India

At the end of March a young girl in New Delhi, the youngest of four siblings in the family, was desperate for a job, which, in spite of a degree obtained in England, she had not been able to find for several months due to the employment crunch and was thus led to committing suicide in a state of depression.

Bhagat Singh was an outstanding figure in the struggle for Indian independence, and paid dearly for his ideals by being hanged by the British colonialists of the time. Attempts have been made to distort what he really stood for, but what is clear from some of his writings is that he rejected the idea of two-stage revolution and saw the workers and peasants as the only truly revolutionary forces upon which the revolution could be based.

A scandalous case of recycling of syringes in Gujarat hospitals and clinics has led to the death of 65 people, with more than 200 still struggling for their lives. The callous attitude of the government is clear for all to see.

Last week the world was stunned by the bloody scenes of carnage in the aftermath of the terrorist onslaught across Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The attack, which began late Wednesday night extended over ten different sites in India's financial capital. It struck Mumbai's two best-known luxury hotels and other landmarks in the city of 18 million.

Here we provide a day-by-day chronology of how the dispute at Graziano Trasmissioni started and developed over a period of months. What emerges the brutal treatment of workers and the terrible wages and working conditions they have had to suffer. This report is based on an interview with two workers at Graziano Trasmissioni.

The news that a manager at Graziano, an Italian multinational company, had been lynched recently made the rounds of the world media. Here we provide the facts as provided by the workers in India themselves, which shows that the workers were not responsible. They are being blamed as a tactic to break the workers’ struggle. They need the support and solidarity of workers of all countries.

The new edition of the Asian Marxist Review is about to come out and here we provide the Editorial statement that concentrates mainly on the situation in India.

The Economic and Political Weekly, the most academic magazine in India, has published a review of Lal Khan's book, "Partition - can it be undone?", written by Ranabir Samaddar. He gives a positive appraisal of the book and asks a pertinent question at the end: "But are the official communists listening to all these?"

West Bengal has been governed for many years by the Left Front, whose main component is the CPI(M), one of India’s main Communist Parties. Their past is one of support for Stalinism. Today the leaders of this party have transferred their allegiance to so-called “neo-liberal” capitalism, to the degree that they have actively organised brutal attacks on peasants defending their land from being taken from them.

The dalits, the “untouchables”, of India are not one homogenous bloc. Within them a bourgeois layer has risen and aspires to be a part of the bourgeois class as a whole. With this aim in mind they promote the idea that the dalits as a caste need their own “dalit party”. To do this they try to isolate the dalit proletariat from the rest of the Indian working class to promote their own selfish interests. Here Rajesh Tyagi explains that what is needed is proletarian unity across the caste barriers.

In the 1940s the Communist Party of India (CPI) was a prisoner of the policies imposed by Stalin on the international communist movement. In backward and colonial countries, Stalin decreed, the movement had to go through two stages - democracy, then socialism. This proved disastrous for the workers of the whole of the Indian subcontinent.

Today marks the 60th anniversary of Indian independence from British rule. In reality, the partition of India in 1947 cut through the living body of whole communities, leading to untold death and misery. This was all part of the tried and tested method of “divide and rule” and behind it lay the interests of privileged ruling elites, not those of the poor masses.

In this first article Jamil Iqbal outlines Marx’s analysis of how British imperialism, by introducing capitalist methods, broke down the old Asiatic mode of production and with it the old type of social structures. The British capitalists did this simply to facilitate the exploitation of Indian resources and labour, but by so doing also prepared the ground for the modern struggle against British imperialism.

On March 14 up to 100 peasants in Nandigram, West Bengal, were brutally massacred by the police as they protested against land-grabbing operations. The leaders of the CPI-M in the local government have justified this action as part of their so-called “development model”. The contradictions between the leaders of the Indian communist movement and the millions of workers who support them are posed here sharply.