United Front of the Oppressed - Economic and Political Weekly

DISCUSSION
United Front of the Oppressed
C P Bhambri
Bernard D’Mello’s clinical analysis
of India’s “rotten liberal political
democracy” from the perspective
and standpoint of the oppressed and
e xploited “underclass” compels him to
focus attention on the reasons for the
continuation, survival and “stability of this
form of democracy”, and on the goal of real
“demo cratisation” of Indian society. In his
article, D’Mello (“ ‘The Near and the Far’:
Why Is India’s Liberal-Political D emo cracy
Rotten?”, EPW, 1 June 2013) mentions
the fact that the oppressed peasantry
and the labouring classes have not been
just passive spectators; many powerful
struggles have been launched by them
against the existing exploitative social
system and in spite of such struggles, the
foundations of the system have not been
shaken. He emphasises that the exploitative
and oppressive strata of the ruling
classes have not felt threatened at all
about their successful survival – a survival
which stands on a private property-based
s ociety and state.
D’Mello is partially correct while stating
that an extremely powerful militarised
coercive state power with the help of wellequipped
armed forces and draconian
anti-people laws is in place in I ndia.
Beginning with the Preventive Detention
Act to the U nlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act, the State has sought to utilise them
to crush all militant struggles beginning
with the anti-feudal, anti- Nizam and
anti-landlord Telengana peasantry’s armed
struggle of 1946-51. This concentrated
coercive military might of the state is
at work in crushing the People’s Liberation
Army of the Communist Party of
India (Maoist), which a ccording to the
prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is the
“greatest threat to the internal security
of the country”.
Cordoned and Confined
It is an obligation on the part of the
l eadership of the organisations that
132
strive for the “basic social transformation
of the existing exploitative social o rder”
to continuously engage in self-criticism
with a view to learn lessons from their
successes and failures. They must recognise
the limitations of strategies employed
by armed guerrillas for achieving
the goal of destruction of the foundations
of the essentially anti-people social
order. The Indian state has enough military
power to deal with l ocalised armed
struggles and destroy the sanctuaries of
the people’s liberation army (PLA) even
in thick forested and hilly or mountainous
areas. The ruling classes do not feel
threatened by Maoist challenges because
the highly militarised class-state of India
has successfully pushed these so-called
guerrilla fighters to limited areas with a
view to cripple their armed struggle.
Even if left- extremism, as characterised
by the prime minister, is operating in
nine states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha,
West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh,
Madhya Pradesh, Maha rashtra and
Uttar Pradesh, the anti-naxal operations
in these states are thinly spread across
some districts and not the whole area
of the state.
How can these “confined” challenges
pose a threat to the Indian state and its
armed forces? The Indian Army has
been deployed by the state to defend its
territorial integrity only in Jammu and
Kashmir (J&K) and some north-eastern
Indian states, and even such localised
challenges have not achieved the goal of
“re-territorialisation” of India. Through
the limited and unequal armed struggles,
it is just not possible to overthrow
the state and “annihilate class enemies”.
Further, every struggle against the p rivate
property-based r egime of private capital
accumulation should have a clear goal
of raising the level of social consciousness
of the suffering masses who are keeping
“ silent” against oppression. Armed
p olitical struggle in India, whether led
by the Maoists or by other organisations
in the border states in the North-East or
J&K, have not at all succeeded in creating
a social awakening. Despite the fact
that “social struggles are the school for
socialism”, it should not be assumed
that every social struggle creates social
awakening and c onsciousness.
Inability of the Vanguard
The role of the vanguard in moulding
and shaping new ways of thinking
among the oppressed masses cannot be
played by the armed groups which have
been pushed and confined to fighting
battles without developing organisational
capacity to reach and impart p olitical
education to the labouring classes. If one
part of the story is that in Indian conditions,
the armed forces of the powerful
state have successfully cordoned the
guerrilla revolutionaries, the other is
that these fighters are incapacitated
b ecause of their situation. Their ideological
message with a view to awaken
the struggling classes remains confined
to a very limited and narrow section of
society, and revolutions do not succeed
without mass mobilisation of the conscious
underclasses.
Further, the practitioners and supporters
of Maoism are taking a great
risk by dismissing the Indian state as
just a coercive machine in the hands of
the exploiting ruling classes, because
the democratically elected Parliament
and political executive has its own
sources of popular legitimacy, and this
is the explanation, completely missed by
D’Mello. This could be for reasons of positive
responses to the demands of struggle
of some strata of society with a view to
broaden its social base among multiple
social constituencies. For example, D’Mello
has not drawn adequate conclusions
from the anti- feudal Telangana peasant
struggle. While it was crushed by the
armed forces of the state, the project
of (limited) land reforms was also
launched by Nehru as a consequence of
this historic struggle. The bourgeoisdemocratic
state also f ollows a piecemeal
reformist social agenda and during
the last 66 years, many reforms
august 10, 2013 vol xlviiI no 32 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

have been undertaken by the bourgeois
state because of popular pressures.
