Revolutionary Perspective for India

(Quote of the Week)

The founding document of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI), written while India was under British rule, emphasized the proletariat’s unique capacity to lead all the exploited and oppressed in the struggle for their emancipation. Applying the Trotskyist perspective of permanent revolution, the BLPI program stressed the fight for the political independence of the proletariat from the Indian bourgeoisie, which is today, as under colonial rule, a counterrevolutionary force beholden to imperialism.

The leadership of the revolution, which the peasantry cannot provide for itself, can come only from an urban class. But the Indian bourgeoisie cannot possibly provide this leadership, since in the first place, it is reactionary through and through on the land question itself, sharing as it does so largely in the parasitic exploitation of the peasantry. Above all, the bourgeoisie, on account of its inherent weakness and dependence on Imperialism itself, is destined to play a counter-revolutionary role in the coming struggle for power.

The leadership of the peasantry in the coming petty bourgeois democratic agrarian revolution that is immediately posed can therefore come only from the industrial proletariat, and an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is [a] fundamental pre-requisite of the Indian revolution. This alliance cannot be conceived in the form of a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Party” or of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” in the revolution. It is impossible so to fuse within a single party or a dictatorship the policies of two classes whose interests only partially coincide and are bound to come into conflict sooner or later. The revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and peasantry can mean only proletarian leadership of the peasant struggle and, in case of revolutionary victory, the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship with the support of the peasantry....

Despite its subjective weakness in organization and consciousness, inevitable in a backward country and in the conditions of repression surrounding it, the working class is entirely capable of leading the Indian revolution. It is [the] only class objectively fitted for this role, not only in relation to the Indian situation, but in view of the decline of capitalism on [a] world scale, which opens the road to the international proletarian revolution. The proletariat needs above all to develop its own independent political party, free from the influence of the bourgeoisie, and armed with the weapons of revolutionary Marxism, to lead it not only in the day to day struggles but above all in the coming revolution. Without such a party the proletariat must fail in its historic task of leading the masses of India to revolutionary victory.

—“Draft Programme of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India” (1942),
reprinted in Charles Wesley Ervin, Tomorrow Is Ours:
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935-48 (2006)