Communism in India

THE Congress Party has ruled India for ten years and still holds an overwhelming 75 per cent majority in Parliament. It has similar majorities in most of the states. However, like a dead tree which first began to grow rotten at the core, the Congress Party is something of a hollow shell. In countless political cartoons, the Congress Party politician is pictured as a man clad in white Gandhi cap and spotless white homespun who spends his time getting jobs for his nephews and import licenses for his friends. Cartoons show him fawning on his leaders and stabbing his political enemies in the back. He is hard-working only when his own interests are at stake; the rest of the time he clozes in his office with his feet propped up on a desk.

The Congress Party has lost the support of the young, Western-oriented middle class — the most vocal group in India and the group which shapes the political opinions of the illiterate masses. Said an editorial in the Ambala Tribune, the leading newspaper of Punjab state: “The intelligentsia is disgusted with the prevalence of widespread corruption and favoritism in the administration and with the sordid scramble for power among Congress leaders. Nothing is more likely to contribute to the undermining of popular confidence in the government than the lack of integrity in high places.”

Even some Congress Party leaders are disgusted. A few months ago, Siddartha Sankar Ray resigned as Judicial Minister in the Congress Party cabinet of West Bengal state. The charges he made were headline news for every newspaper in India. “I have come to the irrefutable conclusion,” he said, “that the present administration and the Congress Party . . . are fast leading Bengal to destruction and the Bengalis to ruination.”

For a while when Nehru complained of “political jobbery . . . careerism, factionalism, communalism, and revivalism” within the Congress Party, it seemed that reform was imminent. He implied he would step aside temporarily as Prime Minister and devote himself to cleaning up the party. There was a flurry of editorials agreeing with Nehru that something was drastically wrong with the party and urging him to do something about it. Then the storm blew over. Nehru did an about-face. He said he would stay in office. He blandly declared that the “loose talk” that the party had become weak was “baseless.”

Nehru and the other top Congress Party leaders, who are generally regarded as the “High Command,” are bound together by memories of the long struggle for freedom. When a decisive moment comes, they hesitate to act against their old comrades in arms. Instead they tend to close ranks and try to pretend that things are not so bad as they seem.

Communist gains

When Nehru decided not to step aside temporarily, his brother-in-law, Raja Huteesingh, predicted a gloomy future for India. He drew a comparison between India and Chiang Kai-shek’s China and reasoned that since the Communists are the only organized party in India, apart from the Congress, and since Nehru would not save the Congress, the only thing left was “the darkness of a totalitarian future.”

The Communists also think the future lies in their hands. “The unity of India can be maintained only by the further strengthening of the Communist Party and of the democratic forces in the country,” says Ajoy Ghosh, the party’s General Secretary. Until about a year ago, the Communist Party of India (CPI) was less sure of itself. The Communists attempted a violent revolution in 1947-1948. The revolt was suppressed and Red leaders were jailed or went underground. The party was legalized on the eve of the first general elections in 1951-1952, but for several years remained split by internal disputes.

The second general elections last year changed everything. The Communists got about twelve million votes, double what they had got in the first general elections. Their 1957 total was still only about 10 per cent of the ballots cast, but this was enough to give them twentyseven out of five hundred seats in Parliament and make them the largest single opposition party. They also became the largest opposition party in the states of West Bengal and Andhra, and they gained complete control of Kerala state.

A few months ago, a Communist was elected mayor of Bombay. And recently, the Communists won the first by-election to be held in Kerala since the general elections. During the past year, the Communists have done much to antagonize many of the voters of Kerala. They have used the police and the entire administration to strengthen their party, while they have done almost nothing to case Kerala’s chronic unemployment problem. But at the same time they have enforced antieviction laws, thereby benefiting landless farmers.

In their massive propaganda campaign, the Communists picture themselves as a “people’s government” and their opponents as tools of the “reactionary capitalists.” The by-election showed how successful this propaganda has been. It also showed that the demoralized Congress Party in Kerala has still not been able to reform itself sufficiently to appeal to the voters.

The hold on labor

The Communists have also strengthened their hold on organized labor. They now claim more than a million members for unions affiliated with the Communist-led All India Trade Union Congress. They even say their unions have more members than unions affiliated with the Congress-led Indian National Trade Union Congress.

Their greatest gains have been in the coal and steel belt of West Bengal and Bihar. They now claim to represent more than 75 per cent of the 35,000 employees of the Tata Iron and Steel Company at Jamshedpur in Bihar. A year ago they had almost no following at Tata’s. In a recent demonstration of strength, they organized a strike which led to violence and which closed down the mills for eight days.

The Communist unions have won control of construction workers at the three new steel mills which are being built with aid from Russia, Britain, and Germany. They are even stronger at the Indian Iron and Steel Company at Burnpur in West Bengal. Both of these mills, which are privately owned, are in the midst of big expansion programs helped out by $160 million in World Bank loans.

Emboldened by their recent successes, the Communists gathered at Amritsar and mapped out plans for even greater gains. They adopted a new party constitution which says, “The CPI strives to achieve full democracy and socialism by peaceful means.” The nasty word “revolution” has disappeared, and the constitution now speaks only of bringing about “fundamental changes in the economic, social, and state structures.”