Democratic Space
It should not be forgotten that even
a “rotten political democracy” provides
enough space for limited democratic
struggles launched by different fractions
of the exploited labouring classes.
An i nherent characteristic of the classstate
is that it confronts violent antistate
class struggles with a view to crush
them. At the same time, it res ponds
positively, sometimes even enthusiastically
and at other times hesitantly, and
negotiates with agitating social groups
and leaders and accommodates their
interests and aspirations. Further, competitive
politics in political democracy is
played by competing parties by raising
demands of their special social constituencies
and by compelling political opponents
to either accept demands of special
social groups or face agitations and
threats of losing an election.
It is left to the parties and leaders of
the socially deprived and exploited strata
of society in a liberal demo cracy to
expand and extend the area of struggles
in the spaces which are available. India
is not an exception to this general rule.
Hence, the central and critical problem
faced by the leaders of mass movements
is to create a powerful fighting force
of the oppressed by forming a united
front of the victims of the existing social
order. Why have the progressive sections
of political leadership not been
able to create a powerful fighting force
of the oppressed against an unequal and
unjust social order? I ndia has not experienced
any all-India mass-based resistance
movement which is taken notice of
by the ruling classes and political executives
of the Indian state. It is a historically
validated fact that the exploiting ruling
classes continue their journey of ruthless
capital accumulation when they are not
under threat from any formidable united
front of the oppressed.
The French Revolution of 1789 succeeded
in overthrowing the “ancien
r egime” of monarchy-aristocracy and
feudal classes because the exploited had
united against the oppressors, d emolished
the old and established the new.
Utsa Patnaik in an introduction to the
Agrarian Question in Marx and His
Successors (2011) observes that
the 20th century was a century of revolutions
which permanently altered the trajectory
of future development of a large
segment of human society. In these revolutions
the peasantry had a major, even leading
part to play. In two large and populous
nations, Russia and China, political movements
based on Marxism and proletarian
ideology harnessed the revolutionary energies
of the peasantry to overthrow the old
regime, end land monopoly and radically
refashion agrarian relations, laying the
basis for a re-ordering of the entire gamut of
social relations.
While history does not repeat itself
in a mechanical manner, unlike Russia
and China, Lenin and Mao, Mohandas
G andhi launched his anti-colonial national
liberation movement by mobilising and
activating Indian peasantry to fight against
exploitation of the whole of I ndian society
by British colonisers. The historical exceptionalism
of the Indian and Gandhian
leadership that relied upon gradualism
did not shake caste- and religion-based
social life of agrarian I ndia. The inheritance
of this legacy has directly affected
the story of post-Independence social
struggles because caste versus caste or
religion versus religion social relations
have fragmented the whole society and
strata of the underclasses both horizontally
and vertically.
Misplaced Characterisation
D’Mello by characterising the Indian
class-state essentially as “caste-ridden
Brahmanical-Hindu communal” has
neither related this social structure with
the history of India nor has he f ocused
attention on its impact on the struggles
of the working classes. The unstoppable
caravan of demands for reservations in
public institutions has solidified casteism
and caste consciousness. It has obstructed
the growth of mass social consciousness
for unity against the existing social order.
Caste versus caste-based struggles are
e ngaged in finding the causes of caste
o ppression in their historical inheritance,
and these prisoners of the past
have not become socially awakened to
understand that the basic reasons of
s ocial oppression lie in the present
e xploitative capitalist social order.
DISCUSSION
The past determines the consciousness
of caste groups, and the present ruling
groups are happy with it. The growing
ritual-based religious practices of the
Hindus have affected the thinking about
social surroundings, and the priestly
classes have succeeded in making believers
fatalists content in their destiny
which is determined by the accident of
birth. It is no one’s case that the oppressed
classes are homogeneous social
groups; the problem is that internal differentiation
among the peasantry and
the labouring classes has been equated
with caste-based fragmentation. It is
easy to mobilise a fraction of a caste to
launch a struggle for a specific demand
felt by the caste group than to launch a
united struggle for establishing an alternative
equality-based socialist social order.
A particular caste group of peasantry
can launch a movement for minimum
support price for wheat or sugar but the
caste-divided landless agricultural worker
base is unable to launch a united
struggle for guaranteed payment of minimum
wages for work.
The irony in India is that unlike Russia
and China where the vanguard role was
played by leaders who had succeeded
in uniting the oppressed massses, the
Indian vanguard parties are themselves
fragmented into various communist parties.
These d ivided communists cannot
lead a united front of the oppressed. The
upshot of the above description is that a
necessity for forming a united front of
the oppressed has to be felt by fragmented
communists because it is only then
that they can challenge the class power
of the exploiters. D’Mello blames the
rulers for following the policy of social
“divide to rule”, while the issue is that
fragmented communists cannot o rganise
a revolution of any kind. This is the crux
of the issue.
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW august 10, 2013 vol xlviiI no 32 133