Meetings organised by the Mumbai Regional Committee of the Communist Ghadar Party of India
“Challenges before the working class movement” was the topic on which the Mumbai Regional Committee of the CGPI organised presentations and discussions in Pune on Sunday, 11th August and in Mumbai on 17th August, 2024. The book “Who Rules India?” that was published in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Punjabi and English by the Party has raised a lot of interest among people belonging to various parties, unions and organisations all over India.
While there are innumerable challenges before the working class, this book had pointed out that “It is the bourgeoisie which is ruling India. Recognising this is the first step towards organising to establish workers’ and peasants’ rule.” The book had also explained in detail how such a numerically insignificant class is able to rule over 140 crore people.
Comrades of the Party as well as many other readers have recognised that it is very necessary to organise discussions on these important topics, for these are the key questions of our times. The meetings were attended by a large number of activists of various parties, unions and organisations. Many of them had already read the book and were keen to discuss it.
The Pune meeting was attended by a few veteran leaders as well as many youth from AAP (Aam Admi Party), Yuvak Kranti Dal, Jan Aarogya Abhiyan, Shramik Hakka Andolan, Ek Kshan Anandacha, BEFI (Bank Employees Federation of India), CRTU (Central Railway Track Maintainers’ Union), ANIS (Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti), and Pune University.
The participants in the Mumbai meeting included leaders and activists of communist parties, as well as of mass organisations and trade union leaders from railways, banks, docks, teachers, journalists, democratic rights activists and youth activists. This includes CPI (Communist Party of India), SUCI (C) (Socialist Unity Centre of India (Communist)), LNP (L) (Lal Nishan Party (Leninist)), AITUC (All India Trade Union Centre), AIDEF (All India Defence Employees Federation), AIBOA (All India Bank Officers Association), TUCI (Trade Union Centre of India), Lok Paksh, JHSS (Jan Hakk Sangharsh Samiti), AMAB (Amchi Mumbai Amchi BEST) and FSSC, (Fatima Shaikh Study Circle), Mumbra.
Participants listened with great attention to the presentations by the CGPI and then seriously took part in the discussions that followed. Some of the points that were raised in the presentations are given below.
The working class and all the toilers have to keep struggling for their rights, irrespective of the party forming the government. If they stop struggling, these hard won rights are taken away. This happens because the economy is directed towards maximising the profits of the capitalist owners. The bourgeoisie is the ruling class.
Capitalist relations predominate in the economy and capitalism is its motor. From 54% in 1947, agriculture contributes only 16% to the GDP of the country, with industry contributing 21% and the service sector 61%.
About 73 crore of our people belong to the working class and 45 crore to the peasantry. As the years go by, those who work with their own means of production and form the interim strata find it harder and harder to survive. Peasants lose their land, small factories and businesses find it more and more difficult to run. Most of them have no option but to join the ranks of the working class.
Overall, the bourgeoisie is numerically insignificant, a few tens of lakhs, in a population of more than 140 crore. It is headed by just about 150 monopoly capitalist groups that dominate vital and important sectors of the economy.
It is clear that irrespective of the party in power, the development of capitalism follows the general law that Marx had discovered and Lenin corroborated over a hundred years ago: Growth of capitalism inevitably leads to concentration and monopoly. The monopoly houses in India are now big on a world scale.
Capitalists in India have never, since the beginning, played a progressive role in India. From the beginning they were nurtured by the British because they were essential to preserve the colonial rule. In their turn, the Indian capitalists continued to collaborate and compete with the British.
The presentation explained how the British established the Congress as a “safety valve”, to preserve the colonial empire against the innumerable uprisings of the Indian people. It developed into a Party that represented the interests of the propertied classes of India. These classes were united with the British rulers by their common fear of revolution.
The leaders of the Congress represented the compromising trend in the Indian liberation movement and united with the British against the revolutionary trend. There were several parties and organisations in India that were motivated by socialism, particularly after the victory of the October Socialist Revolution. These included the Hindustan Ghadar Party, the CPI, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, etc. They represented the aspirations of the working class and peasantry, as well as of patriotic Indians.
By the mid-1940s it had become clear that the British could not rule as earlier. The stellar role played by the USSR in defeating Nazism and fascism had inspired the people of the world and the struggle to establish socialism was gaining ground. India was no exception, and struggles of workers and peasants were mounting. The strike by the sailors of the Royal Indian Navy and its spread across the country, along with the massive support it drew from the working class shook the foundations of the British rule. United by their common fear of revolution, the British ruling class and the Indian bourgeoisie came together. In return for the transfer of power to their hands, the Indian capitalists and zamindars promised to keep India within the imperialist system and to ensure that the interests of the British capitalists who had invested in India would not be hurt. The Indian capitalists realised that they would have to depend on the British for technical and other help.
