PREFACE
The Programme, the Path, and the Constitution were adopted as its basic documents by the Communist Party Reorganisation Centre of India (Marxist-Leninist) at its Inaugural Central Conference in July 1995. Thus, they together constitute the line-basis -- the concrete ideological political foundation -- which sustains the unified organisational body and functioning of the CPRCI (ML). It sets the basic orientation of its revolutionary practice.
On the other hand, these are draft documents (of the proletarian revolutionary line in India) for the future Party Congress. That is to say, the CPRCI (ML) is presenting these documents before all communist revolutionary forces beyond its organisational fold as draft documents for discussion, criticism, improvement and enrichment, in the light of their respective revolutionary studies and experiences of revolutionary practice.
The basic documents of the Party should be as concise and precise as possible. These documents are not so because they were to meet the need: (A) of clarifying the understanding behind the major positions/formulations of our proletarian revolutionary line; (B) of depicting the integral relation between different aspects of the basic line of our organisation. On both counts, our attempt has been to draw a clear demarcation from the prevalent wrong trends in the communist revolutionary camp.
As the establishment of the proletarian revolutionary line progresses and acquires a standardised expression, these basic documents can be made progressively brief in the subsequent conferences (of the party-organisation) and finally made as concise as possible in the Party Congress.
August 1995.
Central Committee,
CPRCI(ML)
(DRAFT)
*
Communist Party Reorganisation Centre Of India
(Marxist-Leninist)
(CPRCI - ML)
August 1, 1995
India is a vast country with a very large population. It is a country of many nationalities. It is one of the oldest civilisations in the world. It has been a country of very rich natural resources. Since the middle ages, its superior skills, wealth and variety have attracted the explorers and adventurers of other lands.
On the other hand, so unyielding was the feudal structure in India that it arrested the critical development of productive forces. The self-contained natural village economy and the all-pervading hide-hound caste divisions made for the tremendous social inertia. In a way British colonialism broke this inertia by disrupting this structure in the course of its own exploitative depredation--thus increasing the pace while distorting the process of social regeneration.
When the British first arrived in feudal India, in the mid-eighteenth century, it was, like the other European powers of the time, for loot and commerce. Their own capitalist development in time defined their colonial ambitions and diplomacy in India, constituting three periods in the main: the period of pre-imperialist colonialism; the period of imperialist colonialism; and the period of imperialist neo-colonialism.
They gradually established and wielded their power in India to make it a source of raw materials and a market for their finished products. This was the era of pre-imperialist capital in the West.
In order to firm up their hold over India, and learning in the main from the first Indian war of independence in 1857 against them, the British systematically set about establishing a colonial State in India and under its sway a social order that would reliably serve to oppress Indian people so as to exploit them better. They destroyed the Indian feudal powers which had led or aligned with the armed rebellions of the peasants, artisans, tribals and Indian personnel in the British army; treated the remainder princelings with calculated deference on terms of unambiguous loyalty to the British Crown. They had created a new class of feudal landlords whose loyalty they ensured. They had converted the land in India into private property which could be bought and sold; and they allowed the new landlords enormous scope for exploiting the toiling peasantry and artisanry. They thus deprived the Indian peasantry of the security of their land and forests and made them prey to crass commercialisation by the colonialists and their native collaborators. At the same time, even as they brutally destroyed the indigenous artisanry and workshops whose products threatened those of British industry, they created a new class of dispossessed workers to build the new countrywide network of railways and communications, irrigation and transport canals, ship-building and port facilities to service British trade.
They also created the early compradors: their agents for executing sub-contracts and dealing with Indian labour, as well as agents for exploiting and linking up markets countrywide for British trading interests. The new feudals (the landlords, the comprador traders and contractors, and the usurers), taking advantage of the countrywide commercialisation and market. and the lack of industrial employment for people, flourished multifariously on rack-renting, usury, and speculative trade on the backs of the peasantry. The peasantry, dispossessed and pauperised along with the artisanry, had no alternative but to continue pinned to the land.
In a nutshell, on the feudal base of Indian society, British colonialism wrought changes such that feudalism was no longer traditionally feudal though it remained basically feudal. Thus British colonialism in the second half of the 19th century created a semi-feudal, colonial India.
Indian feudalism brought under its commercial influence by colonialism is semi-feudalism. In this semi-feudalism, the commercialisation was distorted away from capitalist development, however, by two other features in the economy introduced by the British: the introduction of the class of parasitic intermediaries in agriculture with property rights in land, and the systematic containment and crippling of the local industry (handicrafts and manufacture by artisans). With retrogressive agriculture and crippled industry, the commercialisation pulled people into the market's ambit without the development of productive forces and without the purchasing power normally resulting from the extended reproduction of capitalist industry. Semi-feudalism, in whatever specific form, is feudalism in perpetual crisis. Colonial or imperial capital by its own modal nature while moulding feudalism increasingly aggravates its crisis but does not allow the resolution of that crisis through semi-feudalism's transformation into a capitalist system.
Consequent to the dawn of the era of imperialism at the turn of the century with export of capital as its fundamental feature, the needs of the colonial powers and of the British in particular in relation to their colonies changed. The sheer capacity and growth of monopoly capital in their countries increased the pressure for seeking and grabbing from each other new markets. Gradually these markets were to be sellers not just of raw materials but of intermediate and consumer products that monopoly capital did not find worth its while to produce, and buyers not just of monopoly capitalist industry's finished products but of its output of machinery and engineering equipment. The operation of finance capital thus opened the way for this further distortion of the colonial economy.
British monopoly capital set about encouraging the establishment of a limited industry here which was dovetailed to British industry's need to export capital. However, such industry here had no integral links with various sections of the native economy as would lead it to autonomous capitalist growth on extended reproduction. The early textile industry, the jute mills, the steel industry, the railway workshops, the coal mines are notable in this, colonially moulded, very limited and distorted industrialisation. Such industry had wholesale technological dependence on British imperialism. The bourgeoisie that undertook this industry had generally begun as British agents traders and suppliers in peace and war. In addition to retaining these interests, they now became the new comprador bourgeoisie. As they continued with their interests in trade, usury and speculation, they could co-exist with the semi-feudal base of the Indian economy. Indeed their base in the semi-feudal economy was reflected in the multifarious feudal sources of their profits. The forced pricing, commercialisation, and speculation in indigo, cotton and jute led to ruin of many a peasant but showed up the class contours of the new comprador bourgeoisie. Thus the new 'industrialisation' of India led to the further disarticulation of its economy.
