The Fourth International condemns the Indira Gandhi government's declaration of a state of emergency in India and the measures that have followed it, such as the arrest of thousands of people, the outlawing of twenty-six organizations, and the imposition of rigid press censorship. While presently directed mainly against the right-wing parties, these measures include attacks on working-class parties like the Communist party of India (Marxist) and the banning of several Maoist organizations. They constitute an attack on the Indian workers movement and the oppressed masses as a whole. It is they who will suffer most from the Gandhi regime's dictatorial turn, as has already been demonstrated by the wage freeze and the restrictions on the right to strike. The measures taken by the Congress party government mark a further deterioration of India's already fragile bourgeois democracy and bring the Indira Gandhi regime into line with the other regimes of South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are now ruled under states of emergency. In Bangladesh, the newest of these states, this state of affairs has already been institutionalized by the creation of a one-party state, mass arrests of radicals, and the banning of the left-wing weekly Holiday.
The suspension of civil liberties in India reflects the Indian bourgeoisie's inability to find a solution to the social crisis that has plagued the country for nearly two decades and has led to a massive loss of confidence in the Gandhi regime.
Indira Gandhi's overwhelming victory in the 1971 general elections was the result of her appearance as the "liberator of Bangladesh" and of her radical demagogy during the campaign, which was summed up in the slogan "End poverty." This demagogy was given added credibility by her alliance with the Communist party of India (CPI), while at the same time she dispensed with the services of many veteran right-wing Congress leaders and party managers. But the worsening of the social and economic crisis after 1971 gradually began to erode popular support for Gandhi and the Congress party. Mass famine on a scale not seen since the 1930s and 1940s, food hoarding, a thriving black market, smuggling on a vastly increased scale, and a further generalization of corruption caused the seething discontent of the masses to erupt in huge mobilizations. The failure of the mass workers organizations to provide leadership for this explosive mass discontent or to provide a national focus for an opposition to the Congress party based on class politics enabled reactionary forces employing populist demagogy to assert a strong influence in the leadership of the mass mobilizations. This explains why the Gandhi regime's attack on right-wing forces is actually a prelude to a broader general attack on the masses as a whole.
The tragedy of the Indian workers and poor peasants lies precisely in the fact that the two largest workers parties, the CPI and the CPI(M) are completely incapable of developing a struggle against Indian capital in the interests of the working class and oppressed poor. This failure has been clearly manifested in these parties' inability to organize any response at all to the wage freeze and in their abject failure to mobilize support for and solidarity with the 1974 railway workers strike, which was brutally crushed by the Gandhi government. The CPI and the CPI(M) have put forward class-collaborationist policies instead of a class-struggle line based on the needs of the masses. Thus, while the CPI has hitched onto Gandhi's coattails, the CPI(M) has blocked with other bourgeois forces, even right-wing communalists.
The CPI's decision, fully backed by Pravda, to support the state of emergency and to offer its full cooperation to Gandhi once again reveals the political and moral bankruptcy of Stalinism. Under the guise of opposing reaction the CPI is now openly backing repression, justifying the arrest of its former comrades in the CPI(M) and praising press censorship.
While unequivocally condemning the new measures of the Gandhi government and demanding their immediate repeal, we emphasize that these measures are the culmination of a series of repressive steps that have been taken in India since 1967-68 and have been directed against the workers movement. The international bourgeois press, now shedding hypocritical tears over the demise of "Indian democracy," has been silent about the continuing imprisonment, torture, and killing of radicals. There are some 40,000 political prisoners in India today, many of them belonging to Maoist groups. Hundreds have been killed in prison. Two of them, Kista Gowd and Bhoomia, are still awaiting execution in Andhra Pradesh prison. The bourgeoisie remains silent about these prisoners.
The Fourth International calls for a resolute campaign throughout the international workers movement to demand the immediate end of the state of emergency in India and the release of all political prisoners. We call for the broadest possible united-front effort toward this objective.
July 6, 1975