July 28. Twenty years ago on this day, comrade Charu Mazumdar was tortured to death in police custody after twelve days of rigorous ‘interrogation’ failed to extract any Party secrets from him. His death was avenged instantly and sporadically by a series of annihilation of class enemies, arms-snatching etc. in many places, and at a more mature political level by reorganising the Party centre on the same day two years later — on July 28, 1974 — under the leadership of comrade Jawhar (Subrata Dutta).
Since that day “CM” has never ceased to live among us. On every turn of our journey along the hilly, tortuous road of Indian revolution we have rediscovered him and learnt from him. In the late seventies, for instance, we started the practice of observing July 28 as “national martyrs’ day”, projecting his supreme self-sacrifice as an epitome of all the precious lives laid down by various democratic, patriotic and communist forces for the national and social liberation of the people of India. When in 1980 we gave the call for building a democratic and patriotic front at the national level against the Congress(I) regime at the centre, we took as our point of departure Charu Mazumdar’s last article, “People’s Interest is the Party’s Interest” (June 1972). In that article he had put forward, in the context of setback in armed struggle, the tasks of strengthening the Party and building the broadest possible anti-Congress united front incorporating left ranks disgruntled with their leaderships’ passivity in the face of reactionary onslaughts of the Congress — a, front to be based on united struggle, but not armed struggle alone, We criticised ourselves for our delay in grasping the shift in CM’s tactical thinking and went ahead with the task of further developing it in theory and practice in accordance with the contemporary situation. Within two years the IPF was born.
Well, but that was ten years ago. Over these years, we have introduced so many changes in our Party line and further changes cannot be ruled out. So do we really cherish comrade Charu Mazumdar to this day sincerely and in a contemporary context — and not ritualistically or simply as a great historical figure?
Comrade Charu Mazumdar was the leader who placed the communist movement in India on the correct ideological rails, gave it a new political direction and thrust and built up the revolutionary Party of the Indian proletariat as the outcome and vehicle of these ideological-political struggles. In each of these three areas, we must grasp and develop, the essence of his revolutionary legacy. This is the only way we can pay tributes to our respected leader who taught us never to stand still, who represented the acme of creativity and dynamism.
Charu Mazumdar laid the ideological foundation of CPI(ML) in the context of the international Great Debate — in the course of struggle against Soviet revisionism and its concrete manifestations in our country. In subsequent years he, and after his departure the Party founded by him, further intensified this dual struggle even as the other two communist parties became more and more euphoric about the Soviet superpower. Now that the superpower has collapsed under its own weight — rendering its huge nuclear stockpile history’s costliest farce — the Great Debate stands settled in real life. Despite certain extreme positions (notably the thesis of social imperialism), the essential direction of CM’s trenchant criticism has proved to be correct. Simultaneously, the new economic policy of the Indian government has indisputably confirmed another of CM’s views — which sounded rather queer to many till recently — that the Soviet-aided public sector .actually served as a launching pad for private monopoly capital. But ossified dogmas die hard and the old struggle between two world outlooks continues in a new form on such questions as the main causes of the Soviet shipwreck and the principal world contradiction of our epoch. It now falls upon us to carry the ideological struggle forward in the new conditions and work for the retrieval of the revolutionary essence of Marxism, as CM did in his day. In the Party Congress scheduled to be held late this year, we are going to adopt — for the first time in our history — a full-fledged Ideological Document to deal extensively with such questions.