70th anniversary of Indian independence

The Editor,

MEL.

I am writing in response to the statement of the CC of the CGPI dated July 29, 2017 on the eve of the 70th anniversary of Indian independence which falls on August 15, 2017, which is entitled “On the 70th anniversary of Indian independence: The peoples of India will be free only when we establish our rule in place of the rule of big capitalists established in 1947.”

The statement is an example of Marxism-Leninism in practice, which lays bare the facts that form the political reality that faces the people of present day India, and of what might be considered pre-partition undivided India, which today consists of the countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indeed, the article places in context the enormity of the reality that the so-called independence of India and Pakistan took place against the backdrop of one of the greatest bloodbaths in history and of what may have been the largest mass exodus in history, which came to be known as the exchange of populations.

It is important to keep these facts in perspective to understand what really the independence of 1947 has meant for the people in these lands. In reality what took place was the handing over of the colonial state apparatus to the bourgeoisie in India and Pakistan, with the partition taking place to ensure that the revolutionary upsurge of the peoples of the region be crushed underfoot, so that the system that had been put in place by the British over a long period would not be dismantled.

Rather than wealth being transferred from these lands to Britain, the wealth created has accrued in the hands of a tiny minority which today aspires to be an imperial power, with vast immiseration accruing at the other pole, as seen in vast slums in cities and the utter ruination of the peasantry in the countryside.

In order for this unjust system to continue, the methods of rule today include state terrorism, uncertainty, bomb blasts, riots, lynchings and the like across the length and breadth of the region. In other parts of the country, there is virtual army rule. The big bourgeoisie has trusted parties that ensure that no matter what their capacity to loot and plunder is never compromsised. In order to understand this, we must first understand that the martyrs who laid down their lives did not do it for the dispensation that came into being in 1947.

Indeed, the statement makes a couple of very important observations: the first was that there were two competing lines within the anti-colonial struggle, the first inspired by the revolutionary war of 1857, which though crushed, left behind the aspiration for liberation of the people, while the second was that of the Indian bourgeoisie which sought to become the masters of India by taking over the colonial state apparatus built by the British, and the second that the big bourgeoisie was willing to compromise with the British colonialists and sacrifice the unity of India in order to take charge of the colonial apparatus based on the communal partition of India, thereby betraying the people of India who were in a revolutionary mood to lift all of India out of its enslavement, colonial or otherwise. This was effected by the cunning of the British who exploited the factional differences in the Indian bourgeoisie and appeased the factions, with the tradeoff being that revolution would be forestalled. Thus, what emerged was the rule of the bourgeoisie in India, and in Pakistan, and the continued slavery of the peoples of the region.

Thus it emerges clearly that the rule of the bourgeosie has to be overthrown for realizing the dream of liberation of the people of the countries. Let us all work to this end.

Sincerely,

S. Nair (Kochi)

 

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