[The formal unification of Vietnam was carried out…]

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The formal unification of Vietnam was carried out last week, when the first session of the National Assembly met on June 24th in Hanoi. It set up a cimmission to draft a new Constitution and declared Hanoi the capital of the reunified nation.

Yet the country - and especially the south - remains gripped by an intense social and economic crisis.

The official decree that Saigon is to be called 'Ho Chi Minh City' cannot alter the fact that the old capital of the south remains a centre of unemployment is strention and speculation that gthening the bureaucracy within the Party apparatus itself.

As Tran Trung Tan, head of the Party's education commission in Saigon, admitted:

*When the revolution triumphed the reactionaries said 'All the cadres are perfect." Now, having seen that certain cadres enjoy women, money, villas, cars, they say that the whole world is like that, and that all the cadres are corrupt"

Tran Trung Tan is a veteran of the revolutionary struggle in the south. He spent five years in the tiger cage' torture chambers of the Thieu regime's Con-Son concentration camp.

But his words reflect a situation where the material conditions that feed bureaucracy are rife in the south. and have been little reduced in the vear ence Theration Biack markets in consumer goods and petrol, the reappearance of prostitution, the illegal appropriation of houses and cars for Party officials, expensive restaurants while a severe food shortage continues - all these have forced the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the south to issue public warnings against abuses by the Party cadre itself.

But, far from attacking the problem politically, by placing real power in the hands of democratically elected committees of the workers, soldiers and peasants, the Stalinist leadership in Vietnam is looking for administrative solutions with the help of massive imperialist "aid'.

United Nations Secretary General Waldheim has launched an appeal to member states for 430 million dollars to finance a resettlement Following the report from a Swiss diplomat, Victot Umbricht, to the UN after he toured South Vietnam in March, the UN is to back a policy aimed at shifting 40% of the population of the south. The large majority of these are peasants who fled from the coun tryside during the final stages of the war in the south and have been stranded, almost all unemployed, in the cities since then.

The main economic aims of the UN-backed programme will be to bring abandoned land back into cultivation, and to repair the heavily-damaged transport system in the cruth Like most UN 'aid' it is aimed at propping up and reforming an underdeveloped, agricultural economy. But one of the main causes of unemployment in the south is also the bottlenecks facing Many lactores are small piants, set up to assemble parts and materials imported from the major capitalist states - especially the US and Japan.

With the defeat of imperialism in 1975, many of these supplies were cut off, and a number of technical and administrative staff - tied to the US and the Thieu regime - fled the country.

The Provisional Revolutionary Government has been able to do little to cut down the power and privileges of those who remain.

And some of them have clearly found political niches for themselves in the new regime. At the same time industrial plant remains seriously under-used, and many of the old wage differentials persist.

The crisis in Vietnam underlines the importance of political struggle for workers and peasants democracy against the bureaucracy in all the Stalinist dominated workers states.

The workers and peasants of Vietnam, who carried for decades the harsh burden of the war against impera in their on hands except through democratically elected councils, in which all tendencies of the labour movement are free to be

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Pose 4 June 26th marks an anniversary that will not be celebrated by the Indian working class and peasantry except in tears and anger.

It is one year since Prime Minister Gandhi declared a national State of Emergency that has developed into a persistent and brutal persecution of the workers' movement and oppressed masses, with over 200,000 political prisoners now in jail.

On June 12th 1975, Gandhi was convicted of using corrupt electoral practices and was barred from public office for six years; on the same day election results in the State of Gujerat showed the latest of six defeats for the Congress Party, that time to veteran Gandhian Jaya Prakesh Narayan's Peoples' Front.

The ensuing clamour for her resignation included a rally of 50,000 in the capital, urged by JP to start a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience.

By 5am the next morning, police had dragged some 700 oppositionists from their beds to jail and Gandhi announced the State of Emergency.

