CHARU MAZUMDAR
Translated from the text as appeared in Deshabrati. November 6, 1969. It appeared in liberation, Vol. III, No. 1 (November 1969).
This ancient and vast land of India, the beloved, motherland of ours, is a country of 500 million people, the absolute majority of whom are peasants. Ours is an agrarian country, a land that belongs to the peasant masses who are hard-working and talented.
The British colonialists directly ruled over our country for some two hundred years and the history of these two hundred years is one of repeated peasant uprisings for the overthrow of the colonial rule. A little more than a hundred years ago the so-called ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ sparked off a countrywide conflagration and repeatedly inflicted defeats on the colonial army of the British rulers. But that great rebellion failed owing to betrayal by feudal lords.
The peasant uprisings failed one after another because there was no scientific theory nor proper leadership to guide them.
The Indian bourgeoisie, fostered and groomed by the British imperialists, were comprador in character. They protected the imperialists from the anger of the masses, confined the masses within the limits of reformist movements and bargained with the imperialists to get crumbs for themselves. Helped by the imperialists they posed as the natural leaders of the masses. Such trash as ‘Gandhi-ism’, passive resistance, ahimsa and charkha are the ideology of India’s comprador bourgeoisie and serve only the imperialists.
The great October Revolution brought Marxism-Leninism to the revolutionary masses of India, and the Communist Party was formed. From the moment of its birth the leadership of the Party was usurped by the agents of the bourgeoisie. Instead of inspiring the masses to rise arms in hand against the imperialist rulers and overthrow the imperialist rule by force of arms, these usurpers of party leadership trailed behind the bourgeois reformist leadership and betrayed the revolutionary worker and peasant masses. They repeatedly thwarted the attempts of the Indian revolutionaries to take the correct road for the Indian revolution. The experience of the great Chinese revolution was never assimilated, the content of the Indian revolution was never studied and no assessment of the role of the peasantry in the democratic revolution was ever made. Thus, the Party ranks were alternately led towards Right reformism and Left sectarianism and finally dragged into the morass of parliamentarism and revisionism.
After World War II and even during it, there appeared a high tide of revolutionary upheaval of worker and peasant masses which forced the British imperialists to change their tactics. They turned colonial India into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country and foisted the rule of the comprador-bureaucrat capitalists and big landlords on the Indian people. Thus started the process which changed India from a colony into a neo-colony.
During their rule of twenty years these lackeys of imperialism opened up the country for US imperialist and Soviet social-imperialist exploitation in addition to the British imperialist exploitation. Today, India is a neo-colony of these powers.
The U.S. imperialists and the Soviet social-imperialists are the world’s ruthless exploiters today. They are plundering and fleecing the Indian people without mercy, reducing them to a state of utter destitution. Today, the US imperialists and Soviet social-imperialists have complete control over India— economically, politically, militarily and culturally.
As a result of this relentless and increasing exploitation, the mood of the Indian people is now one of anger that has reached the point of white heat. Indeed the revolutionary situation is excellent.
India is an agrarian country and the vast masses of her people are peasants, so the progress and development of India depend on the progress and development of her peasant masses. There are four major contradictions in our country today — contradictions between the Indian people on the one hand and US imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capital on the other, and the Indian people can liberate themselves only by casting these four big mountains off their backs. But it must be remembered that the main and principal contradiction in our country today is the one between the landlords and the peasantry, the resolution of which alone can lead to the resolution of the other three contradictions. Thus the contradiction between the landlords and the peasantry is one between feudalism and the masses of the Indian people.
The peasant masses of India cannot liberate themselves and the country without the leadership of the working class. The working class is the most revolutionary class and the most organized detachment of the Indian people. That is why only the working class can lead the Indian revolution to victory, and the Indian people can overthrow the four big mountains only by carrying on their struggle under the leadership of this class.