The political subservience of the comprador bourgeoisie to British capital was expressed in their ostentatious loyalty to the British crown and the British raj. Their political alliance with the feudal landlords was expressed in the Indian National Congress which had been formed under British aegis in 1885.
During the imperialist crises of the 20th century which culminated in the two World Wars of 1914-19 and 1939-45, while the oppressed and exploited people in India fought bitterly against feudalism and imperialism, the comprador bourgeoisie were busy raking in huge speculative profits and enforcing supplies of materials and men to the British imperialists. That anti-national trait--of benefiting themselves at the cost of Indian people and in service of British imperialists--found simultaneous expression in the comprador bourgeoisie's politics of the time. Under British patronage, and in alliance with the landlords they assumed leadership of the Indian people's freedom movement through the Indian National Congress to mislead and betray the cause of freedom and to strengthen their own political status. Their essentially servile character vis-a-vis imperialism in general was evident during the second World War in their ambivalent conduct towards British imperialism in face of the military advance of Japanese imperialism and the greater clout of U.S. finance capital.
The inter-war years were marked by two outstanding phenomena. On the one hand was the worldwide impact of the great October Revolution and the unprecedented economic and social achievements of socialist planning in the Soviet Union. On the other hand was the capitalist system's worst crisis exhibited in the devastating depression of 1929-33 in the imperialist countries--even as a new and powerful industrial structure of high-technology giant multinationals was emerging in Britain and other imperialist countries in the fields of engineering, chemicals, electrical goods and automobiles. Growth of political fascism in some countries and of reaction in others was the outcome of this crisis.
In this period already the imperialist countries were trying to use State intervention and planning to mitigate the effects of their economic crisis. And ways were being established of penetrating countries with finance capital and without direct colonial rule.
India's narrow industry and depressed peasant economy did not suffice to meet the requirements of Britain's new-giant corporations. State intervention emerged as a strategy to shape the development of Indian industry to dovetail it to British industry in colonial India, typical foreign investment was held in the form of smaller investments by individuals through managing agency firms that availed of protective barriers set up by the colonial state. In the inter-war years giant foreign corporations also began to set up subsidiaries in India behind the protective barriers. The foundation was laid for neo-colonial exploitation of semi-feudal India
Around the end of the Second World War--when world fascism was defeated by the world socialist. democratic and revolutionary forces led by the Soviet Union--our country witnessed a great revolutionary upsurge against British imperialism and native feudalism. In the general upsurge, the revolt by the ratings of the Royal Navy, the armed struggle of the peasantry in Telangana, the heroic Tebhaga movement of the Bengal peasantry, the movement of Punnapra Vayalar in Travancore (Kerala), peasant revolts in the princely states and P & T and Railway workers' militant strikes, are some of the notable events. This revolutionary tide in India was part and parcel of the worldwide upsurge against fascism and imperialism.[1]
The British rulers in India, seeing that they could be swept away by the great upsurge of the people, hastened to transfer power to the comprador bourgeoisie and the landlord classes.
Along with the main factor of people's revolutionary upsurge, U. S. imperialist pressure played an important role in pushing British imperialism to relinquish its direct colonial hold over India [2]
Consequently, though the British rulers left India, British monopoly capital remained intact.[3] The new State of Indian Union that came into existence in 1947 was the State of the comprador bourgeoisie and the landlords, serving and protecting the interests of imperialism in general and domestic semi-feudalism in particular. Indian "independence" was, and continues to be, formal.
The Indian people were deprived of the fruits of their valiant fight for freedom because the Indian National Congress, whose leadership represented the interests of the comprador bourgeoisie and big landlords, had succeeded in usurping the leadership of the national democratic movement, ultimately to betray it. This they could do primarily due to the weakness of the communist movement and the failure of the communist leadership. Steeped in right opportunist deviation, the communist leadership failed to contend earnestly for proletarian hegemony in the national democratic movement and failed in grasping and concretely applying Marxism-Leninism to unleash the powerful people's movement in a revolutionary direction as could carry the revolution through to the end (over the heads of reactionary Congress leaders). Throughout this period, communists had been fighting many heroic class battles. Nevertheless, in the long run they lost the war owing to the lack of a general-staff which could equal the situation.[4]
Thus, in the face of the failure of the communist leadership, the treacherous Gandhian leadership was able to betray the surging national revolutionary movement, and the 1947 Award as well as the Partition, was an outcome of that betrayal
The glorious vision of our valiant fighters and martyrs, and the revolutionary
national and democratic tasks, remain yet to be fulfilled.
1. The false projection that India attained independence on August 15, 1947, is an insult to the Indian people's countless sacrifices and sufferings in the freedom movement.
1.1 The State of Indian Union that came into being in 1947, under an Act of the British Parliament, inherited the ruthless and alienated colonial State-machinery intact. The comprador bourgeoisie and the landlord classes as true inheritors of the colonial State, baptised themselves as the new ruling classes of India by drowning the revolutionary struggles of the Indian people in blood.
1.2 One of the early steps taken by the new rulers for the consolidation of the Indian State--including its adaptation for neo-colonial exploitation--was abolition of princely states and their integration into the Indian Union. Another step was the passing of the first industrial policy resolution (1948): The Resolution clarified that British monopoly capital would not he confiscated; that doors would be opened to imperialist capital generally; that India's development as visualised by its new rulers was in line with what the colonial power had visualised; and that it would continuously seek foreign finance capital. The Constitution of India, too, adopted in 1950, was a virtual replica of the British India Act of 1935: it constructed a structure of State power which was autocratic in content though it put up a facade of a parliamentary system; "universal adult franchise" was superimposed on a people oppressed countrywide through the new semi-colonial semi-feudal form of socio-economic organisation.
1.3 Thus, "independence" or "transfer of power" amounted to installation in State power of the native collaborators mainly of British colonialism and turning of British colonial India into a new type of semi-colony of the major imperialist powers while retaining its semi-feudal social character.
2. It is these forms of socio-economic organisation which have varied and changed over the years since the transfer of power, preserving all along the basic content that is semi-colonial and semi-feudal. Actually, preservation of semi-feudal agrarian relations under the growing all-round sway of finance capital has remained the key premise of all official strategies and steps.
2.1 The "displaced" princelings were given huge assets, land, and purses which instituted them among the new kind of semi-feudal powers who controlled local politics and could at will enter comprador industry, become managing agencies for it, or enter the business of parliamentary power and loot--ranging from the "panchayats" to the "lok sabha".
