On the occasion of Independence Day 2024:
Only a workers’ and peasants’ state can provide prosperity and protection for all

Statement of the Central Committee of the Communist Ghadar Party of India, 14 Aug 2024

India became free from British colonial rule on 15 August, 1947. However, workers and peasants are not free from exploitation and oppression.

Freedom from British rule has meant freedom for the Indian bourgeois class to accumulate its wealth and develop into a major global power. While Indian capitalists are counted among the richest persons in the world, crores of working people are among the poorest in the world.

Freedom from colonial rule has not brought about freedom from caste-based discrimination and communal violence. People continue to be targets of violent attacks based on their religion, caste, ethnic or tribal identity. Women live in constant fear of sexual harassment and physical attacks.

The reason why independence has benefited only a small section of our society is because political power came into the hands of the bourgeoisie 77 years ago. The British colonialists struck a deal with the Indian bourgeoisie in 1947, to prevent the anti-colonial struggle culminating in revolution.

The middle of the 1940s was a time when socialist revolutions and national liberation struggles were advancing all over the world. Following the victory over Nazi fascism and its allies, people’s democratic states were established in many countries of Eastern Europe, under the leadership of the working class and its vanguard communist party.  A socialist camp was taking shape, headed by the Soviet Union. Colonial rule was coming to an end in many countries. Newly independent countries were gravitating towards socialism. In British India, there was a wave of strike struggles by industrial workers, accompanied by peasant uprisings in Telengana and Tebhaga, and a major revolt in the Navy in 1946.

The common fear of revolution brought the British imperialists and the Indian bourgeoisie together. The British rulers decided to partition the country into a Hindu majority India and a Muslim majority Pakistan, to serve their imperialist global interests.  Negotiating separately with the Congress Party and Muslim League, they persuaded rival factions of the Indian bourgeoisie to accept this as the only way to gain political power. The communal partition served to prevent revolution and drown the united struggles of the people in blood.

Political power was transferred into the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie, in whose interest it was to preserve the oppressive state and benefit from the exploitative economic system that the British had created. Over the past 77 years, they have used this state and system to enrich themselves and develop into an imperialist bourgeoisie, while the masses of working people have remained poor and super-exploited.

Politicians of the bourgeois class are trained in hiding the truth about the class character of the existing state. They talk as if the Indian state – that is, the bureaucracy, armed forces, courts, jails, parliament and other institutions of authority — represents all classes in our society.

A major factor that has helped the bourgeoisie to deceive the workers and peasants is the role played by those parties within the communist movement who keep spreading illusions about the Indian state and the system of parliamentary democracy. Such parties have promoted the idea of a parliamentary path to socialism, implying that there is no need for revolution. They spread the false notion that the existing state can be used for reconciling the interests of exploiting and exploited classes.

The truth which was discovered by Karl Marx, and which life experience repeatedly confirms, is that the interests of capitalists cannot be reconciled with the interests of workers and peasants. Capitalists seek to maximise their profits by intensifying the exploitation of workers and robbery of peasants. Concentration of wealth at one pole and poverty at the other pole is an inevitable result of the capitalist system.

The state is not an organ for reconciling the interests of the exploiting and exploited classes. The interests of the exploiters and the exploited cannot be reconciled. The state is an organ for maintaining the rule of one class by forcibly suppressing other classes. The existing Indian state is an organ for maintaining the rule of the bourgeoisie, by forcibly suppressing the workers and peasants. The class character of the state does not change when one party replaces another through elections.

It is not the people who determine the outcome of elections in this system. It is the bourgeoisie which uses its money power, control over the media as well as outright rigging to determine the outcome of elections. When one of their trusted parties gets discredited in the people’s eyes, the bourgeoisie organises to replace it with another of its trusted parties, and continue with the same system while creating the impression that something has changed.

The idea that the problems of workers and peasants can be addressed within the existing system by voting for an alternative party is a harmful illusion. As long as the existing state remains intact, the bourgeoisie will remain in power. The working people will remain powerless victims of an exploitative economic system and an oppressive state machinery.

That which was not done in 1947 needs to be done today. A clean break needs to be made with the entire colonial legacy, including capitalism, the bourgeois state and parliamentary democracy. We need to lay the foundation of a new state of workers’ and peasants’ rule, with a political process in which the will of the toiling majority prevails. Only such a revolution can liberate Indian society from all forms of exploitation and oppression. Only a workers’ and peasants’ state can guarantee prosperity and protection for all.

On the occasion of Independence Day 2024, the Communist Ghadar Party of India calls on all progressive forces to unite around the program to establish workers’ and peasants’ rule. Let us oppose all illusions about the existing state and system of parliamentary democracy, which is nothing but the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie!