaining control over panchyat samitis and district councils. All our elected zila parishad members stood firm and spurned lucrative offers extended by powerful groups and parties who wanted our support to ensure their own victory. In the three main districts of Bhojpur, Patna and Jehanabad we independently contested the election for the post of chairperson of district council. However we could not win any additional support beyond our own members. In the election for panchayat samiti pramukhs, we did not have a clear majority in any block. While in most blocks we adopted an oppositional stance, in some blocks we entered into temporary adjustments with other individual elected members or groups of them against the main class enemy or political opponent. These adjustments naturally evoked considerable debates. Such adjustments can only be justified in areas where we have a strong overall presence and a powerful movement. Devoid of such a perspective, adjustments are liable to prove counter-productive. However, such adjustments must be differentiated from programmatic united fronts or various other forms of joint action. Such adjustments must be treated as absolutely temporary and the pramukhs and up-pramukhs thus elected must function independently under the Party’s guidance and not as partners of any enduring alliance. Outside Bihar, we also won our first victories in district council elections in Uttar Pradesh and Orissa and also had a relatively improved showing in Andhra Pradesh, Assam and Tamil Nadu.
We also participated in the municipal elections in Bihar, UP, West Bengal and Delhi. The elections however once again revealed our well-known weakness in urban areas. Except Arrah where we could win in five wards of the town council our victories in other towns in Bihar have been very few. But we have polled respectable votes in several wards and we must pay attention to building some strong urban pockets of work. In the corporation elections in Delhi, we succeeded in polling more than 1,000 votes in one ward in North-West Delhi. This has been our best performance so far in municipal elections in Delhi.
5. On the whole, our weak showing in elections raises a number of major questions. In several cases we have still not been able to surpass or even regain the level of our 1989-90 performance. Except some pockets of north Bihar and Giridih district of Jharkhand we have not really been able to significantly expand our electoral influence during the last one decade. How do we explain or deal with this situation? Just as at the initial stage of the CPI(ML)’s history when the Party was engaged predominantly in armed struggle we had to fight constantly against the wishful and romantic notion of easy victory, we have to do the same in the arena of electoral struggle as well. All wild notions of rapid electoral advance are bound to be refuted, and refuted quite harshly, by the objective social reality. Developing appropriate communist attitude to electoral struggle is an important ideological question. Measuring the growth of a revolutionary Communist party merely or primarily in terms of electoral parameters and eventually reducing the very question of relevance of a revolutionary party to the degree of its electoral success is nothing but liquidationism and we have to wage a serious struggle against any such approach.
To say this is by no means to suggest that we should accept our electoral weaknesses as something of a destiny. On the contrary, we must treat our electoral weakness as an objective expression or indicator of our overall weakness and must do all we can to overcome it and strengthen the Party in every manner and in every sphere including the electoral arena. The point is, it is futile to look for a solution within the framework of electoral politics. The rules of the electoral game, the existing administrative procedures and social equations, are bound to remain skewed against us and every inch of our electoral advance can only be attained and sustained only by defying these odds. The question of making a breakthrough in the electoral arena must be treated primarily as a question of intensifying our basic struggles, increasing our capacity of political mobilisation and consolidating the Party organisation. Any dream of attaining a durable electoral success on any other basis can only submerge the Party in the morass of parliamentary cretinism.
Thirdly, in the electoral battle, there can be no resting on our laurels and enjoying electoral victories as a secure regular income from a one-time fixed deposit. Every victory has to be earned anew and it can only be done if in every phase of a developing struggle we can unify and expand our base and break down the barriers and resistance put up by our main enemy or by rival camps. This calls for more determined people’s resistance and conscious and systematic attempts at winning new friends and broadening our social horizon while dividing and cornering the enemy. Instead of bothering about electoral waves and equations, we must concentrate our efforts on increasing political mobilisation in basic struggles, unleashing grassroot initiative and vigorous resistance, and strengthening the Party’s organisational network.
6. In terms of parliamentary work we have now accumulated a decade’s experience. Our continued presence in Lok Sabha, especially now as a state recognised party, provides us with relatively greater scope for representation of the Party and articulation of our views in various parliamentary fora. However, as we have only one member in the Lok Sabha, we do not often get a chance to put forward our views in parliamentary debates or our turn comes towards the fag end of a debate when people start losing interest. Our lone member has still managed to intervene in debates over budget proposals, vote of thanks to customary addresses of the President at the beginning of a session, important pieces of legislation and no-confidence motions against the ruling NDA government. He boldly opposed the controversial passage of POTA in the extraordinary joint session of parliament. A more effective intervention in the parliamentary arena demands proper functioning of a parliamentary office and much closer and systematic coordination between the parliamentary office and the Party centre. We are just making a beginning in this direction.
