By Eva Cheng
Despite extraordinarily brutal oppression, India's working people are resisting the new attacks that the ruling coalition, regrouped after the October election, is seeking to impose. The offensive, loaded with privatisation and "liberalisation" schemes, will line the pockets of the ruling class by giving foreign capital a bigger slice of India's economic cake.
While some sectors (like insurance and banks) have been immediate targets, others will not be spared. The first taste of "deregulation" has proved bitter: a 40% rise in the price of diesel fuel has triggered a big rise in the cost of necessities such as food grains, energy, transport (bus fares have doubled in Delhi, the capital) and life-saving drugs. A hike in kerosene and cooking gas prices is expected at any time.
Shocked by the scale and ferocity of the attacks, workers across India are mobilising for a national day of protest on November 29. According to the Indian daily Hindu on November 8, all major central trade unions, "cutting across party affiliations", have joined the call for "countrywide agitation". They say that massive demonstrations are expected on November 29 in all state capitals and main industrial centres.
Insurance and bank workers took the lead with a countrywide strike on October 29. They are now organising actions for November 29, to coincide with the industrial workers' protests.
A week-long all-India transport strike also took place in October, according to the November 3 ML Update, a weekly magazine of the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (Liberation) (CPI-ML).
There have been many militant actions in many parts of India in response to the attacks. According to ML Update (November 3 and October 27), a statewide protest in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, on October 16 pressed for the withdrawal of all recent price hikes.
Participants also demanded punishment of the officials who ordered the violent suppression of a similar protest at Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh on October 13.
In Delhi, protests on October 14 and 16, which blocked a major intersection, were followed by similar actions on October 22, 23 and 24 in three other central locations, the burning of effigies of ruling politicians on October 31, and a major road blockade on November 2. Street corner meetings were held in the week before November 2, and thousands of leaflets were distributed on the day.
In the northern province of Bihar, marches and demonstrations were held in various centres on October 12, followed by many more later in the month. Mass meetings and other protests were also reported in Calcutta, Gauhati and Kakinada. The students who joined a similar protest in Trivandrum in the southern state of Kerala on October 29 were baton-charged by the police.
According to left activists in India, the frequent bashing and jailing of peaceful protesters are among the "mildest" means of suppression.
Activists murdered
Many left activists have to put their lives on the line to organise around basic issues. In Bihar alone during and immediately after the October election, 18 CPI-ML cadre and supporters were killed, mostly by goons working for local upper-caste lords.
The comrades killed were — in Raghunathpur: Rajkumar and Shambhu Yadav (September 16), Anirudh Soni, Mantu Paswan and Radhakrishna Bhagat (September 26), and Jagan Sah and Dr Shivnath Paswan (both had resisted the stealing of an election booth by local gangsters). In Patna: Chandra Bardai and Amar Manjhi (September 25); Ajit Verma (October 21); and Indradeo Paswan (October 27). In Fatua: Prem Shila. In Jahanabad: Bharati Gupta (October 6), Kallu Shah (October 8) and Bineshwar Manjhi (October 30). Satyanarayan Vishwakarma in Palamu, and two activists in Aurangabad were also killed.
The CPI-ML has lost many other cadre to gang attacks in other election campaigns. The main gang is the Ranvir Sena (the killer army of the Bhumihar landlords), which is known to be linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The BJP leads the ruling coalition.
In most of these killings, the police have done little to bring the killers to justice; in some cases, they have stood by while the atrocities took place.
State repression has often been stepped up to match increased landlord attacks. In Jahanabad, Bihar, infamous for such repression, more than 100 CPI-ML leaders have been jailed in the last few months.
While this reign of terror has often achieved its aims, there are exceptions. Siwan in Bihar is the turf of the capitalist Rashtriya Janata Dal party MP Shahabuddin, who has ruled using killer gangs. Last month, his gangs killed two CPI-ML comrades for resisting the gangs' booth snatching, yet the CPI-ML has continued to organise the masses to resist. In the recent election, the CPI-ML more than doubled its 1998 tally in Siwan to 255,226 votes.
Commenting on this result in the November issue of Liberation, CPI-ML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said he believed the party's "glorious record of resistance and sacrifice" had helped it to emerge as "the undisputed rallying point for the popular upsurge against Shahabuddin's reign of terror". (Shahabuddin "won" again in Siwan. To celebrate, he and his gangsters exploded bombs and fired into the air.)
To continue revolutionary work in the face of such deadly threats is no small challenge, and the CPI-ML has been hit hard in recent years. While it is common for the ruling elites in rural India to resort periodically to massacres (especially of the lower castes and those in resistance) as a terror tactic, the CPI-ML lost 61 of its supporters in Jahanabad, Bihar, in just one blow in December 1997.
The party has little doubt that the 1997 killings were carried out by the Ranvir Sena gang and were designed to terrorise.
But instead of being silenced, within days, the party mobilised its supporters in protest. Despite repeated violent assaults by the BJP and other goons, it pressed on with its public actions, defying a Supreme Court ban on such actions. An alliance of 17 left and democratic parties rallied against the ban and, at one stage, more than 10,000 protesters had been arrested.
Hindu fundamentalism
Such attacks reflect not only the overtly violent nature of class oppression in India, but also the brutal agenda of the BJP and the complexity of working-class resistance.
The BJP, with its undisguised goal of battering India into a heartland of Hindu fundamentalist ("saffron") rule, had been considered a "political untouchable" by other bourgeois parties since it started to gain prominence a decade ago. But as its tactic of terror and collusion with the landlords gained it more parliamentary seats in recent years, an increasing number of regional parties, in their quest for a place in the ruling bandwagon, switched their support from the long-ruling Congress party to the BJP.
The BJP first came to national power in early 1998 at the head of a shaky alliance. It quickly set off some nuclear tests and, to justify them, resurrected China and Pakistan as India's key enemies, reactivating the war over Kashmir.
A religious cleansing spree followed, with Christians as the main target. Churches were burned, nuns raped and missionaries murdered with impunity. To celebrate Republic Day this year, Ranvir Sena slaughtered dozens of low-caste agricultural labourers in Bihar [Liberation, September].
Short by just one vote, the BJP-led government was toppled in April. Despite requiring the support of 23 other parties to rule this time, the BJP has emerged stronger. It has also become bolder in pushing its pro-imperialist (pro-United States) agenda and saffron rule. A difficult battle lies ahead for all working-class and democratic forces in India.