The Communists have replaced their cells with party branches and say they will become a mass party. They also promise that when they achieve power they will retain the freedoms of speech, association, and opposition, as long as their opponents remain “loyal to the constitution.”

The usual clause about the CPI being an integral part of the international Communist movement has disappeared. The task for the CPT now is to “unite and lead all patriotic and democratic elements in the country in the defense and consolidation of national freedom.”Actually the Communists are only playing with words. The constitution still says the CPI stands for the “unity of the organized Communist movement" and it urges all members to “behave in the spirit of proletarian internationalism.”

The Communists hope that the simple facts of Indian life will help make them strong. There are many signs of visible progress. There are the new dams, the new steel mills under construction, and the many new, imposing office buildings. There are also the community development projects which are trying to raise the standard of living of the villagers. But progress is slow.

India is an agricultural country where 60 per cent of the peasants hold about 15 per cent of the cultivable land, while 5 percent of the big landowners hold about 35 per cent of the land. In addition, about 20 per cent of those who depend on agriculture for their livelihood are without land at all.

The haves and the have-nots

The Congress Party has a slogan, “land to the tiller,” yet there has been no land redistribution in India, except in Kashmir, which is not directly controlled by the Congress Party. There have been many laws to protect tenant farmers, but they are often ignored. In fact, thousands of tenant farmers have been evicted by landlords who fear that the law might eventually give tenants permanent occupancy. For instance, the land reforms officer for Andhra state reported that the number of protected tenants who came under the anti-eviction laws in the Telengana area declined from 211,030 in 1952 to 90,279 in 1955.

There are many new office buildings in New Delhi, but a recent survey showed that in the twin city of Old Delhi nearly 50,000 families live in slums and that 80 per cent of these families, each consisting of about five persons, have only one room for living, cooking, and sleeping. Another survey in the textile city of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh showed that 60 per cent of the households are one-room tenements and that more than half of these tenements are without electric light, water taps, or regular drains. In Calcutta, where the density of population is greater than London’s and where epidemics of smallpox and cholera are a yearly occurrence, 150,000 families live in one-room shacks.

Even the major development projects do not automatically mean that the Congress Party grows strong. The two most imposing irrigation and power projects in India are at Bhakra in the Punjab and at Hirakud in Orissa. Yet Communist candidates won at both these places in the last elections.

Nehru plays it safe

No shame or public censure results if a young man drifts over to the Communists. The days when the Reds attempted a revolution have been forgotten. The Communists are now respectable. They are so respectable that during the Amritsar meeting the Congress Party-controlled municipal committee honored the visiting Red leaders with a civic reception. The Reds also attended a dinner given in their honor by the archcapitalist Amritsar Textile Manufacturers’ Association.

Prime Minister Nehru’s foreign policy is largely responsible for making the Communists respectable. Nehru sincerely believes that Khrushchev is trying to liberalize the Communist world and that the best way to further this liberalization is by showing friendliness toward the Russians. He wants to demonstrate that the Russians have nothing to fear — that they are not surrounded by enemies. For the same reason he opposes American efforts to build up a chain of military bases around the Communist world.

From the point of view of India’s needs for peace there is logic to Nehru’s ideas, but much of the logic is lost inside India. Instead of any real understanding of why Nehru talks as he does, there is only a general impression that somehow the Communist nations are good, while the United States and its allies are bad.

Nehru has never tried to link the Indian Communists with such evils as the Russian and Chinese slave camps and purges; his hands are tied by his own foreign policy of not criticizing the Russians. At the most, Nehru has accused the Indian Communists of having their “thinking apparatus outside the country.” However, he has said, in an interview with a British journalist, “We do not quarrel with many of the aims of the Communists, but with their methods and, above all, with their use of force.”

Anti-Communism is not enough

Against such a background, mere anti-Communism is sterile. As Nehru himself admits, and as most Indians believe, there is nothing wrong with the professed aims of the Communists. They say their goal is to transform India into an industrialized state, and Indians think this is good. Since they now claim to have forsaken violence, there is nothing else to argue about. An American, of course, refuses to accept their peaceful claims. But Indians — as evidenced by the Kerala election results — are willing at least to give them a trial.

The Communists now have Kerala, but they simply do not have the cadres to win India state by state, and it will take them a long time to develop such a mass organization. Instead they plan a two-pronged offensive to build up their party and, at the same time, to try to woo potential allies into a united front.

In spite of its deterioration, the Congress Party still has a strong party machine — especially in the vast rural countryside where the masses are illiterate and where the bullock cart is the major means of communication. The Communists are growing strong in the cities, but out in the half million villages of India, change comes more slowly. People vote for tradition, not for change, and their tradition is to vote for the party of Gandhi and Nehru — Gandhiji and Panditji.

If there is not utter chaos, the Congress Party still has time to stem the rot — to develop a new class of young leaders to replace the old guard and win back the support of the cities. But any new leaders must also quicken the pace of progress. As Gandhi said, “The people will worship any god who fills their stomach.”