India: Janata Rats Grab Lifebelts

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Disaffection and mutiny are now rife among the ruling crew of opportunists, timeservers and crooks, known as the Janata.

These political vermin are haunted at every twist and turn of their devious careers by the looming spectre of Indira Gandhi.

Confidence

The Lok Sabha (one of the wo chambers of parliament) may still be voting its confidence in the Janata coalition government, against the challenge of the former dictator's Congress Party.

But that majority reflects the elections of last March, when the workers and peasants rejected the Gandhi dictatorship, and it has already been greatly reduced by desertions.

Recent elections have also shown how little that majority reflects the present dwindling support for Desai's administration.

The spectacular advances made by the Congress (Indira) in the February state elections have now been confirmed by results from Andhra Pradesh in the north.

Naufoninu anain horn Desai increased within the Janata, riven as it is by internal struggles for power.

George Fernandes-leader of the Socialist Party, and Minister for Industries-has attempted to rally the coalition into unity.

In a statement circulated to the Executive, he declares that:

Bma harra failed miserably in communicating with the people. We must be ruthless with ourselves and examine the causes of this loss of credibility, and then provide the remedies".

These "causes' are obvious enough: the total failure of the Janata to solve any of the pressing problems which bear down on the Indian masses.

It is this situation which is driving large sections of the masses back, in frustration, to the politics of the former dictator. There are no possible remedies' for this crisis within the terms of the Janata popular front.

Politically dominated by the bourgeoisie, the Janata is by its essence incapable of meeting the demands and aspirations of the workers and peasants-it can, and will, act only to repress them further.

Voyage

By joining the Janata, Fernandes embarked on a voyage of class collaboration with shipmates who are avowed enemies to the working class and its allies.

He has no power to alter the course of this ship of war, now that it is leaking at every seam and sinking lower nt arrari, mamant they offer no way to overcome that crisis, except abstract maximalist demands for total revolution.

They fight in the belief that this will hasten the dictatorship of the proletariat, and for this reason we defend the Red Brigades without reserve against every form of witch-hunt and attack from the bourgeoisie and its agents.

At the same time there can be no political criticism too sharp of actions which have objectively increased the oppression of Italian workers by capitalism, and yet given no alternative leadership for revolutionary struggle.

There is no principled objection to the tactic of assassination at certain stages of the class struggle.

But terrorism can never substitute for the careful and consistent work of a revolutionary party fighting in the mass organisations of the labour movement in conflict with Stalinism and reformism for the Transitional Programme for socialist revolution.

What is needed in Italy is not more kneecappings, kidnappings, and shootings, but the building of a section of a reconstructed Fourth International to lead workers in independent struggle against the threat of fascism and forward to the overthrow of capitalism and bourgeois damneraru

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In the early 1950s Michel Pablo as leader of the Fourth International undertook a revision of the Trotskyist programme.

He devised the conception that under pressure of 'objective' events-an impending 'Third World War' and the pressure of the working class-the Stalinist