Workers World Vol. 19, No. 6
February 8 – There may be more to the parliamentary elections scheduled to take place next month in India than meets the eye.
The call for the elections comes 20 months after the Gandhi government assumed emergency powers, crushed the rightist opposition, imprisoned most of its outspoken leaders, and also dealt a heavy blow to the “extreme left” in the Indian working class movement by outlawing a number of Maoist organizations, most importantly the Communist Party of India (Marxist). (This party should not be confused with the Communist Party of India [CPI], which abided by the emergency decrees and supported the Gandhi government with “certain reservations.”)
The Gandhi government is a bourgeois government, supported by the biggest capitalists and landlords. A country which emerged from outright colonialism only in 1947 (and became an independent republic free of formal ties with the British Commonwealth in 1950), India not only has strong ties with but is still dependent on imperialist finance capital, mostly U.S. and to a lesser extent British.
In its effort to wriggle out of imperialist economic dependency and broaden its international ties, India early began to establish strong diplomatic and economic relations with the USSR. This has been a keystone in the foreign policy of the Indian government and still is, although recently it has been under increasing U.S. diplomatic, political, and economic pressure to break with the USSR.
The great question for U.S. foreign policy for many years now vis-à-vis India has been how to get this great subcontinent to make the “big turnaround” and break with the USSR.
In other words, how to do what the U.S. has been able so “successfully” to do with respect to Egypt.
There, the USSR has been virtually displaced by the U.S. and the transnational corporations have had a heyday from Cairo to Suez to Alexandria. The recent, virtual nation-wide insurrection by the Egyptian workers showed how quickly the Sadat regime’s economic and diplomatic reliance on American finance capital has resulted in a heavy toll taken on the livelihood of the masses of people.
This is not to say that in its dealings with Egypt the USSR, as a socialist country, really in any way ameliorated class relations in the Egyptian social structure. It merely accommodated itself to the existing regime which, under Nasser, was of course far to the left of the wantonly reactionary policies of Sadat.
The great turnaround is one of the truly important projects which has been occupying the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department for many years. To this end, the U.S. has had ambassadors in India ranging from so-called enlightened liberals like John Kenneth Galbraith to outright, insolent, and unabashed racists and colonialists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Of course this has been no secret in India itself. When Kissinger visited that country some month before the emergency decrees, he was not only treated coolly, but Prime Minister Indira Gandhi later in effect accused the U.S. of plotting a Chile-like coup in India.
Of course, there are strong U.S. influences in the Indian bourgeoisie and a section of it has always been opposed to the rapprochement with the USSR. In this, it has been joined by Peking.
The emergency decrees were, in part, directed against U.S. influence and the ever-present CIA. But mostly they were a reaction to the rightist threat, which had strong fascist overtones and was supported by outright fascist groupings. The decrees outlawed these groups.
The Indira Gandhi regime is Bonapartist in its political and social character, both at home and abroad; that is, it’s a regime of crisis that attempts to straddle the fence between the classes, but it nevertheless deeply rooted in the possessing classes. It also tries to exploit the relationship between the U.S. and the USSR to its own advantage.
It on occasion appeals to the popular masses against the entrenched monopolies at home. But on the whole it is the creature of the possessing classes, and the emergency decrees were calculated to stabilize the bourgeois order of capitalist, merchant, and landlord exploitation over the workers, the petty-bourgeoisie, and the peasants.
The loudest cheerleader in the West for Indian “democracy” is of course the U.S., which has let no opportunity pass to lambaste the undemocratic character of the Gandhi regime. One would think, therefore, that the election scheduled for next month would have been greeted with loud applause from the kept press in this country, especially such self-proclaimed guardians of freedom of speech as the Washington Post and the New York Times.
But the reaction to the call for the elections has been rather low-key. What’s even more significant is that the Pentagon, immediately after the elections were announced, dispatched the nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise and other ships to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. This has virtually gone unnoticed, except by the Christian Science Monitor. No one, of course, invited the U.S. over there nor is anybody able to stop it, although there has been almost universal opposition in all of Asia to the U.S. presence in the Indian Ocean.
The crucial question in the pending Indian election is not what is receiving the greatest concern in the bourgeois press here: the defections of Jagjivan Ram, V.V. Giri, and others from the Indira Gandhi coalition. Unquestionably these may turn out to be important so far as the fate of the Gandhi regime is concerned, although their importance may be greatly exaggerated and blown up by the imperialist press.
The real and overriding question, however, is what is happening in the camp of the working class, the peasants, the millions of rural poor. What is going on there?
On the repression against the working class and the peasants, which elicits only demagogy from the bourgeois opposition to Gandhi, on this the imperialist press is silent.
