Because of this nationalist perspective, the CPI could always be seen looking for avenues of cooperation and unity with the national bourgeoisie. Peace movement was considered a crucial plank in this context. In February 1954, following the Madurai Congress (December 27, 1953-January 4, 1954) the CPI stressed the need to support Nehru’s foreign policy “without ifs and buts”. In April, the Central Executive Committee called for launching a united mass movement with the Congress around the points of agreement on foreign policy. In June, P Ramamurthy, the then Editor-in-Chief of New Age came up with his thesis of formation of a National Front, a broad national platform for peace and freedom, with the Congress. The Ramamurthy Thesis was soon sanctified by RP Dutt who wrote an article entitled “New Features in the National liberation Struggle of Colonial and Dependent Peoples” in the Cominform journal For A Lasting Peace, For A People’s Democracy (FLPPD). Dutt advised the CPI to line up behind Nehru against US imperialism and with the Soviet camp and shed itsearlier obsession with British imperialism, the tendency to judge the Indian government by its attitude to British capital and its continued participation in the British Commonwealth.
The CEC appointed a Special Commission to go into the implications of Dutt’s advice and when the Commission got split into two conflicting positions the Party Centre swung into action and worked out yet another patch-up by combining points from both positions. Two of the June ’55 CEC documents were entitled The CPI in the Struggle for Peace, Democracy and National Advance and Communist Proposals for National Reconstruction. Meanwhile, the February 1955 Andhra election results suggested a severe setback for the CPI, its strength coming down from 48 (out of 140) in 1952 to 15 (out of 196) seats, and the inner-party debate intensified once again.
In strategic terms the debate centred around the question of characterisation of the Indian bourgeoisie. The tactical implication of this debate was the kind of policy the CPI should adopt vis-a-vis Congress — whether to unite with the Congress party as a whole or with sections of it and whether this unity should be merely issue-based or should it also extend to a coalition government at the Centre.
EMS responded to this debate with an elaboration of his 1953 thesis on the dual character of the Indian bourgeoisie and accordingly with a policy of “uniting with and struggling against”. His prescription was : “To the extent to which the bourgeoisie as a whole, or any section of it, goes against this practical basis, goes against the interests of the masses of the people, to that extent has the proletariat and its Party to struggle against it. However, even when carrying on this struggle against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat should take care to see that the struggle is so conducted that all those sections of the bourgeoisie which really stand for struggle against imperialism and feudalism are drawn into the camp of united struggle …” (Stalin and Mao on the National Liberation Movement, New Age).
But neither EMS nor Ghosh, the two leading ideologues of the CPI, would say which is primary in the Indian bourgeoisie’s relation with imperialism—conflict or compromise. Ghosh in fact said, “this is not easy, this finding out of what is dominant. This will lead to endless controversy”. For Ghosh it was enough to say that “the basic concept of the Programme in relation to the bourgeoisie is that the class as a whole is national, and also that it is not revolutionary but reformist”. In keeping with this dual nature of the “reformist” bourgeoisie, EMS and Ghosh advocated a relation of unity and struggle with the Congress, listing out the issues on which unity with Congress was permissible at different levels.
Addressing a central party school some thirty years later, Basavapunniah would tell us, “the very concept of supporting the foreign policy and opposing the internal policy is dubious since both are an integral part of a particular class policy of the Indian bourgeoisie. A Communist Party, if it is really genuine and loyal to the revolutionary working class, should declare itself as a party of revolutionary opposition, without any prevarication. It is crude eclecticism to go on asserting that we support what is “good” and oppose what is “bad”, and we support the foreign policy and oppose the internal policy. Such a stand compromises the proletarian stand towards a capitalist State, whether it is led by the big bourgeoisie or non-big “national” bourgeois”.[1] Yet ironically enough, this integral description of a Communist Party’s role in the parliamentary arena remains conspicuous by its absence in all programmatic documents of the two Communist Parties!
Note :
- 1. On the Programme of the CPl(M), M Basavapunniah, A CPI(M) publication, October 1985, p 28.
