Indian society needs new foundations to ensure prosperity and protection for all!

On August 15th, India’s ruling class will celebrate with pomp, sixty years of its coming to power and taking charge of the destiny of India.

The ongoing “successful” negotiations of the nuclear agreement with the US, as part of a strategic alliance with that imperialist superpower, will be flaunted as international recognition of the arrival of India as a world power.

We workers and peasants, women and youth, the oppressed nations and peoples, will be asked to forget our terrible and insecure conditions, bask in the glow of the transformation of a former colony into an imperialist power. Rosy pictures will be painted of how the rapid industrialization of India is taking place through the establishment of SEZ’s and other projects in the rural areas and in the mineral rich belts. We will be asked to take pride in the Tatas, Mittals, Ambanis and others of their ilk exploiting not just our land and labour, but also the land and labour of other nations and peoples. We will be informed that all those challenging this imperialist course of plunder are terrorists, separatists and naxalites, who must be ruthlessly crushed if they do not submit.

What does the transfer of power in August 1947 represent for 1.1 billion Indian people? What was won and what was lost in 1947? Who gained and who did not? These are not merely historical questions, but questions whose answers give direction to the struggle of the workers and peasants, women and youth today.

In August 1947, power was transferred from the hands of the colonialists into the hands of the bourgeois class of capitalists and landlords after partitioning the subcontinent. The power to rule and determine the fate of India passed into the hands of a group of Indians who constituted the so called Constituent Assembly. The members of this assembly were not elected by the people of India who were fighting to overthrow colonialism, with the aim of writing the Constitution of a liberated India. Instead, the formation of this Constituent Assembly was supervised by the British colonialists. It was elected through indirect elections from the colonial provincial assemblies. The colonial provincial assemblies, in turn, had been elected on the basis of separate constituencies for different religious communities, with vote restricted to the men of property who constituted a minority. This Constituent Assembly was a body that represented the interests of the capitalists and landlords who compromised with the colonialists and imperialists.

August 1947 was a time when the victory against Nazi fascism had placed social revolution on the agenda all over the world. The prestige of the socialist Soviet Union had risen very high. Several countries of Europe had broken out of the imperialist system and joined hands with the Soviet Union in an anti-imperialist bloc. The Chinese revolution was heading towards victory. Anti imperialist and anti colonial revolutionary struggles were raging all over Asia. A revolutionary situation prevailed within the British Indian Empire. The Naval Mutiny signaled that the situation was ripe for the forcible expulsion of the colonialists and the victory of the Indian revolution. The broad masses of people aspired to establish a new political and economic order that would ensure prosperity and protection for all. Revolution was on the agenda.

In this situation, both the British colonialists and the Indian bourgeoisie found common cause in preventing a deep going social revolution from taking place in India. Defence of the interests of imperialism and the Indian bourgeoisie, ensuring that India did not break out of the imperialist system, became of primary importance. The Indian bourgeoisie needed assistance from its imperialist allies against the workers and peasants. The imperialists needed the assistance of the Indian bourgeoisie to more effectively crush the revolution in India. The traitorous Indian bourgeoisie collaborated with world imperialism to make sure that the path to revolution was blocked in this part of the world. With this aim, their representatives, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, joined an Interim Government that functioned under the supervision of the British Viceroy.

The British colonialists organized the communal partitioning of the subcontinent with the active connivance of the bourgeoisie. As a result, three nations — Bengal, Punjab, and Kashmir — were brutally partitioned, and a communal holocaust was unleashed with the immediate aim of drowning the revolutionary struggles of the people in blood. The Nehru government sent its armed forces to crush the communists, the workers and peasants, the revolutionary peasant uprising of Telengana, and peoples like the Nagas.

The Indian bourgeoisie collaborated with imperialism to perpetuate and further perfect the colonial institutions, the capitalist economic relations, remnants of feudalism and the imperialist system of plunder. Its representatives in the Constituent Assembly decided to perpetuate the old system of rule in a new form. And in January 1950, this bourgeoisie proclaimed a constitution that perpetuated communal and caste based division of the polity, and legitimized the rule of the propertied minority, through a political process modeled after British parliamentary democracy. This constitution, in typical empire building colonial and imperialist style, denied the existence of nations and peoples within India and their sovereign rights.

The conflicts that are tearing Indian society apart have their roots in the great betrayal of the people's aspirations by the Indian bourgeoisie in 1947. They have their root in the failure of India in making a clean break with the imperialist system, with the colonial legacy. Instead, the entire edifice of imperialist plunder instituted in India by the colonialists has been further strengthened, wreaking devastation on the peoples. Sixty years of development without social revolution has shown such development cannot provide prosperity and protection for the working people. This course has enriched and will continue to enrich a minority, the bourgeois class headed by the Tatas, Ambanis, Birlas and other big business houses. It has impoverished and will continue to impoverish the toiling majority. .

Workers, peasants, women and youth do not accept the course being followed by the bourgeoisie. They refuse to accept the privatization and liberalization program. They refuse to accept that the state can alienate the land of the peasants and tribal peoples and hand it over to big capitalists to reap maximum private profits. They oppose the efforts of the Indian bourgeoisie to crush the struggles of the Kashmiris, the Nagas, the Manipuris who wish to assert their sovereignty, their national rights.

For its service to the imperialist bourgeoisie worldwide in the battle against revolution and communism, the Indian bourgeoisie is rewarded with accolades such as leading the “largest democracy in the world”. The imperialists see in the Indian bourgeoisie, and in the system established in India, a great ally in the struggle against social revolution.

India’s emergence as an imperialist power which is actively collaborating with the most blood thirsty power known to mankind, US imperialism, is no cause for joy Indian people, and for the people of Asia. Big war games are being planned by the Anglo-American imperialists against the peoples of Asia. The Indian bourgeoisie, for its own narrow interests, is embroiling India in these war games, as a strategic partner of the US. These portend nothing but disaster for the Indian people.

It is necessary to break the shackles of 1947 and 1950, and begin afresh. The colonial and imperialist foundations of the existing Indian state are a block to progress in the interests of the toilers and tillers. No reforms can change this fact. India needs new foundations – new political institutions and economic relations that would allow the workers and peasants to actually exercise power, and make sure that the creation of wealth benefits all those who toil.