Contrary to the misconception conveyed by the capitalist press, the very improvement in the economic conditions which the Gandhi government claims has taken place since the emergency decrees, which is partly true, may act as a spur to genuine working class opposition to the Gandhi regime. This opposition has absolutely nothing in common with the bourgeois opposition to Gandhi, to which the imperialist press has given such wide publicity.
The great problem in India which has concerned the working class and the peasantry for many, many decades is the relationship of the Communist Party of India (and earlier of the entire communist movement) to the Congress Party, to the old Congress Party before it split into “old” and “new,” as well as to the current makeup of the Congress Party headed by Gandhi.
The Congress Party ever since its inception has been the Indian bourgeoisie incarnate. Through all the many years, and especially since the Russian and later the Chinese revolutions, the question has invariably been how the Communist Party should relate to the Congress Party; how the vanguard of the proletariat in the struggle to achieve ideological hegemony over the workers and peasants against the national bourgeoisie, should fashion its tactics and strategy.
This problem runs like a red thread through all of the debates, all of the conflicts, and all of the splits that have taken place in the Indian revolutionary working class movement.
India has not been as fortunate as Russia or China. The Indian working class has not gone through the baptism of a 1905, like that of the Russian proletariat, let alone a February 1917. Unlike China and earlier Russia, it has not had the good fortune of a genuine working-class revolution developing out of the bowels of the earth. Such revolutions cannot be evoked by mere will, even by longstanding revolutionary Marxist parties.
Errors in tactics and strategic approach may have played an enormous role in the struggle for a socialist revolution in India. These essentially subjective factors, factors present in both Russia and China, can disorient and for a time postpone the revolutionary uprising. But they cannot account for its absence altogether.
Struggles and uprisings have been of monumental importance in Indian history. But a 1905 or a 1917 is in an altogether different historic category.
Unlike China, India has been a classic example of a colony. Not so with China. China was never a full-scale colony, although Japan did wrest away Manchuria and establish a puppet state there for a while. And all the Western imperialist powers tried to carve out territory along China’s coastal areas. But China never became a colony as did India.
To this day, English is an associate language in India. The legacy of British imperialism through its long years of exploitation, robbery, and plunder was in the final analysis to strengthen and prepare the Indian bourgeoisie to “govern,” that is, to maintain not only economic supremacy over the enslaved masses of workers and peasants, but to be able to maintain political supremacy over the nascent proletarian vanguard elements in the early communist movement.
The years in which the Congress Party grew stronger while the Indian bourgeoisie traded, negotiated, connived, maneuvered, and by a thousand and one deceptions maintained its stance of vanguard in the struggle for independence, were also years in which the Indian communist movement could not find political perspective or a strategic approach which would wrest the initiative from the Indian bourgeoisie and attain hegemony over the workers and peasants in the struggle for independence and socialist revolution.
It has been stressed – indeed overstressed by the CP’s enemies – that during the Second World War the Indian CP, in the interest of maintaining a united front of Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union against the Nazi menace, so restricted themselves on the independence struggle that they forfeited the vanguard role to the national bourgeoisie and forever lost the right to speak for the masses. Only recently when the CPI finally took issue with the Indira Gandhi regime and said it “cannot remain silent” on economic issues affecting the workers, Gandhi brought up the CP role during the Second World War on independence (Daily World, Jan. 19, 1977).
However, serious as that may be, it could not have closed the path to a resumption of a revolutionary class struggle after the imperialist war. The problem, as we said, has been the long-standing problem of tailing and collaborating with the bourgeois Congress Party and subordinating itself to this alien class influence.
India can never be free, as no other country can truly be free, if its working class is politically held in bondage to its class enemy. The CPI, in spite of all its mistakes and erroneous strategical approach, is a serious force in India. It has chosen to give “critical support” to the emergency decrees in exchange for permission to exist legally. It has thereby sold its birthright for a mess of potage.
In going along with the emergency decrees, it gave up its political independence and strengthened the left-wing elements in other communist organizations, which suffer from defects no less serious and harmful than those of the CPI.
India may inevitably succumb to “Sadat-ism” (if we may employ that term to mean the sharp shift to the right of a former Bonapartist who turns to virulent anti-communism and unbridled repression of the workers, impelled by the demands of imperialist creditors). Such is the magnitude of the crisis which will ultimately surface in India either before or after the election. The rising specter of Sadat-ism, or worse, for which the Gandhi regime or its successors are preparing, puts the CPI and all genuine communists on notice that their only hope lies in an irreconcilable break with the Congress Party and its family quarrels as well as its righting bourgeois opposition, in order to take the road of independent, revolutionary, working class politics.
Whatever happens in the elections can at best be a barometer of the current situation and political maturity of the working class and peasants. It cannot determine the basic class issues; only the workers class and peasants can do that.
Last updated: 11 May 2026