The whole of the Indian press was placed under- censorship, JP himself was jailed, on the 4th July 26 opposition parties were banned, and a-series of presidential ordinances suspended civil liberties including the right to strike, right to freedom of speech and association, and the right of appeal to the courts against arbitrary arrest.

The Emergency was Gandhi's response to an economic and political crisis which had been accumulating for some years and still remains unresolved despite the furious repression of the working masses in the last year.

LANDOWNERS

The backbone of Gandhi's bourgeois nationalist Congress Party, which has held power continuously since independence in 1947, is the rural large landowning class.

Its support is guaranteed by government assistance to big farmers at the expense of increasing landlessness and poverty of small peasants, up to the eyeballs in debt to moneylenders.

These Indian 'kulars' kept prices high even though the Green Revolution increased production, and withhold thair Mienhicac promoted a profitable industrial base for private capital and bought middle class support by state employment.

This resulted in inefficient public spending and vicious private sectors and a parasitic agriculture dominated by massive corruption, especially of Congress officials, and inflicting an inflationary system of shortages on the masses.

INFLATION

The cost of the Bangladesh war, crop failures and the oil crisis combined to stoke inflation as these were financed without touching the rich. Severe shortages of essentials like cooking oil, soap and cloth meant that these were only available at black market prices.

•At the same time as over 50% of the population was thrust below the official subsistence level, unemployment soared to. an estimated 60 million.

This included many of the urban middle che ormer ithe not rospects, the Congress Party, who now began to be wooed by an amalgam of opposition parties including that of JP.

These mouthed the same socialist pretensions as the Congress larty, aimed fot power at the same sections of the ruling class and were mostly led by disgruntled exCongressmen.

They appealed less to the peasantry, weighed down with casteism, religion and exploitation (though with the fresh example of Vietnam before them), and to the small working class, but they attracted some following for want of any other leadership.

They voiced demands for decentransation of government (Peoples' Ia1e], puer ownership.

At this time the black market was unprecedented in extent, the upper classes richer than ever before and the legislatures under their thumb.

This meant a travesty of government, keeping order only with an average of 25,000 armed police in each of the 22 states.

• Gandhi's popularity was waning fast. At several meetings in Gujerat she was pelted with shoes and stones. With a general election due in 8 months, she dealt with the revolt in her own camp by sweeping and dictatorial sunnression under After the arrests, the Emergency was not surprisingly ratified by Parliament, which also ensured that courts could not challenge any government action and granted the Prime Minister legal immunity.

On 21st July Gandhi announced a 20 point reform programme which offered everything to everybody. Radical land reform, minimum agricultural wage, redistribution of urban property and reduced prices stayed on paper.

Only the ban on strikes, reductions in control of private industry and tax exemptions were carried out.

A promised crack-down on the black market and smugglers achieved only temporary success. It was broken by the economic stranglehold of the surplus-producing farmers, Mrs. Gandhi's rural base.

Just as in 1973 these had sabotaged the attempted nationalisation of wholesale food grain trade, by withdrawing supplies. Black market proliteers are now exempt Itom legal action if they just declare their profits!

The political repression which was a constant feature of Congress rule, with some 40,000 under indefinite detention before the Emergency, has sky-rocketed. An estimated 200,000 political prisoners languish in jail without trial.

More parliamentary representatives are imprisoned in India than any other country including even Chile and Brazil. Reports of murder, torture and police atrocity are commonplace.

The attacks and arrests are carried out increasingly by paramilitary forces responsible to the Prime Minister and the Secret Service.

The 250,000 strong Border Security Force is now quartered in all major cities and form a palace guard in the capital, New Delhi. They collaborate with the feared Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), a secret police formed by Mrs. Gandhi in 1967 at the time of the spreading Naxalite peasant revolt in Bengal.

RAW agents infiltrate every union, party, association, college and even the army. Large numbers of riff-raff called 'anti-socials' protected by intimidation in using kidnapping against political and trade union opponents of the regime.