2.2 Similarly, the legal framing and implementation of "land reform"--abolition of zamindari, securing of tenancy rights, ceiling on landownership land consolidation, and co-operative credit and marketing institutions--by no means changed land relations in favour of the toiling peasantry. All of this rather was implemented principally to help the rapacious landlords, present on the scene, to consolidate their economic power, although there were a few formal changes in the profile of the landlord class and nominal distribution of land among some peasant families. However, the official slogan of reform confused, for some time, sections of the peasantry with the illusion of peaceful democratic change and gain.
2.3 Later in the sixties, the ruling classes took up the slogan of "green revolution", relegating into background the worn-out slogan of "land reforms" to forestall peasant unrest. It was done on the excuse that land reform could not work in India and that the country would be made self-sufficient in foodgrains by promoting the "viable farmer" (i.e. the big landlords) and by intensive application of inputs in agriculture. Their real objective was to pave the way for deeper penetration of Indian agriculture by foreign finance capital. This was necessitated by the accentuating economic crisis in the imperialist countries themselves. For that purpose, an agricultural strategy was employed to funnel foreign finance capital as well as tax-revenue from the Indian people through bureaucratic channels (central and states' budgets, State-sponsored agricultural banking network, etc.) to agricultural producers. But these were limited to few pockets and few crops. Again, the principal beneficiaries have been the big landlords who utilized these funds to reinforce their economic, social and political hold over rural working people. The "green revolution" has only tied agriculture to high-value industrial inputs which are either imported or manufactured here in collaboration with foreign monopoly capital. It has, thus, progressively put large sections of the peasantry at the mercy of foreign monopoly capital and bureaucrat capital, and at the mercy of middlemen and powerful local speculators.[6]
2.4 The specific retrogressive character of semi-feudal agriculture in post-1947 India has been shaped, at each stage, by State policy and bureaucrat capital operating in basic favour of imperialism. For its own improved exploitation of India's peasantry, foreign finance capital has thus introduced elements of capitalist organisation into Indian agriculture without releasing the peasantry from its feudal bondage. Landlords have prospered using machiney, industrial inputs, official loans, cheap labour, buying and selling. But their prosperity is mainly owing to the monopoly hold on land and various forms of feudal extraction that amount to ground rent. So have other intermediaries (commission agents, dealers in agricultural inputs and bureaucrats etc.).[7] The vast mass of our people remain pinned to the land--and are forced to accept terms for its cultivation that impoverish and pauperise them. The pauperised and dispossessed peasants are forced into agricultural labour even as they yearn for land for their own cultivation. Hordes depart to other parts of the country as seasonal labourers, contract labourers, construction workers; but they retain their ties with their village and return to those ties. Even those who go as contracted workers abroad send money or return to buy land in the village.
2.5 With land as the principal means of production for the majority of our population, the mode of exploitation remains the same though its forms have changed: a variety of ways of rack renting of the land; deepening indebtedness (to primarily unofficial but also official sources); extorted profit through forced trade and through speculation in land and its products (with the peasantry selling cheap under duress, and buying agricultural inputs as well consumer items at exorbitant prices in the organised markets); and arbitrary exploitation of captive agricultural labour due to its perpetual indebtedness and lack of alternative employment prospects.
2.6 Still, ground-rent remains the signal drain internally, which prevents the development of productive forces leading to extended reproduction of capitalist profit. The other forms of appropriation of agricultural surplus (i.e., through usury and speculative trade) are related to this appropriation following the monopoly of land. The release from semi-feudal expropriation of the primary producers' surplus (from the land) for productive re-investment, is thus crucial for the further development of productive forces in India leading to the extended reproduction of modern industry.[8]
3. Imperialism is exporting finance capital to India in various forms, direct and indirect, the main forms being loans, grants and direct investment, as well as export of technology. New forms of export of capital continued to be worked out to mask its true nature and deceive the people. The Indian ruling classes are hand in glove with imperialism in adopting ever new forms of comprador relations to facilitate the dumping of foreign finance capital. As a result, foreign finance capital controls the life-lines of Indian economy and increasingly wields powerful influence on the everyday economic life of the Indian people. On the face of it, imperialism uses its exclusive hold on the advanced technology and Indian economy's dependence on it as a major tool for enforcing and increasing its neo-colonial domination over India. Actually, it is a matter of imposed dependence on advanced technology by dint of foreign finance capital's control over India.[9]
3.1 To adapt the Indian State to its specifically neo-colonial needs of export of monopoly capital to India, imperialism encouraged the development of bureaucrat capital. In the Indian conditions, this is State monopoly capital which is comprador in nature. Imperialism had earlier already created here a comprador bourgeoisie--the distorted, and inherently dependent, private capital that dovetailed modern industry here to imperialist needs. But this comprador bourgeoisie left to itself could not play a powerful central role in shaping the economy, without the support-base of State policy and bureaucrat capital.[10] This role bureaucrat capital has played largely through India's budgets based broadly upon India's much-vaunted five-year Plans (whose blue-print was lucidly set forth in 1945 by one of India's last viceroys, Wavell, and rubber-stamped by India's comprador bourgeoisie through their "Bombay Plan").
3.2 The public and private sectors of Indian planning are in fact two forms in which the confluence of State and private monopoly capital is manifest. Both forms of comprador bureaucrat capital receive foreign finance capital and both depend on it for their survival and growth. The system based on this confluence and intervention of State power is comprador bureaucrat capitalism. Being distorted capitalism, and essentially parasitic in nature, comprador bureaucrat capitalism exploits and oppresses the working class, the peasantry, and the urban petty bourgeoisie; and it injures the small but multitudinous national industry which does not receive State patronage, to the benefit it of the Indian big bourgeoisie and imperialism.
3.3 The social base of the Indian big bourgeoisie (i.e., the comprador bureaucrat bourgeoisie) too is semi-feudalism. Hitched servilely onto the imperialist economies, this class objectively does not need to free or transform agriculture from semi-feudalism; in the main, it processes raw materials for export to those economies and is heavily dependent on their technology involving, in turn, large import of machinery. It lacks an organic link with the resources and demand of the Indian economy, and it apes Western consumerism. It lacks the incentive to adopt capitalist industry's way of getting cheaper raw materials, that is by making agriculture itself capitalist, because it gets cheap raw materials on the basis of feudal exploitation.[11]
3.4 The other, stunted, aspect of industry is the vast small industry, as well as medium industry, spread throughout the country, mainly dependent on its own resources and with next to no capacity to face the monopolistic position of comprador bureaucratic industry. The small national industry is forever economically suppressed, unable to find markets in the impoverished villages and towns. At the same time, it lacks the economic sinews to go over the heads of the feudal intermediaries to get sustenance from the vast countryside by moulding it to its own needs.
