The Dominant Politics has been the ‘Politics of Management’: Dipankar Bhattacharya | interview by Papri Sri Raman

Dipankar Bhattacharya is the general secretary of the CPI (M-L) Liberation, that is contesting seven Lok Sabha seats. He served as the general secretary of the Indian People’s Front between 1982 and 1994, and later became the general secretary of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions. In December 1987, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation. After the demise of Vinod Mishra who was the general secretary of the party, Bhattacharya was unanimously elected to the post.

North Bengal in 1967-1973 was the home of the Naxalbari Movement, an agrarian movement that had turned violent. The slogans, the arguments had a huge impact on the formative mind of a sprightly seven-year-old who heard, saw and remembered some of all that happened in that turbulent decade that made history, as he grew up.

A railway official’s son, Dipankar was born in Guwahati and had a very traditional upbringing though. He was in school in Alipurduar from ’67 to ’ 73, after which he went to the Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission school near Kolkata till 1979, ranking high in the HSc Board exams. Dipankar then studied in the Indian Statistical Institute, earning an M Stat degree. It was here that his political thoughts flowered. 

We catch up with Dipankar amidst his hectic election campaigns in remote areas of five large States, asking him how it all began for him.

‘I joined the ISI in 1979 and that was the period of hope and disillusionment in the wake of the 1977 election. It didn’t take me long to make up my mind about what I should do in life’, he tells us.

In 1976, the party leadership made a very conscious decision to move away from the violence it began with in 1967 and enter electoral politics. Over the years, the party has focused attention on Dalits, Adivasis and the down trodden. Wasn’t it a very deliberate political step, rather than an ideological shift? What was the thinking behind this?

The changes in our Party’s understanding and practice have happened over the years in response to the demands of a dynamic situation. It’s important to understand the aspect of continuity within this change.

When the Party had emerged in 1969 in the wake of the great Naxalbari peasant uprising, it had a road map of an imminent revolution. Turning the decade of the 1970s into the ‘decade of liberation’ was the clarion call. The dominant slogans and forms of struggle and organisation of the CPI(ML), in its formative years, were all dictated by the assessment of the prevalence of a revolutionary situation and the perceived imminence of revolution.

In the post-Emergency era the same revolutionary quest, based on the most spirited assertion of the most oppressed in every sphere of Indian society, has started finding newer forms of expression. Today, when the very idea of modern India and the constitutional foundations and federal framework of India’s parliamentary democracy are facing their biggest ever crisis in the face of an orchestrated fascist aggression, the CPI(ML) considers the defence of the Constitution and Democracy the central task of the present period.

How has you own journey been in a rapidly changing country, where the ‘classical class struggle’ may not be the battle political parties are fighting?

I think ‘class struggle’ remains a much misunderstood concept in India. Class struggle is the struggle of the exploited and oppressed classes against the dominant class power which controls the state, the economy and also dominates in the realm of ideas. The caste system and patriarchy are two key pillars of this class power in India. If class power permeates all spheres of social life, struggle against the dominant class power will also have to challenge every aspect of that domination.

We can broadly classify politics in three or four broad categories. The dominant politics has been the ‘politics of management’, managing the existing order. In a despotic dispensation, this management takes place through all-out suppression, through erosion and decimation of democracy. This is what we are experiencing today in Modi’s India.

Against this politics of management we uphold what you may call the politics of transformation. There is also the popular politics of representation. In a vast and diverse country like India, and in a society like ours with a deeply entrenched caste order and consequent pattern of social exclusion, marginalisation and oppression, politics of representation also acquires a transformational aspect.

Class struggle has to be grasped and pursued in this dynamic and live political context. Marxism has never seen class struggle as mere economic struggle. Politics is ultimately the concentrated expression of economics, but in class struggle, Marxism places politics in command and combines diverse components and dimensions of struggle — economic and social, cultural and political — in an integrated framework of class struggle.

How has the Party’s journey for these 50 years been? Fifty-years is a long time for a developing country, what are the major impediments a small left-party like yours faced and faces, given when you started, anti-Congressism was one of your agendas?

We stayed away from elections in the first two decades. By the latter half of 1980s, we realised that the landless poor and socially oppressed were effectively disenfranchised, in spite of the Constitutional commitment of universal adult franchise. It made more sense to secure and use that right than to ‘boycott’ it. You can’t really boycott something you don’t have. This, of course, invited fierce feudal backlash. The Right to Vote has been at the centre of much of the feudal violence and State repression that we have had to face in Bihar and Jharkhand in recent years.

False cases continue to be the biggest impediment faced by our comrades almost universally. Let me give you a few examples. In the 2000 Bihar Assembly elections, Comrade Shah Chand, a popular mukhiya of Bhadasi panchayat in Arwal, finished a close second from the Arwal assembly segment, losing by only around 2,000 votes. Soon after, he was convicted in a TADA case, along with thirteen other comrades. Six of these comrades including Comrade Shah Chand himself, have died in custody since their conviction in 2003.

In 2015, Comrades Satyadeo Ram and Amarjeet Kushwaha had to contest the election from Darauli (SC seat) and the Jeeradei seat in Siwan district of Bihar from jail. Comrade Satyadeo won and came out on bail after two years. Comrade Amarjeet lost narrowly and continued languish in jail. In the 2020 November Assembly elections, both again contested; Comrade Amarjeet still from within jail. This time, both the comrades won and it is only now, after more than ten years that all the comrades have finally got acquitted, but not before Comrade Amarjeet spent seven years in jail.

