The Fourth International condemns the declaration of a state of emergency in India by the Indira Gandhi government and the measures which have followed it, such as the arrests of thousands of people, the outlawing of twenty-six organizations, and the imposition of a rigid press censorship. While directed mainly at the right-wing parties at the present time, they include attacks against working-class parties like the CPI(M) [Communist party of India (Marxist)] and the banning of several Maoist organizations. These measures constitute an attack on the Indian workers movement and the oppressed masses as a whole, who will be the ones to suffer the most from the dictatorial turn of the Gandhi regime. This has already been exemplified by the wage freeze and attacks on the right to strike. The measures taken by the Congress government mark a further deterioration of an already fragile bourgeois democracy in India, and bring the Indira Gandhi regime into line with the other regimes of South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are now all ruled under a state of emergency. In Bangladesh, the newest of these states, this has already been institutionalized by the creation of a one-party state, mass arrests of radicals, and the banning of the left-wing weekly Holiday.
The suspension of civil liberties reflects the inability of the Indian bourgeoisie to find a solution to the social crisis which has plagued the country for nearly two decades, and which has led to a massive loss of confidence in the Gandhi regime.
The overwhelming election victory of Indira Gandhi in the 1971 general elections August 4, 1975 was the result of her appearance as the “liberator of Bangladesh” and her radical demagogy throughout the election campaign, encapsulated in the slogan, “End Poverty.” This was given added credibility by her alliance with the CPI [Communist party of India], while at the same time she dispensed with the services of many veteran right-wing Congress leaders and party managers. But the worsening of the social crisis since 1971 gradually began to erode the popular support for Gandhi and the Congress. Mass famines on a level not seen since the 1930s and 1940s, food hoarding, a thriving black market, smuggling on a vastly increased scale, and a further generalization of corruption caused the discontent seething among the masses to erupt in huge mobilizations. The failure of the mass workers organizations to provide leadership for this explosive mass discontent, and to provide a national focus for an opposition to Congress based on class politics, enabled reactionary forces, employing populist demagogy, to assert a strong influence at the leadership level in these mass mobilizations. This explains the Gandhi regime’s attack on right-wing forces as a prelude to the broader general attack on the masses as a whole.
The tragedy of the Indian workers and poor peasants lies precisely in the fact that the two largest workers parties, the Communist party of India and the Communist party of India (Marxist), are totally incapable of developing a struggle against Indian capital and in the interests of the working class and oppressed poor. This failure was clearly manifest in the inability of these parties to organize any response at all to the wage freeze, and in the abject failure to mobilize support and solidarity for the railway workers strike of 1974, which was brutally crushed by the Indira Gandhi government. The CPI and the CPI(M) put forward class-collaborationist policies rather than a class-struggle line ‘based onthe needs of the masses. Thus, while the CPI has attached itself to the coattails of Indira Gandhi, the CPI(M) has blocked with other bourgeois forces, even right-wing communalists.
The decision of the CPI, with the full backing of Pravda, to support the state of emergency and offer its full cooperation to Indira Gandhi once again reveals the political and moral bankruptcy of Stalinism. Under guise of opposing reaction, the CPI now openly backs repression, justifies the arrest of its former comrades in the CPI(M), and praises press censorship.
While unequivocally condemning the new measures of the Indira Gandhi government and demanding their immediate repeal, we emphasize that these are the culmination of a series of repressive measures which have taken place in India since 1967-68, and which have been directed against the workers movement. The world bourgeois press, which is now shedding hypocritical tears over the demise of “Indian democracy,” has been silent about the continuing imprisonment, torture, and killing of radicals. There are today some 40,000 political prisoners, many of whom belong to Maoist groups. Hundreds have been killed in prison. Two of them, Kista Gowd and Bhoomia, are still awaiting execution in Andhra Pradesh prison. On these prisoners the bourgeoisie remains silent.
The Fourth International calls for a resolute campaign in the international workers movement to demand the immediate end of the state of emergency in India and the release of all political prisoners. We call for the broadest possible united-front efforts toward this objective.