3.5 Thus industry, in India today fails to draw agriculture out of its backwardness, out of its perpetual crisis. It cannot offer any alternative to the great impoverished and dispossessed peasantry in terms of employment with a living wage. Labourers come to industry in the cities to seek employment. They are driven by the massive unemployment and arbitrary treatment they receive to seek protection of feudal ties. They come in gangs organised by persons on the basis of their kinship who become the contractors and subcontractors of labour for industry. Thus their wages are further depressed and their militancy curbed by feudal obligations and ties.[12]
3.6 It is not the workforce alone that retains the feudal stamp; even the ownership and management of industry do so. It is reflected in the kinship factor in their structuring. So, instead of industry modernising backward agriculture, backward agriculture lends its stamp to the organisation of industry--in the sphere of raw materials, labour power, executive bodies and profit-making.
4. Indian society, in its semi-feudal stagnation, preserves the reactionary institutions of caste, patriarchal family, and religious rituals and codes for civil functions. These institutions have been for centuries major instruments for legitimising and perpetuating social oppression and exploitation of the toiling masses by the dominant classes of the given period. They have long outlived whatever socially useful function they might have had in the hoary past. Today, these institutions merely serve, through repressive and divisive functions, to restrain the social initiative and self-assertion of the restive masses of socially deprived and discriminated sections of people. And they complicate and delay the process of democratic polarisation and mobilisation of all the oppressed people. The gravity of all this comes into bold relief in the light of the fact that these socially deprived and discriminated sections (women, the so-called low-caste-born and the laity, i.e., ordinary believers) constitute by far the largest segment of the potential forces of India's democratic revolution.
4.1 The native ruling class political forces and the various imperialist agencies systematically manipulate and aggravate the prejudices, divisions and tensions among the people on the basis of these institutions so as to thwart the national and democratic awakening, unity and mobilisation of the broad masses of Indian people. Moreover, they even make aggressive use of these institutions to foster communal-fascist outfits so as to attempt bloody suppression of the people's democratic movement.
4.2 Elimination of the crippling dead-weight of these birth-related handicaps constitutes a part of the overall democratisation of Indian society. Finally, only the democratic restructuring of the social life of the Indian people, on the basis of abolition of semi-feudal production relations, can pave the way for wiping off the accumulated humiliation and crippling impact of these social handicaps and unleash the latent creative potential of the masses of 'low-born', women, and the diverse laity. That alone can weave these segmented sections together into a modern democratic nation (or nations). At the same time specific struggles against all sorts of social discrimination, harassment, coercion, restrictions and exclusive dealings on the basis of caste, gender and religion can broaden the democratic forces and deepen the class struggle for such social transformation and advancement of the present semi-feudal Indian society.
5. India is a multi-national country of unusual linguistic and ethnic diversity. Moreover, it is a multi-national oppressed country in which there is no single dominant nation that oppresses other nations.
5.1 So the principal aspect of the complex national question in India is constituted by the indirect imperialist oppression ( i.e.. national oppression through neo-colonial stranglehold) of the Indian people as a whole as well as of each nationality.
5.2 Nevertheless, various nationalities have uneven levels of development. So disparities exist in their relations with each other. At the same time, all of them lack internal cohesion to a greater or lesser extent, because the process of their socioeconomic development and integration has been hindered by feudalism and distorted by comprador bureaucrat capitalism (or by colonialism earlier). Therefore, notwithstanding the constitutional provisions for apparent equality of statue of all the nationalities in India, the actual elements of national inequality and discrimination give rise to national prejudices, mistrust, and even estrangement among Indian people belonging to various nationalities, ethnic groups and tribal communities. The retrogressive and manipulative policies as well as insensitive and autocratic conduct of Indian rulers, essentially drawn from among the relatively developed or bigger nationalities are responsible for fostering and exacerbating these divisive sentiments and tensions into perpetual discord.
5.3 Thus, Indian ruling classes and their State are instrumental in bringing into operation, in full measure, both the aspects of the national problem in India: the principal aspect of national oppression by imperialism of the multinational Indian people; and the secondary aspect of national inequality and discrimination among and within the nationalities of India; the solution of the problem, accordingly, lies in the demolition of the present semi-colonial and autocratic State by the united struggle of the multinational Indian people, under the leadership of the proletariat. Only by successfully doing so would they be able to exercise their right to national self-determination primarily vis-a-vis imperialism through national liberation; and then, on the basis of that independence and liberty from feudal autocracy would each nationality be able to exercise its right of nation self-determination vis-a-vis other nationalities--through voluntary union on the basis of equal status, mutual respect an mutual benefit, or through amicable secession into separate nation-State.
5.4 Only a consistent democratic stand of uncompromising opposition to any kind of national inequality, discrimination and coercion, and of unambiguous commitment to the right of every nationality to national self-determination including the right to secede--can lead the Indian people to the proper solution of their national problem. The national problem in its internal dimension, is national only in form; in content it is primarily democratic problem. The practical significance of this stand lies in its thrust towards promoting mutual trust, solidarity and unity in-struggle of the people belonging to various nationalities especially the masses of working people, against their common oppressors. Only that would ensure the fulfillment of their national rights while opening up for them avenues for further social advance.
6. In order to cover up their economic and political bankruptcy; the Indian ruling classes and their State have been making increasing use of their old ploy of national chauvinism, weaving into it the other old ploy of communal politics learned from the British colonialists and since perfected over nearly a half a century of crisis management. They work up national chauvinistic) jingoism to justify, in the eyes of the Indian people, their numerous acts of aggression abroad on weak neighbors [13] and armed repression at home of popular movements.[14] They send their armed forces to far-off countries to act as imperialist tools of intervention in these countries under the figleaf of United Nations' missions. Thus, Indian armed forces--reared as they have been in the colonial mould and alienated from the national interests and sentiments of the native people--continue to be mercenary armies in essence.