The main content of our revolution is agrarian revolution. Our revolution is democratic in character. But it is not a democratic revolution of the old type; it is part of the world proletarian socialist revolution ushered in by the great October Revolution, and as such can be victorious only under the leadership of the working class. This revolution will establish under the leadership of the working class a joint dictatorship of workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and even a section of the small and middle bourgeoisie, who together constitute the overwhelming majority of the Indian people, i.e., 90 per cent of India’s population. This is why it is called People’s Democracy.
Among the peasantry, the poor and landless peasants are firm allies and the main force of the revolution. They will firmly unite with the middle peasants, win over a section of the rich peasants and neutralize the majority of them. Only a small section of the rich peasants will go over to the camp of counter-revolution. The petty bourgeoisie of our country is a revolutionary class, the overwhelming majority of which, including the revolutionary intellectuals, will join the revolution. A section of them, however, may detach itself from the main body and join hands with counter-revolution.
The small and middle bourgeoisie are vacillating and unstable allies of the revolution and tend to compromise with counter-revolution because they are economically and mentally linked with the counterrevolutionaries. They may join the revolution only when they feel assured of its victory. The role of the bourgeois intellectuals should also be considered as that of the national bourgeoisie. Only when worker-peasant alliance is achieved through armed struggle and red political power is established in different parts of the country can the democratic front of all these classes be formed under the leadership of the working class.
The working class can establish its leadership over the people’s democratic revolution only through its political party — the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), and in no other way. Apart from giving leadership through its political party, the working class also helps the democratic revolution by launching struggles on various national and international issues, by organizing solidarity actions in support of other revolutionary classes, particularly in support of the agrarian revolution, and by sending its advanced and class-conscious section to organize the peasants’ armed struggle in the countryside.
The working class can lead the democratic revolution to completion only by creating small bases of armed struggle throughout the country by means of developing guerrilla warfare and by consolidating the people’s political power. Guerrilla warfare is and will remain the basic form of struggle for the entire period of the democratic revolution. This is so because guerrilla warfare alone can release the initiative and creative genius of the masses, lead them in making the impossible possible so as to bring about changes in the conditions of the masses and the countryside, inspire the masses to engage in various spheres of work, and establish links and co-ordination between the bases of armed struggle. In this way, we have to create mighty waves of people’s war by expanding the small bases of armed struggle, build a people’s army, overthrow the rule of the four mountains in the countryside, use the countryside to encircle the cities and finally capture them, and thus seize political power throughout the country and bring the democratic revolution to a victorious completion. After accomplishing this the working class must resolutely proceed to build socialism in India, transform her into a socialist state, abolish forever the system of exploitation of man by man, open up before the people the prospect of perpetual well-being and happiness, turn our country into a bastion of world revolution, and carry our revolution forward to the bright future — a future without exploitation, so that it may become a pride of the people of the whole world.
India is an agrarian country the vast majority of whose population are peasants. That is why the culture in People’s Democratic India will be basically and mainly the culture of the revolutionary peasants, a culture led by the working class and anti-imperialist and anti-feudal in character. This is so because the culture that is represented today by the advanced section of the peasantry which is engaged in building a People’s Democratic India through armed struggle, the culture that is serving as a weapon in the people’s democratic revolution, cannot be anything other than anti-imperialist and anti-feudal in character. Therefore, only such a culture can be the culture of People’s Democratic India, and it would be the duty of the people’s democratic dictatorship of India to protect and foster this culture that serves the workers, peasants and soldiers as a weapon in their revolutionary struggle.
We are living in the era of Mao Tsetung. Today the great Communist Party of China led by Chairman Mao and his close comrade-in-arms, Vice-Chairman Lin Piao, is leading the international proletariat in fulfilling their most glorious task, namely, the victorious completion of the world revolution.
We are living in this period of world revolution. We are witnessing before our own eyes the glorious chapter of world history that the revolutionary people the world over are writing with their sweat and blood in order to abolish, once for all, the system of exploitation of man by man from the world. We are a detachment of that international army.