7. In the Bihar Assembly we function as a bold and consistent revolutionary opposition championing not only the cause of struggles directly led by our Party, but intervening in every issue related to the cause of democracy and development in the state as a whole. However, we still have a long way to go to improve the quality and force of our intervention. There have been some occasions when our intervention inside the Assembly has been effectively synchronised with our initiative outside the Assembly. The successful and militant gherao of Bihar Assembly after the Miyanpur massacre in Aurangabad district in which the Ranvir Sena gunned down a number of RJD supporters marked one such occasion.
In electoral terms the RJD government’s position has become relatively more comfortable after the bifurcation of Bihar. The challenge mounted by the NDA reached a plateau after the last election and the BJP-led opposition is yet to recover from the farcical experience of Nitish Kumar’s weeklong stint as Chief Minister. The split of Lok Janshakti Party from the JD(U) and its subsequent rift with the NDA have further weakened the NDA opposition in Bihar. In fact, the opposition is more embroiled in its internal rivalries with the Samta Party trying to edge out the BJP as the formal leader of the opposition. Meanwhile, thanks to the ruling RJD’s constant manipulations and the lures of office, the JD(U) is fast losing its separate existence. The BSP too has suffered a major setback with all the five of the party’s MLAs who were anyway part of the RJD camp formally quitting the party and joining the RJD. The ruling RJD is however having to face increased pressure from its junior coalition partner, the Congress. Against this backdrop, our bold and energetic role as the consistent democratic opposition in Bihar assumes considerable importance. The experience of the corrupt and criminalised misrule of the RJD government on the one hand and the decline and unsuitability of the NDA model in Bihar on the other hand strengthens the potential basis of a third alternative or a Left and democratic camp in Bihar and we must play a much stronger and pro-active role in this direction.
8. Within a short span of time we have accumulated considerable experience of legislative intervention in the newly created state of Jharkhand. With the creation of Jharkhand as a separate state, there has surfaced a major contradiction between the long neglected needs, aspirations and identity of the Jharkhandi people and the BJP-led government, which lacks any kind of wider social acceptability and is perceived to be almost an alien order by the broad masses of Jharkhandi people. The contradiction has created a turbulent political situation punctuated by powerful mass agitations with the government trying to survive on the strength of police repression and divide-and-rule manipulations on sensitive issues like reservation and domicile policy. The Assembly has naturally emerged as a platform of bitter debates and shocking exposure of the misrule, callousness and sheer incompetence of the repressive Marandi regime and the lone CPI(ML) member has come to be widely recognised as the most consistent, informed and forceful voice of the people and democracy in this new Assembly. This has raised the Party’s profile in the state and created wider openings for the Party to expand rapidly.
While the Jharkhand experience has to be viewed primarily in the unique context of this newly created state, it does provide glimpses into the vast area of intervention that even a single member of Assembly can explore to the Party’s advantage. However, this has also opened the prospect for closer and more frequent interaction with various parties of the opposition and the Party has to be careful about keeping all such interaction and initiative subservient to the Party’s political independence, tactical priorities and strategic vision. We must remember that one of our principal differences with the social-democratic parliamentary tactics revolves around the question of handling the contradictions among ruling classes and bourgeois parties. It is not our case that such contradictions do not exist or that they do not need any special attention, but we insist on strict subordination of this aspect of parliamentary practice to the independent identity and extra-parliamentary initiative of the communist party and to the primacy of the development of the revolutionary movement. Parliamentary initiatives and intervention can help create favourable conditions for the movement especially by way of exposing a government’s anti-people policies and its track record of corruption and repression. But parliamentary intervention does not by itself add to the material organisational strength of the party and the movement. Moreover, bourgeois and non-Left opposition parties support our role and initiative only to the extent we are seen as being instrumental in exposing and weakening the government of the day. But when we are singled out for harassment and repression, such parties can seldom be expected to stand by us.