6.1 The Indian State has one of the biggest armed forces in the world along with the ever-expanding para-military forces which are, in fact, camouflaged armies for civil suppression. It has been continuously using foreign finance capital to arm, equip and modernise these coercive forces. The foreign debt on this account is huge and its full extent is hidden from public view by budgetary book operations. The Indian State even pretends to an enormous armament industry and arms research most of which are a pathetic array of assembly plants that switch processes and prolong dates according to the whims of its imperialist patrons and availability of foreign finance capital. Thus, India's armament drive, under imperialist patronage, rather than serving the needs of national security serves merely to deepen the neocolonial grip over India.
6.2 The Indian State's pretence to "non-alignment" in its external affairs is as baseless as its presence to "parliamentary democracy" in its internal affairs. The posture of non-alignment nevertheless, has helped the Indian State to relatively shift or switch loyalties among major imperialist powers depending upon the obtaining world balance of imperialist forces. It has at the same time helped it to appear as leader of the Third World countries and manipulate them in its petty regional power games whose axes however are set by the imperialists.
6.3 At home, this projection of defender of national integrity and regional power seeks to offer national chauvinist satisfaction to the Indian people and thus smoothen the transfer of the burden of burgeoning "defence expenditure" on to their backs.
7. Semi-colonial semi-feudal India is caught up in a crisis of production. in industry as well as agriculture, that has deepened over the decades. Its rulers have landed it in a debt-trap. The burden of every economic crisis has been passed onto the common people, workers and peasants in particular, through price rise, unemployment and worsening of social consumption and environment. With each crisis the Indian State's opiate slogans--such as socialist planning, land reforms, nationalisation, ''Garibi Hatao", employment guarantee schemes, primary health service, universal primary education--have all successively and miserably lost credibility.
7.1 The perpetual economic crisis has given rise to its political crisis too. The unabating political crisis gets expressed in continuing schisms and conflicts among the ruling classes, continuing instability of regimes at the central and state levels, the faction-fights and splits in the ruling class political parties, the wrangles between the central government and the state governments as well as among various state governments. Moreover, it gets reflected even in the growing strife among, and within, various limbs of the state structure--viz. the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The contradiction among various imperialist powers' operating in India finds expression in these intra-ruling classes' divisions and conflicts' lending intensity and durability to such conflicts. At the people's end, the political crisis gets expressed in heightened social tensions, the deepening disillusionment of the people with the existing political order, particularly people's loss of faith in the ruling class political parties' willingness or ability to deliver the goods, and large sections of the broad masses of Indian people getting willingly or unwillingly sucked into political action and turmoil.
7.2 The political and intellectual representatives of the ruling classes have nothing substantial to offer to the suffering people except the diversionary slogans and issues. The crisis of the ruling classes is beyond salvation within the frame of existing State-power and economy.
8. The Indian people express in various ways their exasperation at such state of affairs and their unwillingness to stand it any more. They long for a revolutionary political alternative that can be clearly grasped by them and that would lead to the solution of their basic problems. Although generally sharing their disgust with the existing set-up, different classes of Indian people tend to show specific variations in their respective political responses and roles vis-a-vis the objective requirement of a democratic revolutionary change in the existing situation. They do so depending on their objective class status and condition under the existing social order.
8.1 The proletariat alone in India possesses such social qualities as determine its objective status of a basic motive force and the leader of India's new democratic revolution. It has revolutionary firmness and consistency, owing to its alienation from ownership of the means of production and its burden of multiple oppression and exploitation. It has a developed rational competence as well as a sense of organisation and discipline, owing to the advanced technical level and social and systematic nature of its productive work. It has ample fighting experience and steeling, owing to the legacy of determined class-battles, bitter sacrifices, political setbacks and betrayals. And it has natural links with the peasantry, owing to its social origin and owing to the terrible uncertainties of urban life, which are conducive to the forging of the revolutionary worker-peasant alliance.
On the other hand, the proletariat here suffers from certain weaknesses and handicaps which have hen negatively affecting, to one or the other extent, its ability to discharge adequately its historical obligation of leading the revolutionary march of Indian society to national liberation and social emancipation. First and foremost, there has been inadequate development of its political vanguard, the communist party, over a considerably long period of time.[15] This weakness till its lasts, is bound to curtail the integrity, credibility and sweep of its political initiative. Next the colonial and feudal environment of its birth and development has distorted the compositional homogeneity of the proletariat. The vast majority of workers throng the unorganised sector and contract labourers or temporary hands who are deprived of the legitimate dues, facilities and formal rights; and who are even made to work under barbaric conditions. Only a small segment of workers is absorbed in what is called the organised sector and, within that there is a tiny layer of relatively better placed workers employed in the imperialist and comprador bureaucrat capitalist concerns. Consequently, the workers in the unorganised sector tend to reflect more the revolutionary resolve and fighting spirit of the proletariat than its rational competence whereas the workers in the organised sector tend to reflect more the rational competence of the proletariat than its revolutionary resolve an fighting spirit.[16] Further, the socio-economic environment of its birth and development lends a semi-feudal tint to the socio-cultural life and conduct of the proletariat; this renders somewhat difficult and prolonged the task of extricating itself from the baneful influences of the divisions based on caste, religion, nationality and region.
Nevertheless, the proletariat alone is capable of providing reliable political leadership that is indispensable for the successful consummation of the New Democratic Revolution in India. The weaknesses and handicaps coming in its way would mostly be overcome once the political vanguard of the proletariat is properly organised and the working class movement set on revolutionary lines.
8.2 The peasantry in India is the most numerous oppressed, and militant segment of Indian society. It is the basic toiling class which is the bed-rock of Indian economy and culture.
Despite the centuries-long history of enduring feudal autocratic suppression, and resisting through armed uprisings and struggles, particularly since the advent of British colonialist rulers, the Indian peasantry continues to be basically in an unorganised state. In the absence of proletarian leadership and assistance in organising it, the transient peasant organisations which used to emerge during their great resistance struggles, tended soon to fall prey to dissolution under feudal influences. Among the negative social factors that continue to harm the organisation and struggle-movement of the peasants, the caste factor plays the major role.
In the semi-feudal mode of production the peasantry is no more a monolithic class and is in the process of differentiation into various distinct layers with their own characteristics. Moreover, with the exception of the small layer of rich peasants--who embody the dual characteristics of an exploiting class and a labouring class, hence, show dual behaviour in the democratic revolution--the peasantry i.e., the poor, landless and the middle peasants, is the main motive force of India's new democratic revolution. The poor and landless peasants (including agricultural labourers) form the bulk of the peasantry as well as the fighting ranks of the democratic revolutionary forces. They are the most staunch ally of the proletariat and constitute the solid core of the revolutionary worker-peasant alliance. Without the mobilisation and active participation of the broad masses of the peasantry, the democratic revolutionary movement cannot acquire massive sweep, effective striking power and staying-power; and without forging revolutionary alliance with the peasantry, on the basis of the agrarian revolutionary programme, and providing leadership to its agrarian revolutionary struggles, the proletariat cannot establish its hegemony over the whole democratic revolutionary movement.