The revolutionary people of India were all but submerged in the morass of revisionism when Chairman Mao gave his clarion call and pointed out that revisionism is the main danger today. With deep attention we listened to these words of Chairman Mao’s, and there began a searching of hearts among us. As Chairman Mao took up his pen in 1962 to fight modern revisionism with Soviet revisionism as its centre, we found our way. Later, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution rang out Chairman Mao’s great call, “It is right to rebel against the reactionaries”, which filled our hearts with courage and gave us tremendous strength to rise up and stand on our own feet. We defied the revisionist leadership of the party, independently took the road of developing the armed struggle of the peasant masses and accepted the method and principle laid down by Vice-Chairman Lin Piao in his great work Long Live the Victory of People’s War!, because this method and principle embody the correct application of Mao Tsetung Thought and the summing-up of the experience gained the world over. This is how we organized the Naxalbari struggle. The great support given to us by the great, glorious and correct Communist Party of China enabled the revolutionaries all over India to unite, and the flames of Naxalbari spread to different states of India and there appeared Srikakulam, Mushahari and Lakhimpur Kheri. The concrete application of Mao Tsetung Thought in the concrete conditions of India and the constant summing up of the experience gained in these struggles forged revolutionary unity, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) was born. That is why the Indian revolutionaries are constantly studying Mao Tsetung Thought — the highest stage of Marxism — Leninism in this era, constantly trying to apply it in the concrete conditions of the Indian revolution, constantly summing up their own experiences in the light of Chairman Mao’s writings, thus developing the mass line, and trying to elevate the struggle to a still higher stage.
The revolutionary proletarian party was born at a time when the flames of people’s war were burning brightly in India. After the victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China the flames of people’s war are burning more fiercely and have become more widespread in the colonial and semi-colonial world, increasing the difficulties of the US imperialists and Soviet social-imperialists at home and abroad. Revisionism stands exposed and its power to deceive the people is daily and rapidly decreasing. The revisionists are now coming out openly in support of imperialist aggression with the result that the imperialists and the social-imperialists are rapidly heading towards their total collapse. Our Party was born at a time when the revisionist parties of our country were exposed as the lackeys of imperialism and Indian reaction, when the reactionary forces inside the country are disintegrating under the blows of the peasant armed struggle, and when the internal contradictions of the ruling classes are coming out in the open and the political crisis has become clear as daylight before the masses. Even the most backward sections of the people are entering the political arena as a force and the struggle against the four mountains is developing daily and hourly. Thus the revolutionary situation in India is increasingly becoming more and more excellent with every passing day and every passing hour.
Today, the peasant armed struggle is being waged in India and guerrilla bases have already been established. This proves conclusively that it is irresistible and the Indian reactionaries are totally unable either to arrest its growth or to prevent it from developing. More and more people are becoming convinced of the immense power of Mao Tsetung Thought, the peasant armed struggle is steadily expanding and more guerrilla bases are being established. All this shows how deeply Mao Tsetung Thought has struck root in the soil of India. It will grow ever deeper with every passing day, every passing hour, and will create a storm that will envelop the entire country; it will become a material force of tremendous power that will sweep away the reactionaries and revisionists of all hues like so many dry and withered leaves from this great land of ours.
A People’s Democratic India is no longer a distant objective. The first rays of the red sun have already lit up the coasts of Andhra and will tinge the other states also before long. A radiant India bathed in the rays of this red sun will continue to shine brightly for ever. Every communist must exert his entire effort and energy to bring about this glorious future.
Victory certainly belongs to us because China’s Chairman is our Chairman1 and China’s path is our path.
Note :
The CPI(M-L) constitution did not provide for any office like that of Chairman. This much-misunderstood expression is a recognition of the leadership of Mao Tsetung in the ideological sphere, his leadership of the world’s Marxist-Leninist forces, of which the CPI(M-L) was a contingent.
