CRISIS OVER LEFT COMMUNIST VICTORY IN KERALA
By Kailas Chandra
BOMBAY -- The final results in the midterm elections to the 133=member Kerala Legislative Assembly held March 5 show that the Left Communist party of India is now the largest party there. It has 44 members of Parliament (including four independents supported by the party). Twenty-nine of these elected Communist legislators are still in jail, detained under the so-called Defence of India Rules.
. Central Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda told Parliament that the detained legislators were a threat to the “security of the nation" and therefore they would not be released. In fact the leaders of the Left CPI detained in Kerala were placed under jurisdiction. of the central government the day the election results were announced to prevent their release by the state authorities through "mischance."
E.M.S.Namboodiripad, who has been elected as the leader of the newly elected Left CPI group, has said that he is in a position to form a "non-Congress ministry" in Kerala with the support of his electoral allies -- the Samyukta (United) Socialist party [ssp] and "independents" -- but he would not be interested in such a move unless the elected legislators were set at liberty.
Namboodiripad has said that the CPI would launch a nation-wide mass agitation for the release of about 900 Communists kept under detention in the various states. Other left parties have extended support to the agitation.
The party position in the newly elected Kerala Assembly and the votes polled by different parties are as follows: .
Seats Votes Polled
Left Communists 40 1,257,878
- Right Communists 3 5135, 384
Congress 56 2,125,749
Kerala (rebel) Congress . 23 791,020
SSP 13 498,089
Independents. 10 632,281
Muslim League 6 258,919
Swatantra . 1 4'7, 105
Peasants! and Workers! party 1 41,501
Revolutionary Socialist party . O 77,107
Jan Sangh fe) 32,590
Praja Socialist party* 0) 22,'764
Malnad Peasants Union fe) 16,058
*Last year the former Lohiaite Socialist party and the Praja Socialist party merged to form the Samyukta Socialist party, but a section of the former PSP has come out of the SSP to revive the "PSP."
When the issue of the continued detention of the Communist legislators in Kerala came up for debate in Parliament, Home Minister Nanda defended his position with the ingenious argument that the Kerala-polls showed that the Communists were becoming less popular than before. He said the two wings of the CPI: had polled only 29.5 per. cent of the total votes this time as against 44.5 per cent secured by them in the 1957 general elections, But obviously he was lying even in the matter of statistics.
As a matter of fact, the Left CPI with allied independents polled about 22 per cent of the votes cast in the midterm elections; but the Left CPI, SSP, the RSP, the Right Communists and the independents supported by the left parties together polled 32 per cent of the total votes as against the 33 per cent polled by the official Congress party. The Congress party leaders also claim that if the votes polled by. Congress candidates, the rebel Congressmen and the allied independents are added together, it would be 46 per cent!
_A smaller number of seats secured by the Congress party in the midterm election has been compared by Nanda to the 29 seats won by the united CPI in the 1959 elections when they polled 39 per cent of the votes. In the 1957 elections, with 35 per cent of the votes, the CPI won 60 seats and. formed a government, while the Congress party with 38 per cent of the votes got only 43 seats. This kind of postmortem analysis might comfort the Congress party leaders but obviously it does not prove anything, nor does it hold out the promise that the Congress would be able to do better next time,
Obviously the Central government, for. its own political reasons, has made up its mind not to release the detained Communist leaders. Nanda made this quite clear in his reply to the "censure motion" against him in Parliament last week. He also explained the real purpose behind the mass arrests of Left Communist leaders all over the country.
The main burden of Nanda's statement was that the Left CPI leaders all over the country had "started working on the basis of a blueprint supplied by the Chinese for an armed insurrection in this country with the assured backing of China"! He mentioned two “important landmarks" of this strategy: the Tenali conference in July 1964 when the GPI split into right and left, and the Calcutta c onference in October-November 1964 when specific tasks "in furtherance of the programme of subversion were assigned to different people,"
By then, Nanda told Parliament, "the stage had already been reached for the Government to step in but the Government preferrec to wait and watch whatever secret moves were being made to the detailed Chinese instructions for organising an internal disorder."