8.3 In India the petty bourgeoisie, apart from the peasantry, have begun and developed as a class under the aegis of colonial rule. The British sought to create a class of babus who could do the petty tasks involved in running the country. The small traders and shopkeepers, the artisans, the intellectuals, and the professionals (lawyers, doctors, engineers and technicians) came out of the feudal structure of society often corresponding to their earlier status within that structure. The essential stagnancy of the socio-economic system designed for colonial exploitation made them all insecure and clinging to whatever ties they had inherited. The small traders and shopkeepers and the artisans shared a precarious future along with the peasantry. The intellectuals--the educated teachers and clerks and the body of students--were educated under a colonial system which was alien in the language and culture it promoted. Yet their access to scientific knowledge, their insight into the political system, as well as the restrictions and uncertain future they faced made most of them side with the revolutionary democratic movement. The lawyers, doctors, and engineers, were differentiated by the superior status they were accorded by the colonial system; and the more successful among them vacillated according to the strength of the movement, often earning, living and practising politics by colonial norms.
With the transfer of power to the Indian ruling classes in 1947 and the subsequent further adaptations of the semi-feudal mould of the Indian economy for neo-colonial ends, these traits of the various segments of the petty-bourgeoisie have heightened. Nevertheless, the petty-bourgeoisie on the whole is a reliable ally of the proletariat. As the party of the proletariat is strengthened, the vast majority of the petty-bourgeoisie will join the democratic movement for liberation and emancipation. The revolutionary students and intellectuals in particular--owing to their political keenness and sensitivity, their general inclination to pursue great ideals, and their spontaneous aversion and opposition to all manifestations of injustice, oppression and tyranny--constitute a special contingent of revolutionary democratic forces. They are likely to play a dynamic political role, and in certain periods even vanguard political role, in the revolutionary democratic movement. However, the stability of their political dynamism is determined, in the long run, largely by their integration with or isolation from the revolutionary movement of the toiling people. To the extent they identify with the proletariat and are prepared to integrate with the peasantry some of them can become communist revolutionaries and be great soldiers and even leaders of the struggles for the new democratic revolution.
8.4 The national bourgeoisie in India arose as a class of nascent capitalists who experienced the colonial suppression of their entrepreneurship and development and the constriction of it by feudal powers and who therefore identified with the freedom struggles of the Indian people. They saw in these struggles the prospect of unleashing the productive forces and markets of the country for independent capitalist development. As a bourgeoisie, however, they were wary of communist leadership and, to the extent that they materially and politically identified with the Congress leadership, they sealed their own doom as the Congress represented not national interests but interests of the comprador bourgeoisie-landlord combine. With the transfer of power to this combine, the national bourgeoisie was swept off-stage in national politics. Today, they are the small entrepreneurs in their hundreds of thousands. They depend chiefly on their own resources and do not have the patronage of comprador State capital that the private compradors do. They do not have the sinews to make an indent in the national market either for their finished products of for their raw materials by industrialising agriculture. To the extent they are forced to hitch their lot to the bandwagon of the comprador bureaucrat bourgeoisie they resent it, for they lose their independent initiative without gaining the security of their capital since the big bourgeoisie always play them against one another.
This is a class with a dual character and so a dual role. It is resentful of the suppression of it by the comprador bureaucrat at bourgeoisie and the many hindrances put in its way by local feudal power. Yet it lacks the material and political platform under its initiative. Even more it balks at the necessary proletarian leadership of such platform today. While by its modal nature it is not an enemy class for the new democratic revolution, it is not a reliable ally for it either. In other words, it may, at various times and for varying periods, play a revolutionary role in relation to the democratic movement or stay neutral or even temporarily ally with the counter-revolution. It is a class the proletariat should seek to carry along, once the forces of the proletariat are consolidated, towards the new democracy, or at least to prevent its going to the enemy.
9. With the above class analysis of Indian society, it is quite clear that imperialism and feudalism continue to be the basic, social burden which hold back the social progress and prosperity, of the Indian people. Accordingly, the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed Indian people, and the contradiction between feudalism and the broad masses of Indian people, remain the two basic social contradictions of Indian society. Therefore, national liberation from imperialism and democratic emancipation from feudalism--involving the abolition of the neo-colonial and feudal relations of production--are the basic tasks of the Indian revolution at the present stage of India's social development. [17] The main economic content and the axis of this national democratic revolution is the agrarian revolution. This is so because feudal monopoly of land is the economic basis of all undemocratic social and political authority of feudal forces, principally the landlord class; and because feudalism is the main social base of imperialist oppression. [18]
9.1 The international imperialist bourgeoisie and the indigenous big bourgeoisie-landlord combine, constituting the class alliance that rules, are the main class forces who thrive on and fiercely defend the existing social set-up in India. They are the chief class enemies and targets of Indian revolution. On the other hand, the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie including the majority of intelligentsia, are the main class forces who find the imperialist-feudal oppression unbearable and constitute the motive forces of the revolution. The national bourgeoisie too is objectively pitted against the ruling class alliance and, hence, is amenable to support the revolution off and on. Thus the strategic picture of objective class alignment emerges wherein the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie confront the big bourgeois-landlord combine which is in league with imperialism, overtly and covertly.
9.2 The forging of a united front of all these revolutionary classes of Indian people on the basis of an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal revolutionary programme, and under the leadership of the proletariat, is necessary for the victory of People's Democratic Revolution of India and the fulfillment of its national and democratic tasks. The political alliance of the working class and the peasantry, on the basis of the agrarian revolutionary programme, would constitute the nucleus of such a revolutionary united front, bringing into full play the main force of the revolution and laying the foundation of the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution. By following this political strategy and the military strategy of protracted people's war, the revolutionary united front under the leadership of the proletariat can certainly defeat and overthrow the existing reactionary State and establish instead the truly democratic State of the revolutionary classes of Indian people, i.e., People's Democracy. People's Democratic State of India would act as the democratic dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes under proletarian leadership, against Imperialism, indigenous big bourgeois class and landlord class.
