Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
West Bengal may soon feel the void Buddhadev Bhattacharya’s defeat has created; but it has also earned the distinction of being the State that has unambiguously pointed out that Party Banner will not help if any Communist accommodates Capitalism.
Thank you, West Bengal; your mandate is good for communism.
Communism needs that the Communists in India should stay away from power. They are the last hope for our people to save them from plutocracy and plutocracy cannot be defeated by partnering with it.
And, howsoever committed to Marxism the Communists may be, when in power in India, they would be bound to, as they were in West Bengal, partner with plutocracy; because, no government in India can go against the Constitution.
Indian Constitution helps plutocracy because of components it carries since its formative days. Therefore, if Communists form government under this Constitution, people who believe and hope that they will emancipate them, will be disillusioned and distance.
West Bengal has established this in this year’s election to her Assembly.
For the Communists to perform their role, they are to start the war afresh to free India from plutocracy.
They are to reach the people with details of how the contradiction – engineered in equality amongst all citizens in voting power and inequality in economy – planted in the Constitution by the rich that had dominating majority in the Constituent Assembly, has reduced India to a grazing ground of the propertied class that run after lucre and generation of private profit and build up personal/corporate empires in this soil denuding it of its natural resources and pushing its toiling masses to further impoverishment.
They are to educate the people about this contradiction inherent in the Constitution and wake them up to remove this contradiction.
Removal of this contradiction depends upon removal of right to unlimited property and rescue of means of industrial production from private ownership.
Power politics will not help them perform this role as that would force them to collaborate with this contradiction under the overriding and judicially protected provisions of the Constitution.
This is proved by the fact that Communists in power in provinces and in central coalitions have not been able even to take any step to remove this contradiction, when, on the other hand, they have strengthened status quo by taking oppressive steps against active opponents of economic inequality and even have taken steps, as witnessed in West Bengal, to displace poor people from their lands for benefit of the rich and the private industries.
As long as economic inequality enjoys Constitutional support, economic emancipation for our people will not be possible.
So, for the Communists, seeking power under allegiance to the Constitution in its entire form, would be defeating by themselves their own mission. And, partial allegiance to Constitution is not permissible.
So, they should decide to stay away from seeking people’s mandate to form Government(s).
People in various parts of India, in various forms, are battling against Governments, against economic exploitation, against economic inequality, against corruption, against corporate empires, against loot of exchequer, against communalism, against casteism, against religious revivalism, against misrule, against misuse of Law, against State terrorism and against environment of defeat of their independence. Communists should consolidate all these active groups. The country needs selfless sacrifice to ignite a new war for emancipation from exploitation, from politico-economic confusion and from anti-people administration.
Faithful refusal to seek power under the Constitution that accommodates annihilation of the dreams for and the environment of independence can only help revival of people’s faith in the Communists and then they can proceed to fulfill their unfinished historic task of making the world a better place to live in.
Introspection should tell them that, forming Governments in certain States and occupying portfolios in the Center or calling the shots through coalition with class enemies, has not helped them bringing in Communism in India. Rather it has distanced the people for whom the Communists stand and whose emancipation they aim at.
The 2011 verdict, specifically that of West Bengal, has given them the opportunity to introspect.
The verdict is, therefore, good for Communism.