INIEKNALIUNALI Movement of Indian masses highlights leadership crisis

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sharp and otten violent conflict partners recognise that they Gandhi . has worked to restrain Gandhi .without exploit these movements and to provoking enormous and threatrange behind the banner of the ening protests on a national alongside new technology in Indian crisis Essential reading for anyone attempting to reach a scientific understanding of the contradictory role of The plans of Indira vanant to return to partiament as leader of the official opposition party are now maturing rapidly.

Since the general election two and a half years ago, which swept her dictatorship from power land overturned the mammoth majority in her own constituency), Gandhi has frequently and passionately declared that she renounces all ambition for high office and is content to serve 'the Indian people' in more humble stations.

These resounding claims have always sounded cavernously hollow.

Now an MP of the Congress (Indira) has agreed to resign his safe seat in the southern state of Karnataka so that Nehru's daughter can resume her career in style.

Gandhi's election would deal & humiliating blow against the buffeted Janata coalition.

Brought to government on a coro or opposition to tne eLoppressive period of 'Emergency' legislation, the Janata has never dared nor fundamentally desired to bring Gandhi to account for those two years of vicious repression.

The generous credit from the Indian masses to this 'demo. cratic' force has long since been exhausted.

By preserving intact the massive central machinery of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is the exiled leader of Iran's Shiite muslims.

At present he is calling for the overthrow of the dictatorship of the Shah and for the restoration of the democratic rights contained in the Persian constitution of 1906.

Limited

This was a very limited bourgeois democratic constitution. Its implementation at the present time would not solve the material and political problems of the Persian masses. That would require the overthrow of the semi-feudal aristopost-war Stalinism.

Available from WSL, Dartmouth Park Hill, London the bourgeois state, the Desai Cassa tolao alariande limits of its democratic For all the confusions and fumblings of its economic policy, the Janata has always intended to act in the interests of capitalism.

Workers demanding wage increases and poor peasants occupying land have come into with this government.

Congress (Indira) those millions scale. cracy and the capitalist class.

But Khomeini's espousal of democratic change in Iranopportunistic and hypocritical as it may be-has meant that in the eyes of a large section of the oppressed masses . this aged religious leader has come to represent a hope of relief from the cruel and hated dictatorship of the Shah.

This is not altered by the fact that at the same time other Shiite leaders and even Khomeini, whose pronouncements are seldom unambiguous and who still represents the religious hierarchy, have also mobilised masses of people against the Shah on very reactionary demands.

Until the mass movement littleAssimof the unemployed starving in ‹ne towns ana ine countrystae. Jala More recently, the most slavish supporters of her dictatorship, the pro-Soviet Communist Party of India, have come forward in the mass agitation of the 'Untouchables' No authority Desai and his coalition have not the authority to can produce a leadership which represents the independent interests of the oppressed classes, then religious leaders and petty bourgeois liberal intel -lectuals will continue to play an important role in the opposition Much though they hate and Tear wanani, inay tina mass bama struggles of workers and peasants a far more intolerable prospect.

But the Janata's problems do not end with Gandhi's resurgence and the bitter fighting within its own ranks.

The deepening economic crisis of capitalism ravages under developed countries . such as India with special intensity.

To boost profitability, an assault has to be made on the organised economic and political strength of the working class.

An Industrial Relations Bill has been prepared for the purpose, While Janata leaders declare their opposition to a wages freeze, this bill proposes wide-ranging powers of imposing compulsory arbitration in disputes, and outlaws strikes in "essential' services l'essential' is of course defined broadly).

Trade union bureaucrats have been closely involved in tha dicassiano triuordo tha finsI draft, but these proposed restrictions on the democratic rights of workers have already met with fierce opposition from the most militant sections of the class.

At the same time, Desai's cabinet faces mounting problems in asserting the authority of the central government over the powerful state governments, only half of which the tyrant himself these treacherous 'socialists' have put Khomeini, and reportedly other Persian leaders exiled by the Shah, under house arrest and have refused them any oppor tunity to communicate with their followers.

The iraqi regime which is a coalition of the Baath Socialist Party and some members of the Communist Party who survived the recent bloody purges, now lines up with the Moscow and Peking bureaucracies, the British "Labour" government and the Carter administration as the are now controlled by the Janata.

These problems have reached their highest and most complex form in West Bengal, where the Communist Party (Marxist) holds an absolute majority of seats yet leads a popular front Despite its revolutionary pretensions and mass base of support, the CP(M) has dragged out all the old arguments and some new ones, to justify its treacherous activity and failure to meet the demand of workers and peasants.

Promises of land reform have materialised in a petty. and bureaucratically hidebound programme that has done little to alter the distribution of agricultural property.

At no point has the CP(M) sought to mobilise the revolutionary strength of the working class to carry through land reform and seize the massive holdings of multinationals and other major bourgeois companies in West Bengal.

On the contrary, they have sought to bring pressure on the Janata coalition by lining up alongside the bourgeois governwords) the of one of most repressiv in tyrannies the world.

We remind readers of Socialist Press that this band of criminal enemies of the working class in Bagdad are week after week given uncritical adulation by the Newsline, the paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, an organisation which makes the grotesque claim of being Trotskyist.

We ask these "Trotskyists" of the WRP leadership yet again -do they support the Iraqi government's measures in defence of the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran? ments of other states.

Last week, Kanail Bhattacharjee, Minister of Industry, even demanded that the central government ease its restrictions so that multinationals and major Indian capitalists could invest more in the state.

Extend exploitation Far from acting to expropriate such sections of imperialism, and establish some basis for a socialist planned economy, the CP(M) is now working to extend their exploitation of workers!

But the development of the class struggle in West Bengal is reaching well beyond the artificial and strangling limitations which the CP(M) hopes to impose.

Chief Minister Jyoti Basu now talks of introducing legislation next year for complete land reform.

But strengthened by the power of the working class shown in the election and preservation of the CP(M) government, and frustrated by weakness and vacillation of that CP(M) leadership, thousands of landless labourers •áll over the state have seized land themselves for cultivation.

The workers and peasants of West Bengal are experiencing the bitter betrayals of an inadequate leadership that has neither the determination nor the ability to lead them to victory.

Toss aside

Huge social forces are moving forward in India with the power to toss aside the opportunists and incompetents of the Janata coalition, to threaten the survival capitalism in India.

But the CP(I) and CP(M) can lead the Indian masses only down different roads to defeat.

The struggles of workers in India will be spent uselessly, if they are not firmly directed by a leadership fighting for a revolutionary programme to mobilise the strength of the proletariat against its enemies, and to unite behind it those forces prepared to battle for socialism against the oppression of imperialism, against political exploitation by Gandhi and other populists, and against the counter-revolutionary agents of WRP leaders:

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Contains Tim Wohlforth's known Theory of Structural ¡lation', suppressed since 1964.

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