Ashok Mitra on the CPI (M)

First read this on Bhupinder’s blog A Reader’s Words.  This is an essay written by Ashok Mitra on the MR Zine, the online Zine by the Monthly Review, a great socialist magazine which I haven’t been able to read that much as late because of my union work and school.  But thank God for their nice little articles on their Zine.  Ashok Mitra:

is a former Chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission and Chief Economic Advisor of the Government of India.  He was the first Finance Minister of the Left Front Government in West Bengal in 1977, and a former member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament.  He has been a close friend to Monthly Review, from Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff to the present editorial committee.  Ashok Mitra assisted in the creation of Monthly Review’s sister edition in India, the Analytical Monthly Review.  His heartfelt appeal to the central leadership of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for a fundamental change of course is of the greatest significance.

In this essay Mitra is addressing his concerns to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (or CPI (M), or, more common CPM) over the Nandigram dispute.  Nandigram is a rural area in Western Bengal and Western Bengal is a province that the CPM has control over.  Recently the CPM government of Western Bengal decided to allow and Indonesian chemical company to set up a chemical hub in Nandigram.  The villagers obviously revolted to such a dangerous operation taking place in their backyard and this lead to a clash between the villagers and the CPM government.  According to Wikipedia:

The administration was directed to break the BUPC’s resistance at Nandigram and a massive operation with at least 3,000 policemen was launched on March 14, 2007. A group of armed and trained CPI(M) cadres wore police uniforms and joined the forces. However, prior information of the impending action had leaked out to the BUPC who amassed a crowd of roughly 2,000 villagers at the entry points into Nandigram with women and children forming the front ranks. In the resulting mayhem, at least 14 people were killed.

Journalists were also kept at bay by armed CPM cadres and were not allowed to see nor document the extent of the massacre at that time.

One excerpt which sums up his concerns is:

One can borrow S.D. Burman’s songto describe what the CPI(M) was in the state a few decades ago: “You are not what you were.”  Ninety per cent of the party members have joined after 1977, 70 per cent after 1991.  They do not know the history of sacrifices of the party.  To them ideological commitment to revolution and socialism is simply a fading folktale.  As the new ideology is development, many of them associated with the party are in the search for personal development.  They have come to take, not to give.  One efficient way to bag privileges is to flatter the masters.  The party has turned into a wide open field of flatterers and court jesters.  Moreover, there has been a rising dominance of ‘anti-socials’.  For different reasons, every political party has to lend patronage to ‘anti-socials’, they remain in the background and are called into duty at urgent times.  In the 1970s, these anti-socials had reached the top rung of the state Congress.  I fear the same fate is awaiting the communist party.

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