Stiff fight among the top leaders of CPI M over ‘Fascist’ row

When comrade Sitaram Yechury decided to target Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by arguing its ‘communal and fascist’ agenda, it didn’t go well for Politburo member Prakash Karat. But comrade Karat decided to endorse the Narendra Modi government as an ‘authoritarian’.

Now the same issue has sparked an internal power politics in Communist Party of India- Marxist (CPIM) and has reached the central committee, the party’s top decision-making body.

Veteran CPM leader V S  Achuthanandan, during the central committee  meet on Tuesday, is learnt to have supported Yechury. Achuthandan is considered close to Yechury. The nonagenarian is learnt to have argued that the BJP’s “communal and fascist agenda” needs to be  countered and resisted.

“We are saying the BJP acts as the political arm of RSS. The RSS has a fascistic agenda, and that fascistic agenda is an effort to try and replace the secular, democratic, constitutional republic with their concept of a Hindu Rashtra…. So it is not a fascist state but the movement towards fascism…which we will resist,” Yechury saidMonday, at the end of the end of the three-day meeting of the central committee.

While Yechury said the meeting did not discuss the issue, he added that the “party position was clarified”. “This is the party position and everybody knows that,” he said, without naming Karat.

Calling BJP ‘fascist’ is historically untenable

According to noted historian and political observer Ramchandra Guha, calling BJP or its leaders ‘fascist’ is historically untenable. He said this during an interview with Rediff.com.

Guha rightly pointed out that a fascist party does not contest elections and then give up power when losing a majority in the Parliament, like the BJP has done. Therefore, to call the BJP or its leaders ‘fascist’ is historically untenable.

He also noted that the RSS from which the BJP grew was inspired by European fascism. “The Bajrang Dal, another right-wing group, is involved in hooligans to intimidate and terrorise its opponents. Hence, Bajrang Dal can be called as ‘fascist’. But not the BJP,” the historian added.

Left totalitarianism

Even the Left wing has totalitarianism. The extreme leftists who claim to Naxalites do not care for electoral politics and practice a savage politics of revenge and retribution. If CPM is keen in accusing BJP as ‘Fascist’, the democrats of the nation can also condemn the same.

However, the Party which professes a reverence for Russian dictators Lenin and Stalin, the CPIM participates in electoral practices, assuming power if they win and giving up power if they lose.

Even the CPI-M has accepted (in fact, if not in theory) the fundamental democratic principle of a multi-party political order.

Naxalites and Bajarang Dal are two sides of same coin who  are antithetical to the democracy of the nation. But we should be careful about using labels such as ‘fascist’, ‘genocide’, etc, which originated in historical contexts and epochs very different from contemporary India.

‘Isolate BJP’

Citing a recent CPI-M Central Committee statement, Prof  Irfan Habib, India’s foremost historian and a leftist,  said that the Communist Party has failed to understand that the BJP government at the Centre, “is not just another parliamentary government of a bourgeois party”, but rather “represents a regime which openly acclaims the semi-fascist ideology of the RSS.”

He, in a letter to the Party, raised that the BJP government is “unconditionally committed to meeting all the demands of the top elements of the corporate sector, Indian and foreign, and is continuously undermining, in the most naked fashion (through saffronzing education, raising new communal issues, etc.) the secular basis of our nation.”

Habib, who is a long-time member, says, “The primary objective of our party should be to isolate the BJP as far as possible, and form a broad united front with all other democratic forces so as to foil the BJP’s plan of gaining control over the states still outside its orbit, and finally, to secure its defeat at the parliamentary elections due in 2019.”