He also stated that the decision to. take preventive action against “attempts at subversion had been reached much. earlier at the highest level but strictest secrecy was maintained about it till all
preparations including contacts with the state administrations had been completed, Round-up operations were launched when the time was ripe."
Nanda went. a step further to publicly express his “appreciation" of the Right Communists! "correct stand on the Chinese aggres~ sion," mentioning that he had "no quarrel with the radical programmes of communism as such," He said that he would welcome a truly "Indian Communist party which subscribes to a peaceful parliamentary system of democracy with no extraterritorial ties."
Nanda's oft-repeated charges against the Left CPI have not been taken seriously even by the bourgeois press, A demand for a public trial of the arrested Communist detenus has been made by a Swatantra party member of parliament, P.D.Deo, and a staunch anti-Communist, H.V.Kamath, who belongs to the PSP group in Parliament. Both these reactionary groups have demanded that the Left CPI should be banned,
"The Home Minister's statement," said the Free Press Journal of Bombay in its editorial March 15, “contained little that could convince the public that detention without trial was absolutely urgent and necessary." As such, it added, "liberal opinion is bound to be uneasy about the assault on civil liberty and continue to ask why the Government is fighting shy of a trial. . . Some additional details the Home Minister gave about Left Communists! preparation for. a violent revolution will not obviously stand scrutiny in any court of law."
The Left CPI leaders have alleged collusion between Nanda and the Right CPI leader, S.A.Dange, in the recent mass arrests, Namboodiripad in a statement issued on March 14 said: "It is true that I have done something which is disturbing him (Nanda). His calculations about a Congress victory and his hope of Dangeites beating us in the election have been upset. The people of Kerala have clearly rejected Nanda'ts lies and slanders against our party. If he has any sense of shame, he ought to resign."
A demand for the resignation of Nanda as Home Minister has been made by other left leaders including those of the SSP and the Right CPI. The Right CPI's Central Executive Committee is scheduled to meet soon to conduct a post-mortem on the Kerala polls and there are indications that a new crisis in the party's leadership is in the offing. A new move to oust Dange as chairman of the party is also afoot. Dange, who recently returned from Moscow (where he attended the consultative conference of the international CP leaders), appears to have fallen out of grace with the Soviet leadership. An annual allowance of 4,500 pounds hitherto made to him as the general secretary of the All-India Trade Union Congress [AITUC] by the World Federation of Trade Unions [WFTU] has been stopped recently, osten~ sibly because of the objections raised by the Japanese trade-union body affiliated to the WFTU. Dange might be made a scapegoat for the Kerala debacle of the Right CPI and its class-collaborationist line
Ta
in relation to the Indian bourgeoisie. The Kerala poll outcome has had a profound effect on the ranks of the Right CPI.
Meanwhile there are moves by the "rebel" Congressmen in Kerala (politically more reactionary than the Congress party) to form a "non- Congress Ministry" with the support of either the Congress party or the Muslim League and the SSP. But the official Congress party leadership has decided not to participate in-any coalition ministry. The bourgeois leadership of the Congress party, it would appear, has made up its mind to continue the President's rule in Kerala with the main object of preventing a Left CPI-sponsored Government being set up in the state even temporarily. The Congress leadership knows that if once the Left CPI is allowed to run a bourgeois state administration in Kerala, it could utilise the "constitutional" advantages derived thereby to launch a mass offensive against the bourgeois state ona national scale,
Having failed to "persuade" the Kerala governor, V.V.Giri (a former trade unionist), to release the elected legislators, Namboodiripad has announced his intention to visit New Delhi to meet the president of the Indian Union and Prime Minister Shastri and secure their freedom, But Namboodiripad knows that his mission is not going to succeed. Home Minister Nanda has in fact openly threatened that Namboodiripad and his colleagues would be rounded up if they prepared for a mass agitation for the release of the Communist detenus. Threatened by a serious internal economic crisis (and perhaps egged on by the top American intelligence advisers now in New Delhi) the bourgeois state has started a course that can unleash a new phase of repression against all militant working-class parties and mass organizations and deal a mortal blow to democratic rights in India,
DOBS