The Hindu : National : Uncompromising struggle against Hindutva forces needed: Karat

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Dec 28, 2007
ePaper

National

National

Uncompromising struggle against Hindutva forces needed: Karat

Special Correspondent

Congress failed to focus on danger posed by the Hindutva platform, he says in article

NEW DELHI: The Gujarat elections outcome underline the need for an uncompromising struggle against the Hindutva variety of communalism, Prakash Karat, general secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist), has said.

“Such a political platform has to be built up in the State and forces rallied around it. The Congress, as the main opposition in Gujarat, has shirked doing so,” Mr. Karat said in an article in the latest issue of the party organ People’s Democracy.

Mr. Karat said the Congress harped on all other problems except the central one — the danger posed by the Hindutva platform.

“Some of the speeches of Congress president Sonia Gandhi were an exception, and this only points to the absence of a firm anti-communal thirst in the campaign. The unwillingness to take up this struggle was reflected in the hesitancy and refusal of the UPA government to boldly pursue the legal and constitutional avenues to bring those responsible for the 2002 carnage to justice,” he said.

Flawed strategy

Stating that the strategy to fight the Bharatiya Janata Party in the elections was flawed, Mr. Karat said that some of its components included avoiding a forthright stance against the communal platform; depicting a contradiction between Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP-RSS combine; and hoping for normal issues of bourgeois politics to assert themselves were all symptoms of the “flawed strategy.”

Mr. Karat said:

“The fight against the communal forces could have advanced only if it was reinforced by the taking up of the immediate problems of the people affected by the unabashed rightwing economic policies of the Modi government. The struggle for the rights of the farmers, the workers, the adivasis, against the eviction of the urban poor and displacement of farmers – all these could not be organised effectively.

“The Left could only do it in a limited way given its strength. The fight against the BJP’s Hindutva platform can be waged effectively only if the reactionary class policies are fought and people’s interests defended. Here again, the Congress, which advocates policies of liberalisation, was not inclined to oppose the BJP government’s policies in any determined fashion.”

All indications were that the Congress was up against popular discontent due to its State government’s record in Himachal Pradesh, where results of the Assembly polls would be declared on Friday.

“Pro-super-rich”

He said the decline of the Congress in the past two decades could be attributed mainly to its identification as a party that “pursues policies that promotes the interests of the super-rich and international finance capital and which has lost its orientation towards the rural and urban poor.”

Describing Gujarat as “unique” in that the RSS-BJP combine has always considered it to be a laboratory for the Hindutva experiment, Mr. Karat said that right from the Eighties, the network of the VHP-RSS was developed throughout the State.

“Spread of communal propaganda, targeting of minorities, first Muslims and later Christians, winning over the middle classes to the communal platform and when in government enlisting big business support by ‘disciplining’ labour were all resorted to on a systematic scale. It is these long years of work on the political, ideological and organisational plane that has resulted in a communal atmosphere developing in Gujarat, which is now seen as a ‘normal’ state of affairs,” he said.

Advani’s comment

Describing Mr. Advani’s comment that Gujarat marked “a turning point” in national politics as being “misplaced,” Mr. Karat said that Mr. Advani could not have forgotten the events of 2003.

“After the BJP’s victories in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, Mr. Advani and the BJP leadership decided to go in for an early Lok Sabha election. They expected the momentum of the Assembly elections to carry them back into office. Instead, to their surprise, they faced defeat. Just as the Congress party is being punished by the people in the States where it rules, the BJP should be apprehensive of what it will have to face in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh that go to the polls later in 2008,” he said.

Mr. Karat claimed that the record of the BJP governments in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh was one of misrule and corruption; of policies brazenly promoting the interests of the big capitalists and contractors, intimidation of minorities and repression of popular movements.

The BJP government in Rajasthan, he said, has set a dubious record of 47 police firings in which 43 people died, including 16 farmers. The BJP had “pathetically failed” to prove that there was even a semblance that it was a “party with a difference.”

The lesson

The CPI(M) general secretary said the lesson from Gujarat was that deep-rooted communalism cannot be fought just by momentary electoral tactics, however well designed.

“Success in the electoral battle requires taking the battle for secularism firmly forward with no quarter given to communal politics. This, in turn, requires the mobilisation of the working people through struggles. After all, they are the victims of the right-wing communal politics, which serves the regime of big capital. This two-pronged struggle has to be carried forward by the Left and democratic forces and all those genuinely committed to secularism,” he said.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National