Indian Communists Are Leading the Fight Against Communalism
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is a key force fighting against Hindu nationalism and for social justice. Whatever its flaws, it deserves our solidarity.
Activists from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) protest a hike in vegetable prices in Guwahati, India, on November 4, 2020. (David Talukdar / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Last month, Jacobin published an article by Shadman Ali Khan called “Indian Communists’ Muslim Dilemma.” This “large crisis,” the author argues, “is a crisis of imagination regarding the kind of social transformation it aims to achieve.” Because the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) must stay “electorally relevant,” it gets “trapped in the conflicts of identity.”
Indian Communists, it’s implied, are trapped by the social contradictions of today’s India, which means that they have absorbed the wretchedness of an anti-Muslim politics. This is a strong claim, but thankfully one that the article cannot sustain.
To take just a single example of the inaccuracies and evasions littered in Ali Khan’s piece, one of the two statements that provides the anchor for the essay is purported to be by Kerala’s chief minister and CPI(M) Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan. Ali Khan says that Vijayan made the point to the Hindu’s Sobhana Nair that gold smuggling in parts of Kerala is used for “anti-national” purposes. At the bottom of the article, the newspaper apologized for the inclusion of material about gold smuggling that had been made “in writing” by the public relations company Kaizzen and not by the chief minister. Two days later, Vijayan reiterated that he had not made or approved those statements. Ali Khan elides all of this and takes for granted that these statements are made by Vijayan. It frames the basis of his entire article.
Simply, Ali Khan relies on skewed articles in the capitalist press as his source material and at no point does he reflect on either the manifestos and documents of the CPI(M) or on a range of campaigns led by the Communists against the agenda of the Hindutva forces in India. Nor is there evidence that he has interviewed anyone on the record about their views about the Communist movement.
That broader context would provide readers with a clearer understanding of the struggles for justice currently being waged by India’s Communists.
Progress in West Bengal
Throughout the Indian republic’s history, the Left has had to operate both in the extra-parliamentary and parliamentary domains within limits set by the bourgeois-landlord class. However, at several moments, the Left has built on its massive popular struggles to come to power in state governments. In West Bengal, the Left Front won seven consecutive elections to govern the state from 1977 to 2011. No full account of the Left Front rule has yet been written in any language. It will require immense study of the advances and shortcomings of that period. Ali Khan cherry-picks from the documents, but once again ignores the broader context. What he also ignores is that after the Left Front was voted out of office, the right-wing government that has been in power since 2011 has increased inequality and deaths from hunger.
Two of the major achievements in West Bengal were agrarian reform and the democratization of education. The countryside benefitted from land reforms, tenancy registration, and devolution of power to local self-government (Ali Khan concedes that “the program greatly benefited most Muslim sharecroppers, improving their socioeconomic conditions”).
Schools were improved, primary health centers were enhanced, and training institutes developed for teachers and medical practitioners. The Left Front government provided teacher training for those who taught at the historically Muslim schools (madrasahs) and converted the Calcutta Madrasah into the Aliah University and enhanced the course selection to include STEM fields alongside language instruction in Arabic and Islamic theology. These developments, modest as they are, nonetheless enhanced the cultural lives of working-class Muslim students. In rural West Bengal, the educational differentials faced by Muslim youth were less than in urban West Bengal, which implies strongly that the agrarian reform played a large part in the social changes.
There were of course limitations in the Left Front government, particularly when it comes to the provision of medical facilities and employment opportunities. It is possible to produce a long list of these failures and to bemoan missed prospects. If Ali Khan’s desire had been to offer a thoroughgoing critique of the Communist Party, it would have been interesting to take some examples and show what policies might have been enacted that would have improved the immediate lives of the working class and peasantry, particularly in this case Muslims, in West Bengal.
For instance, West Bengal would have benefited from a policy of building widely distributed health care clinics in rural areas, the type of polyclinics built by the left doctors in the Telugu-speaking areas of India. The basis of this kind of regime existed with the Primary Health Centres (PHCs).
If you read Ali Khan’s polemic, you’ll see no criticisms of this nature. That’s because it is simply not lodged within the debates of the Left but from outside.
The Problem of Violence
Likewise, in his overview of Muslim political organizations in Kerala, Ali Khan ignores the role of the Popular Front of India (PFI), which was founded in 2006 and then banned for five years in 2022. The reason we bring up the PFI is to highlight the killing of Abhimanyu, the child of Adivasi farmers, who was murdered in the early morning hours of July 2, 2018, by activists of the PFI’s student wing. They killed him because he was a member of the communist Students’ Federation of India, which had emblazoned a wall at Maharajas College with the slogan “Death to Communalism.”
By the time of Abhimanyu’s murder, the PFI had killed sixteen CPI(M) comrades. Perhaps the most widely publicized attack was when PFI cut off the hand of T. J. Joseph, a college teacher, who simply mentioned the name Muhammed in a class exam. The attack was roundly criticized, but it did not stop the PFI.
Ali Khan says that these forces, such as the PFI, “remain largely marginalized within the [Muslim] community” in Kerala. That is the case, but this is also only because of the struggles waged against them by other Muslim organizations and the Left. In his article, Ali Khan does not mention that Vijayan, the Kerala Communist leader, is one of the most outspoken critics of the Hindutva forces, taking them head-on in speech after speech; in 2021, an Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader called for the execution of Vijayan. In late November, Vijayan criticized the Congress Party for trying to create a controversy over the politics of the Muslim community in Kerala. At a district party conference in Kovalam in November, Vijayan pointed out that the legendary CPI(M) leader EMS Namboodiripad had said that “we do not want RSS votes.” “Does the Congress have the guts to say that?” Vijayan asked.
Interestingly, Ali Khan says that in the CPI(M)’s review of the 2024 parliamentary elections, the party supposedly comes to the conclusion that “Muslims did not see the Left as a force in the fight against Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).” However, within Kerala, the Left broke the incumbency curse to win reelection in 2021 largely because the electorate, including the Muslims, see the Left as the best force for government in the state. Ali Khan’s misreading of the CPI(M) record creates a false picture of Kerala’s electorate, which is tactically intelligent in its voting habits.
Simply put, Ali Khan mischaracterizes the Indian left’s fight for social freedom. With all its limitations acknowledged, and within the context of India, the CPI(M) is one of the primary forces in the struggle not only for the full citizenship of all Indians but also in the fight against the rise of fascistic communalism that targets Muslims with venom. In 1998, the former CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said that the forces of Hindutva strengthen “the very edifice of exploitation that is heaping misery on our people.” Each year, hundreds of thousands of Indian children die of malnutrition.
To fight this, we must unify all the Left, secular, and democratic forces. That is the approach of the CPI(M): to seek unity for popular power, and not to divide the people for cheap electoral gain.