10. In view of this we put forward the following programme before the people
of our country to be implemented by the People's Democratic State, relying
on people's initiative and their concerned associations.
It will be the task of the People's Democratic Revolution to smash the present State machinery completely and build up a new one to serve the needs of the revolution.
Supreme power will go to the people. The material basis of people's supreme power will be their control over the means of production and their own organised armed strength.
The organs of people's democratic state power (legislative, executive and judicial power) will be People's Congress at all levels--ranging from the primary local administrative unit level up to the highest Union level. The People's Congress will be constituted by the elected representatives of the people, on the basis of universal adult franchise, to the exclusion of the overthrown classes. The people will have the right to appoint the candidates (through mass organisations); elect them; and at any time recall them when they lose the confidence of their electorate.
The People's Democratic State shall guarantee the fundamental rights of the Indian people--i.e., the right to life and living with human dignity (including access to health services and housing etc.); the right to knowledge (education and information); the right to work; and the right to struggle for collective good and social progress--and the associated democratic rights.
It will recognise and safeguard the right to believe or not to believe in any religion as a personal matter of every citizen. However, it will not entertain any interference of religion or religious rituals in the functioning of the State and in the education system. Nor will it allow any person or community to use religion, religious rituals and religious festivals as a means of dominating, intimidating or provoking other religious communities or non-believers through public displays.
The Indian Union will be a voluntary union of national states and autonomous regions. All the constituent nationalities will have the guaranteed right to self-determination including the right to secede. Indian union will provide for the autonomous self-development of all nationalities, big or small, while encouraging their natural inter-action and mutual assimilation on a free, rational and progressive basis. All the Indian languages, identified with particular nationalities, will be recognised as national languages and equal in all respects: no particular language will be imposed as the State or link language. In any case, every linguistic community will have the right to interact with the concerned administration in its own language. The respective cultural identities, customary rights and traditions of local self-government of various tribal or Adivasi communities will be protected and assisted to develop on a democratic basis.
In the course of People's Democratic Revolution the People's Army will be developed. The People's Democratic State will take steps to abolish the mercenary army and police and replace these with a People's Army and People's Militia who will defend the country from imperialist aggression and internal subversion by its native allies. The country will be self-reliant in arms and equipment.
All unequal treaties with imperialist powers will be abrogated. All unequal
treaties with our under-developed neighbours too will be abrogated. The People's
Democratic State of India will be among the anti-imperialist democracies
of the world. It will support and strive to unite with all the forces worldwide
who struggle against imperialist oppression exploitation, aggression,
intervention and imperialist war.
The People's Democratic State will complete the Agrarian Revolution and abolish feudalism by confiscating the land of the landlords without compensation and distributing it to the poor and landless peasants (including agricultural labourers); distributing the cattle and agricultural implements to them; abolishing usury and cancelling all peasant debts and mortgages; freeing agriculture from the clutches of foreign finance capital and Indian comprador bureaucrat capital; providing provision of State financial and technical assistance to the peasants and encouragement for using forms of productive association that are to their progressive advantage.
The People's Democratic State will confiscate all foreign, finance capital in all its forms including loans and investments; cancel all imperialist debt; confiscate the capital, industries of the Comprador Bourgeoisie, and convert all imperialist enterprises as well as comprador bureaucrat capitalist enterprises into State enterprises. It will protect the industries of the National Bourgeoisie. It will eradicate unemployment and ameliorate the working and living condition of the people.
On the material basis of the democratisation of Indian State and economy, the People's Democratic State will launch an administrative and ideological crusade to wipe out the caste system involving caste oppression and discrimination; the feudal patriarchal family system involving oppression, exploitation and discrimination of women at home and in the society at large; and religious oppression and discrimination affecting the civil life of common God-fearing people.
It will ensure that no community remains tied down to a particular hereditary menial job; that no public place, utility or symbol remains for exclusive use of any particular community; that so long as social handicap is not completely eliminated special positive measures will be taken to neutralise or mitigate such handicap; and that except for the purposes of these positive measures (such as reservation in government jobs and institutions), records of the State or public institutions will not require the mention of one's caste or religion.It will ensure that there remains no legal basis of gender discrimination regarding the right to family property and inheritance; the right to marriage and control over one's body; the right to official recognition of one's autonomous identity as a person and as a parent; the right to social life and struggle; and the right to opportunities and payment for work. It will provide for special courts with women judges and prosecutors to deal with cases of crime against women. So long as women suffer from accumulated social prejudices and handicaps, the State will provide for special weightage to women in matters of education, employment and promotion.
It will ensure that, along with maintaining secular indifference of the State to all religions and religious practices, ideological and material inputs are provided to encourage the secularisation of social and cultural life of the people and to confine religion to its proper status of being a spiritual pursuit alone. That will go a long way in removing the soil for the growth of religious prejudices and discrimination and ultimately communal fanaticism among the people.
In order to effectively combat the above social evils in particular, and anti-democratic past influences in general, the People's Democratic State will encourage a mass cultural revolutionary movement. That movement will strike at the colonial and feudal aspects of our culture and education while promoting a scientific, national, democratic and mass culture. Universal literacy and the mother tongue as the medium of instruction at all levels will be the necessary tools for bringing about such a mass culture.
Our Party, the political representative of the proletariat in India, puts this Programme before our countrymen. It is of the firm opinion that the implementation of this Programme alone will emancipate our people from the yoke of imperialism and feudalism. It calls upon the broad masses of our people, their political and mass organisations, to grasp this programme, implement it, enrich it with the experience of their revolutionary practice, forge a broad revolutionary alliance on the common basis of this programme and dare to fight and win national liberation, revolutionary democracy and social prosperity. Our Party is committed to be in the forefront of this glorious mobilisation and struggle for a free, prosperous People's Democratic India.
1. The victorious march of the Chinese revolution, the rise to power of proletarian and democratic forces in the East European countries, and the great advance of the national liberation movements of the oppressed peoples all over the world, were evidence of this upsurge and constituted tremendous blows to fascism and imperialism.
2. As a result of World War II, German imperialism and Japanese imperialism got knocked out of contention among major imperialist powers for markets and sources of raw materials; French imperialism and British imperialism were considerably weakened; and U.S. imperialism emerged as the predominant imperialist power economically and militarily, hence politically. In this changed balance of power, U.S. imperialism sought elimination of colonial restrictions for the free play of its own finance capital. The neo-colonial mode of domination suited it most: it had no direct colonies and its finance capital had emerged supreme out of World War II. So, U.S. imperialism could pursue its predatory aims by raising the demand for according formal independence to the colonies.
