(Comrade Dipankar’s address at the AILC Convention held in Kozhikode, Kerala on 22 January)

Comrades,

When we had assembled in Delhi to launch this All India Left Coordination, it was four days before the Independence Day of 2010. Today when we meet here in Kozhikode, it is incidentally again four days before another important National Day, the Republic Day of 2011. Between Independence Day of 2010 and Republic Day of 2011, which way has the country moved? Almost everybody would agree the country has moved deeper into crisis.

It is a crisis which we can see everywhere, it is a crisis which we can feel everywhere. It pinches us every time we go to the market to buy the necessities of life. Sometime back, a newspaper reported that onions and petrol and beer are selling at the same price in our country. Since then onion and petrol prices seem to be involved in a relentless race. If onion prices race ahead during the day, yet another hike in oil prices takes effect from midnight.

If prices are loudly announcing the economic crisis from the market to the household, the fields and factories, the peasants and workers, are also reeling under the same crisis. If every new day brings news of more peasant suicides from Vidarbha or Telangana, there is also no respite from starvation deaths in rural poor households in incredible India’s invisible villages. In cities, factories and offices are being shut down, and workers thrown out of jobs. Food security and employment guarantee have proved to be no more than empty words, cruel jokes inflicted on the needy people by our corrupt and greedy rulers.

The crisis is economic, it is also absolutely political. The state is waging war on the people and their livelihood. It is afraid of the people and their protests, it is afraid of the intellectuals and their dissent. It kills the people when they resist SEZs and corporate plunder. It slaps sedition charges on doctors and writers; it accuses courageous lawyers raring to raise a finger against judicial malpractices of committing ‘contempt of court’.

Look at the scams stacked in the cupboard of virtually every ministry in almost every government, whether at the centre or in the states. Scams today are great levellers – there is perhaps no institution which can claim to be free from scam stains. When the Central Vigilance Commissioner appointed by the Central government has to face trial on corruption charges, we can easily imagine how deep and wide the rot has spread.

It is not just the governments and ministers and bureaucrats, top Army officers are also found to be involved in huge land scams. After the ‘Adarsh’ scam, the Army seems a little worried about its image and a senior Army official has now been awarded some symbolic punishment by the Army itself. But if the Army were to go into every accusation beyond selective and cosmetic court-martials, it would have perhaps no other option but to overhaul itself completely. Judges are facing impeachment motions and serious corruption charges – someone who only the other day retired as the Chief Justice of India is today haunted by charges of nepotism and misuse of power.

The Army and the judiciary apart, we now also know what many influential media personalities are really doing. They are not just giving us information or trying to shape our opinions, they are also working in tandem with corporate lobbies to make sure that big corporations have the full benefit of pliant ministers and friendly policies. The 2G scam and the Radia tapes have now clearly revealed an intricate organic nexus between big corporations, influential media houses, important ministers, big bureaucrats and ruling parties.

The crisis can also be seen clearly in the social sphere. Oppression of dalits is on the rise right in so-called economically advanced regions like Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana, and UP. In BSP-ruled UP, a dalit girl is raped and then imprisoned while the MLA accused of raping her, an upper-caste MLA who won on a BSP ticket continues to enjoy the party’s patronage. In Nitish Kumar’s Bihar, a woman teacher who had been a victim of continuing sexual harassment by a BJP MLA, had been left with no other option but the drastic measure of stabbing the MLA to death. And is anyone keeping count of the number of women and young couples daring to marry according to their own wishes who are being killed by their own families or caste panchayats in the name of protecting the ‘honour’ of the family or village or caste?

The crisis then clearly is all-pervasive. It is multi-layered and structural, it is a crisis rooted in the failure and treachery of India’s rulers. It is a crisis of credibility and legitimacy of India’s ruling classes. What must be the communist response to this crisis? When the livelihood of the people is at stake, when the shadow of corruption looms large over every sphere of national and public life, when democracy is under growing assault, it is the historic responsibility of communists to unite and lead the people under the banner of people’s welfare, honesty and democracy.

The launching of the AILC in August 2010 was a product of this communist urge and sense of responsibility. Through diverse initiatives like conventions and protest campaigns we have spread the message of the AILC to the fighting Left ranks across the country. In contrast to the opportunist Left’s policy of “all for a share of bourgeois state power” we have upheld the fighting Left banner “all for communist assertion, all for people’s struggles”.

The arrival of AILC has signalled a new possibility in the Indian Left movement. It has not only brought together Left forces from diverse historical backgrounds, it is also helping all of us to understand each other better and in the process it is strengthening the process of realignment of Left forces and radicalization of the Left movement. Till recently we knew little about your struggle against the CPI(M)’s opportunism and corruption in Kerala, you too perhaps had little idea about the CPI(ML) – yet today we are marching shoulder to shoulder in common struggles.

In different states we are faced with different historical conditions, different social and political trends. The conditions in West Bengal and Kerala where we face virtually the same ruling class policies and same attacks on dissent and democracy perpetrated by Left-led governments are clearly more complex than states where we are directly pitted against NDA or UPA rule. Yet while resisting these government’s anti-people moves and fighting against the CPI(M)’s growing degeneration and authoritarian attitude, we are determined to hold high the independent and fighting banner of the Left, because that alone is the real challenge and the real need of the hour for the communist movement.

We all know how well-known erstwhile CPI(M) leaders like MV Raghavan and KR Gauri failed to retain their communist identity and got subsumed in the UDF. Learning from their miserable experience, today’s fighting communists at the grassroots in Kerala have every prospect to succeed in charting a new road of advance and we in CPI(ML) and AILC wish you every success in this direction.

From Delhi in August 2010 to Kozhikode in January 2011, we have surely come some way. But there is a much longer and challenging way ahead of us. We have now resolved to undertake a countrywide mass campaign against the all-pervasive crisis being inflicted by the UPA government, especially focussing on the burning issues of price rise, unemployment, corruption and state repression. Apart from organizing protest actions in different districts and states, we will also march from different states to Delhi and on 11 March we will all be demonstrating outside Parliament in the national capital.

We also have important Assembly elections coming up in key states, including Kerala and West Bengal where the opportunist Left too will have to face the wrath of the people and pay the price for their authoritarian arrogance and anti-people steps. The coming days are bound to witness turbulent moments in national politics. These are decisive hours for the Left movement and the AILC will have to move ahead through this political turbulence, bringing together fighting forces of the Left in all corners of the country, and reinvigorating and radicalizing the Left identity in the midst of powerful people’s struggles.