Promise and Challenge

FROM N.C.’S WRITINGS

India today, standing on the threshold of the twentyfifth year of Independence, is compara-tively more certain of her future steps when the world around enters a period of rapidly changing scene, domestic and international, which has shaken the nation out of a torpor, as it were. The process, started since mid-1969 of removing roadblocks in the way of social progress, has gathered a new momentum. Its own inexorable logic is pushing ahead even those who would otherwise choose to rest on their oars.

The cataclysmic developments in neighbouring Pakistan, leading to the declaration of Independence by the people of Bangladesh, bringing in its wake an influx of nearly 80 lakh refugees escaping from Yahya Khan’s campaign of genocide, could leave hardly any Indian untouched. The culmi-nation of the prolonged surreptitious and open contacts in the US President’s decision to visit Peking, gives a new dimension to the strategy of tension built around the Asian continent ever since the end of the Second World War. Its impact can be grasped when one sees that China has made an open declaration of support of the Islamabad military junta against the anti-colonial freedom struggle of the Bangladesh people, and the Nixon Administration is determined to continue military and economic aid to the Yahya regime in its desperate bid to retain its lost colonial rule in Bangladesh.

The last one year has been more eventful than any single year since that fateful night when in the midst of two contradictory currents of internecine strife and hope for a new life free from alien bondage, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed the independence of India from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi. It has been a year of intense political activity, pulling into its vortex the entire nation, when the forces of progress, obstructed by the vested interests at every step, mounted ever greater assaults to frustrate their efforts. The constantly growing mass movement has become the impelling force for an advance to the next stage on the road to India’s appointed destiny—where the realisation of the goal of ending exploitation of man by man, opening up the way to equal opportunity for all to develop their intellect and genius, enabling the people to live in peace and prosperity and making their due contribution to promote international peace and amity, would come by as a matter of course.

A rapid review of the outstanding develop-ments of the year since the last Independence Day brings to the fore a new situation that developed with the erosion of the sovereign right of Parliament as a result of judicial pronouncements invalidating laws enacted to remove the shackles of age-old feudal oppression. The executive effort to end the princely privileges and purses met with the same fate at the hands of the Supreme Court as did the nationalisation of banks. It became evident that without the restoration of the authority of Parliament, representing the will of the people of this country, the vested interests would always take the advantage of loose ends left in our Constitution to nullify all efforts to go forward.

Evidently, the urgent need was to amend the Constitution in such a manner that in the changed circumstances instead of its being used by the forces ranged against popular aspirations, it actually became a vehicle for social progress. It was on this single but momentous issue that the forces of social progress recently sought the verdict of the people. And the people gave their overwhelming support to all those who had sounded the tocsin of an all-embracing struggle to mount an assault on the citadel of vested interests. If in the process remnants of the reactionary forces found their way into the new Parliament, it was only because the forces standing on the side of the people did not correctly assess their own strength and had so far been unable to overcome the disruption within, born of past prejudices, and insufficient mobilisation of the common people against the attempts to sow confusion in their ranks.

Yet, the grand success of the people is there for all to see and recognise its strength in fulfilling the unfinished tasks of the democratic revolution. The take-over of general insurance business in the country, which was corollary to the nationalisation of banking business, could be gone through without much ado.

Above all, the Lok Sabha has not only adopted with an unprecedented majority the clauses amending those which stood in the way of rapid social progress, it has also been able to move further with the introduction of measures to abolish the princely privileges and privy purses. The movement towards the new direction has been initiated on the strength of the massive popular support given to those who stood by them.

It is this popular consciousness, born of our people’s experience in the struggle against colonial domination, for national freedom, which made possible their unequivocal support to the freedom loving people of Bangladesh engaged in a similar struggle to overthrow the colonial domination of the Islamabad military junta. For the people of our country, the struggle in Bangladesh is part of the same struggle that we are waging and against the same colonial imperialist powers that see a hope of survival in the world today only by re-establishing colonial domination through their trusted agents such as the Yahya-Bhutto clique in West Pakistan, the Thieu-Ky gang in South Vietnam, the Lon Nol-Sirik Matak traitors in Cambodia, and others of their ilk.

In the course of this solidarity with the people of Bangladesh, the Indian people have also been able to cement their friendship with all the forces of peace, freedom and socialism throughout the world, the climax of which has been the signing of the twenty-year Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. It has been a rewarding lesson for our people that their struggle for social justice, economic prosperity and political freedom, which enabled them without hesitation to extend powerful support to the freedom-loving people of Bangladesh, have earned them closer friendship and support of the progressive peoples throughout the world.

It is, therefore, not a time to be complacent, to rest on one’s oars, but to intensify this struggle to go forward, to win greater victories over the forces of reaction, and to accelerate the march to social, economic and political freedom, to redeem the pledge of achieving purna swaraj that the nation took fortytwo years ago on the banks of the Ravi. The political leaders and the government have to keep in mind that in this march forward the largest mobilisation of the people would be possible only if the burden of that struggle is equitably distributed, and those made to bear a bigger share who are capable of it. In this effort the Left will have a crucial role to play—to unite all the progressive democratic forces on the side of the people and to isolate the reactionaries, so as to ensure the victory of the masses.

(Mainstream, August 14, 1971)