Class Struggle Rages in India

Workers are fighting determined battles against the bosses in India, a country with almost one-fourth of the world’s population, more than the Western Hemisphere plus Europe combined. PLP is growing roots and winning workers to our international party, and for communist revolution.
Workers and Students Fight Sexism and Battle Bosses
Worldwide attention focused on the systematic sexist violence against women when a medical student, Jyoti Singh, was raped and murdered on a New Delhi bus in 2012. Thousands of demonstrating workers then broadened the grassroots struggle against sexism throughout India, especially in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Recently, tens of thousands of students in Kolkata marched in protest against the corrupt cover-up of a sexual harassment incident, and dozens were arrested in clashes with the police. The main university was disrupted for weeks, with many functions completely shut down.
In the same city, workers producing jute, a rope-like substance made from plants, have fought back particularly hard. The hard labor to make jute might earn from $1.60 to $6.50 per day. This is nothing compared to the amount the bosses make off of this product, and many workers have had their hours cut. In one factory, workers physically attacked a plant manager who cut the workers’ hours and, in the attack, the manager was killed. In a separate attack, workers damaged a plant manager’s home while the manager escaped. These attacks are not isolated examples of workers’ fightback, as thousands of auto, transportation and agricultural workers have staged militant strikes in the north and south of the country.
India has a rich history of class struggle and revolutionary movements, which have been betrayed again and again by political parties claiming to be “communist” while joining with the bosses in helping to exploit the working class. Many working-class people became disillusioned with these parties, especially the mainstream “Communist” Party of India, and simply did not vote, which resulted in the electoral victory of the right-wing capitalist parties over the usual liberal capitalist parties. The bosses’ current right-wing Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has a mass base in the viciously racist and sexist Hindu nationalist movement, the Hindutva, which has many similarities to Hitler’s Nazi Party.
In 2002, Modi was Chief Minister in the state of Gujarat, India’s industrial and commercial heart, Hindutva mobs rioted and murdered over 1,000 Muslims following years of anti-Muslim, nationalist propaganda. During the killings, Modi had requested the police and security forces not to intervene. While Modi is now Prime Minister and openly dedicated to helping giant corporations and banks accumulate more and more wealth, those workers won to Hindutva ideology are being used the same way that Hitler used middle-income types rocked by economic crisis to turn against their working-class brothers and sisters.
Separate Struggles With the Same Goal
The stakes are high in India. The increase in working class fightback in India is extremely positive, and workers around the world can learn from their example and their heroism. But unless workers in India are won to a revolutionary communist party with an international outlook of organizing billions to lead a revolution and destroy capitalism, workers will continue to be divided and suffer grinding poverty and vicious racist and sexist attacks. All these struggles show the courage and determination of many working-class people. But all of these movements also reveal the weaknesses that will destroy these movements as fascist repression intensifies.
All of the struggles are divided with no revolutionary communist party to tie them together and build the type of mass movement that workers need. The women’s movement in Delhi was an important part of the recent struggles against sexism, but is a single-issue movement. Killing an individual boss here and there will not systemically change the lives of jute workers of Kolkata — they need a revolutionary party to destroy the bosses’ entire system of capitalism. That means building unity with the women’s and student movements, which number in the tens of thousands in the same city. It means unity with fellow striking auto workers and agricultural farmers. In the countryside, the government is using the military to push the indigenous Adivasi people off their land to make room for big corporations who want to steal it, and the military has been especially brutal.
The capitalists in India are not fools — they know to maintain their power, regionally and nationally, they need to pit one group against the other. The capitalists have also found ways to effectively use the centuries-old caste system of ranking people by birth — technically banned — even as they pretend to oppose it. These types of racism severely super-exploit and oppress targeted groups like the Adivasi, the Muslims and lower-caste workers. But they also split up and distract the whole working class from a unified fight against our common oppression. This keeps the whole working class down. PLP has always made the struggle against all forms of racism the front edge of our struggle to build a communist movement.
Workers Need a Revolutionary Party to Go All the Way
The masses of workers fighting back have been breaking away from the fake “communists” and other capitalist parties with their false promises about reforming capitalism. Capitalism is the reason for these nightmares in the first place — centuries of imperialism and vicious racism gave way to national independence and instead of British capitalists, workers are oppressed by Indian capitalists.  
PLP’s strategy of building an international party has had greater appeal to many workers and students as nationalist movements have become the new oppressors. In the past, the communist movement tried to compromise with nationalism. It believed that nationalism was a necessary aspect of the struggle against imperialism. History has proven what PLP pointed out almost fifty years ago — that nationalism leads potentially communist movements right back to capitalism. In India, and throughout South and Central Asia, PLP is systematically expanding its influence among industrial workers, students, and grassroots organizations, fighting for workers to understand that the working class in the whole region has the same destiny as their sisters and brothers all over the world, and need one party to destroy imperialism at its core: capitalism.