The ruling class of “independent” India decided to keep intact the exploitative and repressive state machinery that the British had used to rule over India. That is why the nature of the state has not changed with the transfer of power. The police, military, bureaucracy, judiciary, parliament, parties of the capitalist class are as anti-people as they were before. They continue to serve the new ruling class.
The Indian bourgeoisie, with Tata and Birla at the head, had drawn up the Bombay Plan in 1943-44, which outlined their vision of India’s economic development. Realising that the masses were inspired by socialism, they publicised that the Indian economy would be a “socialist pattern of society”.
In 1947, the capitalists did not have the enormous capital needed for investing in the infrastructure needed for industrial growth. The public sector was built up using public money for that purpose. It also served the new ruling capitalist class by providing steel, electricity, coal, etc. at subsidised rates and giving them an assured market for their produce. Imports of goods that the big capitalists could produce were banned.
This created a favourable environment for the growth of the Indian capitalists. By exploiting the labour of Indians as well as the rich natural resources, which they acquired with the help of the state, Indian capitalists grew bigger and bigger. Finally, in the 1990’s they embraced the policy of globalisation through liberalisation and privatisation. The foreign monopolies, through their governments, were pressurising the Indian government to open up and liberalise. The Indian ruling class also realised that they would need to give the foreign monopolies access to the Indian market, in return for modern technology that they needed from them, and also because they needed to be allowed to access more markets in other countries.
The Bombay Plan, or the Tata-Birla Plan as it was called, remained the basis of the Indian economy in the decades after 1947. This Plan even envisaged that after the Indian capitalists became big enough, they could take over the profitable public sector units and services. Every government since 1992 has implemented privatisation to the extent it could in the face of the struggle of the workers and people.
Today, the monopoly capitalist houses dominate every vital sector of the economy and more and more aspects of our lives are controlled by them. They have unimaginable wealth, and some of them are even among the richest capitalists of the world. At the same time tens of crores of our people live in sub-human, worsening conditions and our country is close to the last in every indicator of human development.
The ruling class preserves and protects capitalism by using the repressive powers of the state, as well as by using the tried and tested methods of Divide and Rule, and by massive disinformation and the propagation of lies in order to misdirect people.
One of the ideas it propagates from the moment that a child enters school is that India is a democracy. The right to vote does not mean that we have a democracy for the working people. It is a democracy for the ruling class, and a brutal dictatorship over the workers and other toilers.
Elections are totally weighted in favour of political parties of the ruling class. These parties spend lakhs of crores on elections. Where do they get this money from? They have no way of earning it. They thrive on the money that capitalists provide. It is clear that if they get into government, they have to implement the agenda of the ruling class.
Parliament is just a talk-shop as Lenin had pointed out. Nothing of substance is planned or discussed there. All the decisions are already taken behind the scenes by the capitalist class, and the government has to obey and implement its orders. The role of the opposition parties is just to create a big drama and shout what the people desire. They keep waiting for their chance to form the government, and then they do exactly the opposite of what they had promised.
It is disastrous to become tails of parties of the bourgeoisie. We have to educate the working class to recognise who is really ruling our country and explain how they do it. We have to make our class aware of our strength. We have to unite despite the differences that exist between us, of caste, religion, party affiliation, etc., and direct our struggle against our common class enemies. While we continue with our daily struggles we have to fight with the perspective of replacing the rule of the exploiters by the rule of the toilers. Then we could turn the direction of economy towards maximising and steadily increasing the standard of living of all working people.
The discussions were conducted in a very comradely atmosphere and there was a genuine spirit of learning from each other. Other challenges were brought out in the discussions by various participants, such as the necessity for all the members of the working class to recognise and be proud of their identity as workers contributing to society. It is necessary for the working class to recognise its strength and potential, and to fight against caste oppression. It is necessary for the working class to develop its own program and not tail behind the parties of the ruling class.
Many participants said that the book as well as these meetings are important contributions of the Communist Ghadar Party of India on the vital tasks facing the working class. Many communists requested CGPI to hold more such discussions on a periodic basis so that questions of theory are discussed to strengthen the communists themselves as well as to prepare the ground for building unity of the communist movement.