(The following article is from the April 16-30,  2010 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

By B. Prasant, PV correspondent in India

     At a March 26-27 meeting of its state committee, the Bengal section of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of the strongest units of Asian Communist Parties after China and Vietnam, called for widening and deepening the struggle against right reaction and left sectarianism. Since 2008, nearly 400 CPI(M) leaders, activists, and workers have been killed and thousands more seriously injured by rightists and the ultra-left (so-called "Maoists").

     The Bengal CPI(M) and its mass organisations (whose numbers are in the millions) work tirelessly among the small and marginal farmers, the rural poor, workers, and the poorer sections of the people. The Left Front led by the party has governed Bengal since 1977.

     Until now, the Bengal CPI(M) has responded to the armed attacks on its cadres through mass movements and organised protest actions. The assaults commenced in earnest when the CPI(M) suffered losses in elections to the lower house of the Indian parliament in mid-2008.

     In the wake of the Lok Sabha elections, the CPI(M) was dealt a further blow. For the first time in close to four decades, the Party suffered defeats in Bengal's three-tier rural self-governing or Panchayat system - at the levels of the districts (Zillah Parishads), the blocks (the Panchayat Samities), and the villages (Gram Panchayats).

     Other changes have since taken place in the state's political scene. Just as the CPI(M) has built a strong base for the Left Front, along with eight other left, socialist, and workers' parties for more than three decades, the anti-Communist opposition has fashioned what is called a mahajot or "grand alliance" in the corporate media.

     This grouping, anti-people and opportunist to the core, includes anti-Communist elements of virtually every kind - left, right, centre, and the lunatic fringe - plus a guiding hand from the agents of imperialism, and their lackeys in the Indian ruling classes. Adding succour has been the centre-right Congress party that runs the central government in the cosy ambience of a constitution that is very much more unitary than federal.

     The division of votes amongst the anti-Communist opposition in Bengal has always worked in favour of the CPI(M) and the Left Front, especially after 1998, when the large and violent segment of the provincial Congress, or Pradesh Congress as it is known here, broke away to form the "Trinamul" ("grass-roots") Congress with Mamata Banerjee as its supremo. Mamata always had good relations with the left sectarians and the right reactionaries, through links via the corporate houses and international "sponsors" of her brand of violent anti-Communism. Historically this has been perhaps a minor factor, but a factor nonetheless in determining both urban and rural election results.

     Adding grist to the mill of the anti-Communist opposition has been the role of the "left" literati, including artistes, teachers, and intellectuals who have always been closet anti-Communists, even while benefitting from the governance of the Left Front. These elements, otherwise very professional in the theatre, cinema, painting, and writing, have formed several "groups" who squabble over art and such matters. Sometimes they are critical of the right and stand opposed to the religious, nationalist concept of Hindutva. Now they are making a unified appearance as an anti-Communist front, openly calling for a parivartan or régime change.

     By themselves, these groups do not carry much political weight. But when synergised with the blast of media propaganda in favour of the need to "end" Communist governance, they constitute a bigger factor. In south Asian countries, such celebrities are known to influence the voting pattern of the bourgeois and the petty bourgeois who compose the bulk of the urban and rural "middle class."

     The shift in loyalties of these classes is unfortunately also legitimised by local grievances, nurtured over the decades against malgovernance and by acts of omission and/or commission by those considered "friends" of the CPI(M) and the Left Front.

     As elections approach in the middle of 2011, the CPI(M) has decided to go deep among the masses, talking and listening, and then trying to rectify itself in a big way. Rectification has always been seen in the CPI(M) as an ongoing process, in the manner of Mao Zedong who characterised it as a continuous act of "from the people and to the people."

     The CPI(M) has also chosen to muster its strength amongst the youth. In areas where it is under physical attack, especially in the forest areas in western Bengal, the CPI(M) has called for protests to be turned into mass resistance. This political-organisational drive has started to yield results. The killings of CPI(M) cadres have fallen, after a gruelling couple of years of death and mayhem. The left sectarians have been disheartened as they lose their grip over the masses, and as their "field commanders" flee the state. The CPI(M) has organised village-level resistance committees who keep vigil and repel armed incursions by the sectarian and reactionary elements. Meanwhile, elections for 81 municipalities will take place in June. We hope to preview this campaign in our next column.