SPLIT IN THE PRO-PEKING COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA
By Kailas Chandra
The Politbureau of the CPI(M) [Conmunist party of India (Marxist) -- pro- Peking Left CP] which met in Calcutta in the last week of June considered the situation arising out of the "large scale dissensions" inside the party, especially in West Bengal, and authorised the state committee to expel about 32 members. Among those who were subsequently expelled by the West Bengal leadership were Sushital Roy-Chowdhury, a state committee member and Parima]l Dasgupta, a member of the Calcutta district committee, for their allegedly "“anti-party behaviour."
Although a section of the bourgeois press has cynically suggested that the expulsions were a "sham move" to consolidate the control of the leading faction in the West Bengal party it is obvious that internal dissensions have assumed serious proportions with the dissidents accusing the leadership of following "a revisionist line." A leader of the dissidents told Link weekly (July 2) "We are the majority in the party...we shall be able to take control of the party as a whole."
The dissidents, however, are subdivided into several tendencies. They are trying to regroup themselves under the banner of the "Committee of Support to the Naxalbari Peasant Struggle." [See World Outlook, July 28, 1967.] Before the expulsions these tendencies had started a series of journals to voice their differences with the leadership which had bureaucratically stifled all internal discussion.
The Peoples Democracy, official organ of the CPI(M), has named at least five of these journals as "“anti-party" including Commune, Bidroh [Revolt], Santrash, Dakshin Desh [left Land] Chhatra Fauj (Students Army] and Chinta [Thought]. These tendencies have uniformly opposed the class-collaborationist coalition politics of the leadership and tried to develop militant struggles of workers and peasants in their own limited manner. One important organisational problem has been the scope of inner-party democracy and democratic centralism governing the functioning of a Marxist-Leninist party.
The Commune, which has been vocal in its criticism of the leadership, wrote recently: "Whenever there was an ideological fight inside the party Promode Babu (Promode Dasgupta, secretary of the West Bengal unit) and Ramamurthi (member of the Politbureau) described it as CIA activity. We want to make it clear that these people are trying to transform the party into a tail of the bourgeoisie and
imperialists by expelling persons who are
engaged in a real ideological fight in-
side the party."
Expulsions of militant dissidents
are not confined only to West Bengal. Dis-—
ciplinary action is being used against
such elements in every state. The Bombay
Council of the CPI(M), for example, has
recently expelled some active members
including K. Ramachandran, a former secre-
tary of the Bombay committee and a promi-
nent trade-union worker. He is associated
with a number of unions including those
of central government employees. Not even
the constitutional procedures of the party
were followed in expelling hin.
The charges against him included
that he did not work for a party candidate
in the last general elections and that he
attended a meeting of trade-union cadres
of the Right and left CPIs (along with
some "centrists" not belonging to either
party) to explore the possibilities of
united action by the working class. He is
supposed to have degenerated into a "re-
visionist" because of his talks of joint
action with the Right CPI cadres!
On the political plane he has been
accused of holding "a pseudo-left Trotsky-
ist position." The charge against him is
that he had criticised the CPI(M) pro-
gramme of the so-called "peoples democra-
tic front" from "a ‘left' angle and had
opposed the inclusion of the national
bourgeois in" it. (In fact Ramachandran
was one of the delegates to the Maharash-
tra state conference in 1963 who, it would
seem, moved an amendment to the official
programme of a "peoples democratic front"
suggesting that the character of the