To cite another example, Comrade Manoj Manzil contested the 2015 Assembly elections from Agiaon (SC) seat in Bhojpur from within the jail and finished a close third. In 2020, he won from the same seat with more than 60% of the vote, but now, in the same politically-motivated case, Comrade Manoj and 22 other comrades have been convicted for life, leading to Manoj’s renewed arrest and disqualification of his Assembly membership.
For us the operative environment has all along been quite hostile, and now the current phase of fascist aggression has made it even more so.

The speed with which we have seen the advent of the saffron agenda… are the left parties ready to acknowledge that there needs to be one party, larger than the left parties, that needs to be the fountainhead of all anti-BJP alliance?

The saffron agenda has been on the ascendant for almost four decades. The shift in India’s economic and foreign policies since the early 1990s only helped this rise. Today the Sangh brigade has emerged not just as an aggressive champion of Hindutva, but also as the staunchest supporter of corporate power and a pro-US pro-Israel foreign policy. Since 2014, it has also been reaping a political windfall when almost all non-BJP streams and parties find themselves at their weakest because of diverse reasons, creating a highly favourable vacuum for the BJP to exploit.

We surely need broad-based unity to counter this tilt to the extreme right. The farmers’ movement (2021-2022) demonstrated a model of unity. The INDIA coalition is also a response to the demands of the situation. No single party or ideology that has grown organically in India in the course of the freedom movement or in the post-independence decades is in a position to independently defeat this fascist offensive. We need an effective and dynamic united front. All major ideological streams and political trends will have to find ways to deal with this situation and answer the challenge. On our part we are trying our best to develop a dynamic and determined popular movement by uniting all stakeholders of democracy.

In 1989, the Party earned its first Lok Sabha seat. That is early success for a young party. In 1991 came the second LS seat. Now the BJP completely overwhelms Assam. In 1999 too, the party won the Assam. seat. The loss came in 2004. What happened between 2000 and now? Do the recent successes in the assembly elections since 2020 make you hopeful?

The 1989 victory from Ara was truly special and historic. We won in a multi-corner contest and for a good number of our voters, that was the first time they had managed to vote. There was a brutal massacre on the polling-day evening, a heavy price the people had to pay for exercising their constitutional right.

The victory in Assam from the hill districts in four successive elections — 1991, 1996, 1998, 1999 — was secured on the basis of the popular movement for an autonomous State, as promised in Article 244A of the Constitution.

This was a rare movement in the North-East, a peaceful democratic agitation based on a territorial unity of people belonging to diverse communities and social identities. But the Indian state under the NDA (the National Democratic Alliance) government (of A B Vajpayee) managed to plant the seeds of armed insurgency, to break this unity, leading to a split in the movement and gradual loss of steam.

Your statement on the Burdawan seat… where everything began… one feels the party no longer feels as strongly about that seat. Which contest, from your point of view, will be the toughest contest among the seven seats and why?

There is no pre-poll seat-sharing among INDIA constituents in West Bengal. We have decided to put up one candidate and campaign across the State against the BJP, without extending support to any party.

We are contesting the least number of seats in these elections — four seats in Bihar and Jharkhand as part of the INDIA coalition, and one seat each in West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. The seats in Bihar (Ara, Karakat and Nalanda) and Jharkhand (Koderma) are all currently held by the NDA, like most other seats in Bihar and Jharkhand. But the tides are turning and if we are able to turn the elections into a determined people’s movement to end the dictatorial and disastrous Modi-Shah reign, then it is surely possible to reverse the 2019 outcome. The 2019 Assembly elections in Jharkhand and the 2020 Assembly elections in Bihar already showcased this potential. The challenge now is to take it forward.

You have considerable following in several States and have young admirers in universities, Marxist reading circles etc. Your own growth has been through electoral politics at the party level. What is the future of electoral politics in India, when the BJP is saying it will win 407+ seats?

A multiparty parliamentary democracy and a more or less credible track record of five-yearly elections have been the two basic features of India’s flawed democracy. Ambedkar was forthright in indicating the contradictions that would continue to haunt India’s Constitution — the contradiction between the equality of one vote for every citizen and the massive inequality in social and economic realms. Mounting social and economic inequality would render electoral equality meaningless beyond a point.

In India, even the electoral system has now started becoming dysfunctional — the combination of a compromised Election Commission, unmitigated corporate funding through opaque electoral bonds, non-transparent system of electronic voting machines, and a propagandist media has greatly eroded the credibility of India’s elections.

These elections are perhaps India’s last chance to check democratic India’s descent into an electoral autocracy.

There haven’t been any Leader of the Opposition for two Lok Sabhas. Tell me one thing that a left-of-center or socialist grouping can do that can bring a modicum of balance in democratic politics?

Trust the people and their attachment to democracy. India fought a protracted battle for freedom and secured the Constitution and Democracy as integral features of free India. For years, we took them for granted till the Emergency gave us the first rude shock.

Post-Emergency, democracy got a new lease of life, decentralisation and devolution of power through the panchayati raj system and the greater representation secured by hitherto under-represented sections of society through the implementation of Mandal Commission recommendations reinforced democracy and reassured the Indian opinion at large about the future of India’s democracy.

Since 2014, Constitutional democracy has experienced the most severe and sustained assault and more and more people have been waking up to this threat. It is the crystallisation of this popular realisation and determination that will not only restore the lost balance but take India forward to a more robust democracy and egalitarian order.