Communist Party of India (M-L) Janashakti

The latest annual Budget of India placed by the Indian finance minister on 27^th february 1999 has raised income tax for all domestic corporate and individual taxpayers earning more than 60,000 Rs (i.e. more or less 1400 US $), in a year, by imposing 10 percent surcharge on tax pay-outs. But there is no such proposal for the foreign companies operating in India. This government claims to be "patriotic" or "swadeshi"!

As per revelation by the same budget during the current financial year 25 % of the government’s earnings is from loans and 27 % of its expenditure was spent on interest payment.

Thanks to the budget, the prices of tea, the mass consumption beverage, will go up; and imported beverages like beer, rum, whisky, gin will be cheaper because import duties have been reduced on such items.

Through the pre-budget measures, prices of all daily necessities, from rice and sugar to kerosene oil, which are partly marketed through public distribution system for the lower strata of the population, have been hiked. Current budget has taken care so that the prices of the commodities like imported cosmetics, colour television, refrigerator, air-conditioner, motor-bike etc. becomes cheaper than before. Tele-com ministry is not lagging behind; proposal has been made that charges for local tele-call is going to be increased while international calls will be cheaper. None can accuse the Indian government of being nationalist on that account. It was and will remain very much "internationalist".

During last 7 years, the period of new offensive in the name of globalisation, more than 1000 so-called joint ventures, of Indian companies with foreign companies, are taking place with U.S. companies and nearly 500 such ventures are taking place with companies from Germany. Still it is much less than half of such ventures because there are others - from U.K. to Russia. One can imagine the speed of globalisation we are having and how much Indian wealth would be drained out. And it is only new addition to the semi-colonial past of 50 years and colonial past of nearly 200 years.

India is also a semi-feudal country. There are scholars even amongst the M-L organisation who will tell you about the capitalist development in Indian agriculture. What these friends of us refuse to look at is that this "development" imposed by the imperialists actually arrested the natural development of the Indian society. Only in one province in India, last year, in cotton cultivation, failure of one crop led to suicides of more than 300 peasants who could not bear the burden of loans which they took to provide so-called high yielding seeds, fertilisers, pesticides etc., all supplied by MNCs. Let one talk about the vast majority of landless and poor peasants, who live under semi-starvation most of the times.

During last two decades, nearly half a million factories have been locked-out or declared sick. With the new offensive of "globalisation" the so-called public-sector, the "socialist" part of the Indian economy according to the revisionists, has come under the same threat. Privatisation, reducing the work-force by various means including retrenchment, closing down the units or even part of a big industry like mines and further opening up all the sectors to MNCs are the features to tell about, albeit partially.

The Hindi-Hindu combine of the Indian ruling classes was always there. Now with the BJP, as the main force, coming to the central power - oppression on the religious minorities is continuously growing. Open attacks on the Christians is the new feature of Indian communalism. Heaviest repression on the struggling minority nationalities, increasing attacks on the Dalits, severe oppression on the women - are the other features, to be precise, of the Indian realities.

The other side of the Indian reality is the people’s movements of all the sections of the above mentioned masses, in various forms and degrees, which are also on the rise.

The parliamentary "lefts" in India, the revisionists and neo-revisionist parties, viz CPI and CPL(M), have not only betrayed the people’s cause, but they have also become part and parcel of the present ruling system. They are having their own governments in three provinces in India where they are gleefully implementing all the new ventures of World Bank and different MNCs. And to get rid of communal BJP combine in central power they are now heavily depending on the Congress (I) - the traditional number one, ruling classes’ party in India.

The M-L movement which was supposed to be the revolutionary alternative in India is still now in a divide state with a number of M-L party-groups existing in India. In the decade of ‘70s our movement was defeated mainly due to the "left" line we practiced. Then onwards, although the process of correction started, but the line that appeared in the name of "mass line" has so far been unable to solve the main problem concerning developing the class struggle into the level of regular guerrilla warfare.

"Left" hangovers are still very much there in different forms like making the tactics of participation in the elections or boycotting the same as a matter of standard or dividing line between revolutionaries and revisionists. But the main problem in our movement is not the continuation of the "left" mistakes; rather the right-deviation in different forms is main danger.

The big and massive peasant struggle which was developed in the vast region of Andhra Pradesh in the decade of 70’s and 80’s and which was finally defined as "resistance struggle" by the main leader of this movement, Com. C. P. Reddy, and was adopted by us, CPI (M-L) Janashakti, as a step towards guerrilla struggle, is under review now.

We could have been in a much better situation now to answer some of the major problems, including the main one. But for the internal problems of groupism, splittism and rightist orientation of a section of us we lost some valuable time. CPI (M-L) Janashakti is on its way to come out with a solution not only in theory but also in practice as well. We are confident that we will be able to do so.

Central Committee, CPI (M-L) Janashakti