9. The provision of large-scale allocation of local area development funds to members of Parliament and State Assemblies has created a situation in which opposition members are also being made accountable for the implementation or non-implementation of government schemes. This tends to depoliticise the consciousness of the people by detaching the so-called development schemes and projects of a government from its basic politics and economic policies. It also generates a kind of patron-client relationship between the elected people’s representative and the electing people where the people are encouraged to look even at their elected communist representatives more as governmental agencies for development than as representatives and leaders of the people for a just and democratic order. Worse still, contractors and vested interests tend to encircle the members for sanctioning contracts and projects and even a section of political activists begins to succumb to such economic considerations and gradually degenerate into petty fortune-seekers.
To counter this perspective it is imperative to expose the essential political nature of economic development, ensure constant political mobilisation of the masses on the issue of development and promote their participation in decision-making, implementation and supervision of official schemes and projects at all possible levels. Some recent experiences in this regard have been quite positive. In parts of Giridih district even the issue of inauguration of official projects became a matter of struggle with the people assembling in their thousands and inaugurating roads and bridges pre-empting the bureaucratic fanfare of a formal inauguration by the Chief Minister. The people spontaneously resorted to this novel way to express their indignation against inordinate delay and corruption in official projects. In Sahar block of Bhojpur the people were mobilised in a determined struggle under the leadership of the Party MLA from Sahar constituency, against the prolonged official neglect and callousness on the issue of construction of a road. Thousands of people laid an indefinite siege to the block office and soon the ‘ghera dalo, dera dalo’ agitation generated considerable momentum and supporters and local activists of other parties also started joining it. The administration eventually had to bow to this popular pressure and expedite necessary construction work. In Obra constituency of Aurangabad district, our Party MLA has initiated the practice of submitting periodic public accounts of work financed by development funds allotted to him. The practice of upholding the principles of accountability and transparency and the people’s right to information can go a long way in demarcating our MLAs from the general run of corrupt and careerist bourgeois politicians.
10. In the light of the problems and prospects of parliamentary work and our experience on this front, we need to reaffirm the following principles.
(i) In spite of the declining importance of parliamentary institutions as forums for informed debate and discussion and the growing tendency of various governments, especially the BJP-led NDA government to sidestep parliamentary institutions, procedures and conventions, we should re-emphasise the primary relevance of parliamentary institutions as platforms of exposure and agitation. Even though our intervention in this arena remains constrained by the paucity of numbers, we must consciously try to overcome this limitation through more serious homework, living feedback from concerned sources and closer guidance of leading Party committees.
(ii) Despite diverse patterns of panchayat election and a certain conflict among various levels of representation, the entire system from Parliament down to panchayats is one from the point of view of the ruling classes’ attempt at legitimising and strengthening their class rule. On our part, we should also treat the entire system as one while exploring every possible opportunity for strengthening the revolutionary democratic movement and advancing the assertion of the working people. In particular, we must pay serious attention to panchayats as a developing arena of class struggle and counter the threat of depoliticisation, degeneration and co-option by ensuring greater mobilisation and closer supervision of the people in the functioning of the panchayat system.
(iii) We must remain alert about the gradual reduction of the role of elected people’s representatives to a mere agency of implementation of official schemes and the attendant distortion of leadership role and rise of patron-client relationship between elected people’s representatives and the electing people. In public perception, development work has become synonymous with the flourishing of a criminal-contractor-bureaucrat-politician nexus. In contrast, development work in our areas must become a model of democratic participation and supervision and corrupt contractors and officials must not be allowed to exercise any control over the agenda of development. We must uphold the principles of accountability and transparency and the people’s right to information. The whole question must be addressed in terms of popular mobilisation and struggle on the issue of formulation and execution of policies and plans.
(iv) We must strictly maintain the principle of keeping parliamentary practice subservient to extra-parliamentary politics. We must intensify our collective vigilance and struggle against the threat of parliamentary cretinism. This is an ailment that does not remain confined to the legislative or parliamentary wing of the Party but afflicts the entire Party by making the Party dependent on parliamentary facilities and also reducing and restricting the Party to what may be called the parliamentary mode of thinking and functioning. We must also weed out parliamentary careerism which detaches parliamentary role from the revolutionary perspective and promotes the tendency of looking at parliamentary role as a reward for work and sacrifice and increasingly as a career opportunity.
(v) People’s representatives elected under the Party’s banner must distinguish themselves both as true representatives of the people and as activists and ambassadors of the Party. This is crucial from the point of view of demolishing the mischievous myth of the political class marketed by the ideologues of the ruling classes, a notion that blurs the essential distinctions between career politicians engaged in the service of the bourgeoisie and committed revolutionaries who participate in electoral politics to serve the people and the revolution. q