As we have already noted, despite two major all-India splits in the party, the debate has very rarely reached programmatic heights in our movement. A major-reason for this confusion has been the fact that the splits have taken place in the backdrop of a larger split in the international Communist movement. Interestingly, while the CPI(M) in the mid-60s always blamed the CPI for dismissing or underplaying the content of the split and instead presenting it as an extension of the Sino-Soviet split, the CPI(M) is guilty of playing the same mischief in relation to the subsequent CPM-CPI(ML) split. The CPC was accused of inciting the split and but for the CPCs open support, the CPI(M) argued, the split would have remained confined to minor cases of desertion or expulsion. Instead of joining issues with the new born party, the CPI(M) CC therefore chose to state “our differences with the CPC”. With slogans like “China’s Chairman is our Chairman” and an uninhibited exhibition of Chinese fetishism, the CPI(ML) too brought not little grist to the CPI(M)’s propaganda mill.
Even before or apart from the Sino-Soviet rift and the Great Debate, the political-tactical debate in CPI and subsequently in CPI(M) has always been conducted within the parameters of Russian Path versus Chinese Path. The freezing of the focus on mere paths of revolution inhibited a deeper programmatic understanding of both Russian and Chinese revolutions and also hindered the evolution of an Indian Programme and an Indian path suited to Indian conditions. The Russian path was considered synonymous with urban working-class insurrectionism and the Chinese path meant no more than peasant guerrilla warfare. Thus a Chinese wall was erected between the two paths and the specific historical settings and situations in the two countries – the determinants of the two paths – were absolutised. The basic programmatic or strategic unity or continuity between the two revolutions came to be overlooked or neglected; it was forgotten that Russian revolution too was waged and won on a substantially agrarian plank. Despite Lenin’s pointed observations that “… In very many and very essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian Countries”[1] and that the stubborn survivals of serfdom in the Russian countryside have not only given rise to a nationwide peasant movement but have also made “that movement the touchstone of the bourgeois revolution as a whole,”[2] Indian communists do not appear to have taken the agrarian component of the Russian revolution with due seriousness.
The understanding of the Chinese Path too has been rather shallow, mechanical and Soviet-inspired. The 1951 Tactical Line or its legal version, the SOP, contains an interesting section on similarities and dissimilarities bet ween India and China. There we can see certain observations which tend to negate the very significance of Chinese revolution as a victorious application of Marxism-Leninism in a predominantly agrarian, backward and populous country and its relevance for a country like India. For instance, it is pointed out that following the split in the United National Front in 1927, the CPC had an army of 30,000 to begin with. The role of the Communist Party in building a people’s army which would go on to serve as a “magic weapon” in accomplishing the revolution is thus seriously understated.
The SOP also told us that it was only when the revolutionary forces of China made their way to Manchuria and found the firm rear of the Soviet Union that the threat of encirclement came to an end and they were able to launch the great offensive which-finally led to the liberation of China. “It was thus the support given by the existence of a firm and mighty Soviet rear that was of decisive importance in ensuring victory to the tactic of peasant warfare in the countryside inside China”, concluded the SOP. The efficacy or success of the Chinese Path was thus ultimately attributed to Soviet support and not to China’s own conditions and their brilliant utilisation by the CPC.
The SOP also appears to share the view that the Chinese revolution did not really satisfy the condition of working class leadership when it says, “we should bear in mind that the Chinese party stuck to the peasant partisan war alone, not out of principle but out of sheer necessity. In their long-drawn struggles the party and peasant bases got more and more separated from the towns and the working class therein, which prevented the party and the liberation army from calling into action the working class in factories, shipping and transport to help it against the enemy. Because it happened so with the Chinese, why make their necessity into a binding principle for us and fail to bring the working class into practical leadership and action in our liberation struggle?”.
Notes :
- 1. Democracy and Narodism in China, LCW, Vol. 18, pp 163-69.
- 2. Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy, LCW, Vol. 13,
pp 291-92.