3. Its subsequent relative decline in India was the result of its relative decline within world finance capital.
4. Soon after 1947, the top leadership of the Communist Party of India definitely betrayed the People's Democratic Revolution. The renouncing of the great Telangana peasants' armed struggle was the chief manifestation of this betrayal.
5. Partition of India on communal lines was the most devastating application of the long-standing British colonialist policy of divide and rule to the surging independence movement of the Indian people. It caused a communal holocaust and a lasting wound to the composite personality of the Indian people. Indian National Congress and All India Muslim League, in their jockeying for political power, proved to be the chief instruments for carrying out the sinister anti-lndia game-plan of the British colonialists. So, partition stands as a bloody monument of national betrayal of the Indian people by their would-be ruling classes. It is a sad commentary on the ideological-political acumen of the Communist Party leadership of that time that it too supported the Partition-Plan.
6. The new IMF-World Bank sponsored policies to be implemented via the Dunkel Draft can only sharpen these retrogressive features and the agrarian crisis, tying up the country further to import of foreign monopoly capital and forced export of agricultural products. The continuous devaluation of the labour of our countrymen and the shilts of every new crises onto their backs is implicit in these policies. These policies are paving the way for foreign capital to penetrate not only agriculture, and even the side-line occupations (dairy farming, poultry farming, fish-farming etc.) but also agro-industry which until recently was an arena available to small local industry which could form linkages with local agriculture and local markets.
7. Of course the usurpation of bureaucrat capital including the misuse of developmental funds has reinforced that prosperity to a significant extent.
8. The transformation of agrarian relations would encompass: putting an end to feudal monopoly of land and to retrogressive expropriation of peasants' surplus product or labour; free distribution of land and agricultural implements to the tillers; provision of State financial and technical assistance to the peasants; and encouragement for using forms of productive association that are to their progressive advantage. All this would help them to raise their productivily and the surplus of their labour -- to the benefit of national industry and, in turn, to the benefit of industrialisation of agriculture itself.
9. This technology is fashioned for the needs of world monopoly capital. Only comprador bureaucrat capital by its very nature is dependent on it. It is by no means the technology suited to the economic needs of the Indian people. The Indian people need technology which is congruent with the present level of their productive forces and their available natural human and capital resources. Continuous import of technology without control over it development leads to a sense of alientation from the very approach needed to fashion machinery and develop technology independently. It destroys--of does not allow the development of--scientific confidence and it creates slavishness towards the suppliers of technology and machinery. It thus constantly removes a people further away from technological capability and perpetuates the dependence on finance capital. Without depending on imperialist countries, People's Democratic State will definitely and self-sufficiently develop science and technology suitable to our country's needs and development.
10. Collection of revenue to encourage or discourage growth in certain areas; to allocate national resources to mould the economy for imperialist capital; to receive finance capital and channel it for buying foreign monopoly capital's products; to actually set up public utilities and industries whose profitability would be unattractive for private industry but which are necessary to underpin the prospering of the comprador bourgeoisie and to make India a fruitful recipient of foreign finance capital.
11. That is, by depressing the income of agricultural producers rather than raising their productivity. Two specific means for doing so are the speculative trade and the "dadani" system of securing captive crops by advancing loans to the distressed peasants.
12. The process of deepening contractual labour without a living wage is a feature that will yet massively extended with the "new economic policy" imposed by the IMF-World Bank-imperialist combine.
13. They have had three wars (one with China and two with Pakistan) have militarily intervened in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, have forcibly merged Sikkim into the Indian Union under the facade of a voted merger, have continuously bullied Nepal into submission on terms of trade.
14. Indian rulers have denied (through betrayals and bloody suppressions) the Kashmiri people their right to decide their future by making out Kashmir to be an issue between Pakistan and India; they have sought to belittle and distort the Kashmiris' wish for freedom by ascribing their movement to Pakistan's ambitions over the state and played upon the common Islamic religion of the majority Kashmiris and of Pakistan. They have been continuously suppressing the North Eastern nationalities through bloody sorties, a reign of terror and divisive sabotage claiming all along that it is protecting the "integrity" of India.
15. Proletariat in India is more than a hundred years old, in fact, older than the Indian bourgeoisie. That way it is a veteran of many a class battle wherein it had demonstrated its militancy and spirit of sacrifice. Although it revealed its aptitude for political struggle as early as at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the issue of Tilak's arrest by the colonial administration, and proclaimed its independent political identity in the Nineteen Twenties by launching its political party, the Communist Party of India, that political promise has mainly not been fullfilled. The working class and the Indian people in general continue to pay a heavy price for that historical failure as they endure prolonged birth-pangs of delayed democratic revolution. The main reasons underlying that historical failure are: one, the party's ideological-political infirmity leading to subsequent revisionist degeneration of the greater part of its political vanguard, and, two, its inability to forge a revolutionary alliance with the toiling peasantry and earnestly lead the agrarian revolutionary movement.
16. Such somewhat fragmented expression of the integral revolutionary quality of the proletariat, however does not rest on profound cleavage in the body of the proletariat that could cast a long term shadow on the revolutionary effectiveness of the working class as a whole; for the crisis of India's semi-feudal economy reinforced by the crises of the world monopoly capitalism, does not allow for the creation of a considerable and durable stratum of privileged workers here. It only underscores the greater need to political work among both the layers of the working class.
17. The two basic social contradictions and tasks subsume the contradiction between comprador bureaucrat capitalism and the broad masses of the Indian people, and the task of abolition of comprador bureaucrat capitalism. This is so because comprador bureaucrat capitalism combines in itself the comprador aspect of subservience to imperialism and the feudal aspect of monopoly parasiticism and arbitrariness.
The class contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the contradiction among the various sections of the ruling classes are other notable class contradictions within Indian society which, however, do not determine the basic course of its development though they influence the specific contours of its motion. The significance of the study of these contradictions lie mainly in the sphere of the tactical conduct of the revolution.
18. This means that the whole process of democratic reconstruction of Indian society would unfold around the transformation of agrarian relations in favour of the toiling peasantry: putting an end to monopoly of land and retrogressive expropriation of the peasants surplus product or labour. That whole process includes the transformation of relations of production in non-agricultural sectors of the economy on the basis of the agrarian evolution, as also the democratic transformation of all social relations and entire cultural life of the Indian people.