Virtually the only party untouched by arrests is the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India, which has continued its criminal and treacherous support of Congress to this day (as does the Morning Star, paper of the British Stalinists), lending credibility to Gandhi's "left" and populist rhetoric.

In this they follow the policy of Stalin in China in the 1920s to use the peasantry to support the bourgeois nationalists. . Trotsky wrote then:

"Stalin and Bukharin preached that thanks to the yoke of imperialism the bourgeoisie could carry out the national revolution in China. The attempt was made. With what results! The projetariat was brought under the headman's axe. Then it was said: the democratic dictatorship will come next, the petty-bourgeois dictatorship proved to be only a masked dictatorship of capital."

The dictatorship of capital in India has dropped its mask. I hough most of the jailed oppositionists, united only by their hatred of Mrs. the struggle against her contained those who spoke for the three quarters of farmers working uneconomic holdings and sliding further into debt, the hundreds of millions of the most severely oppressed landless labourers, and the low-wage urban workers starved by inflation.

Despite Gandhi's propaganda against reactionary plotters, it was these masses that were further disciplined under Emergency powers.

The Maintenance of Internal Security Act gives the police the right to arrest and imprison anyone without charge or trial or right of appeal, or even the right to know the reason for arrest.

This may be exercised if the individual has not paid his local Congressman. Even , civil rights associations and legal aid committees were declared illegal and their leaders arrested.

The only trade union federation opposed to the regime, the CITU led by the independent Communist Party of India (Marxist) has endured violence and destruction of its officers from Congress supporters and their union, the INTUC.

The 'anti-socials' under police protection occupied 300 of CITU's union offices.

Normal trade union activities are virtually impossible. Unions are not allowed to hold meetings except for supporting the government, or to raise army demands. Strikes are banned.

Management have taken advantage of this to declare a wage freeze. In Madhya Pradesh, a mining area, union leaders were arrested after writing a letter of protest to the authorities. -New Delhi food Negotiations take place under threat of arrest if the trade unions do not toe the line of the authorities. The CITU is denied any role in negotiations. Student unions are abolished.

The Congress slogan 'Production first and distribution next. The AllOC, tederation oi the Stalinist CPI calls on workers to produce more, and enthuses over the collaboration machinery which it calls workers participation.

FINED

This line will be familiar to many British workers. On the railways staff are fined for failure to maintain the timetables. or for excessive use of coal. Speed up is rampant in every industry.

On 25 September the veariv offset their miserable wages was halved, and Congress is now considering its abolition, saving private industry £75m.

The CITU alone protested and 3 days later mass arrests started which now claim 2,000 of its membership. Wages and 'dearness allowances' to the value of £625m have been impounded.

It was therefore no surprise when a recent World Bank report recommended increased aid to India because 'conditions are once again ripe for an upturn in the growth rate of the economy' praised vigorous Government action' to control inflation and noted 'improved labour discipline' since the ban on strikes.

But though profits are up, the recession in industry is growing. Inflation has slowed due to a record food harvest but prices stay high and average food grain consumption is the lowest since 1967.

With the masses' purchasing power crippled and unemployment SO high that the Government refuses to publish figures, any home market is wiped out.

Production has been cut back with wholesale factory closures, laying off 475,000 workers and leaving . £3,750m worth of equipment lying laie.

Investment is stagnant, the employers and landlords retaining their high profits. The regime's current attempt for an exportorientated growth relying on foreign investments and markets will lead to a semi-colonial dependence on fluctuating foreign demand and soive neither economic nor political problems.

Any failure in agriculture will renew inflation and threaten to ignite the discontent that smoulders the policen an's club.

There has been resistance. The state Governments of Gujerat and Tamil Nadu protested against the Emergency and refused to implement its repressive measures, and large protest demonstrations were held there last August. These governments have now been removed and "Presidential rule installed.

The main opposition front, the Lok Sangharsh Samitais, was formed last October from the Congress: (Organisation), BLD, Indian Socialist Party under George recently escaped from jail, and Fernandes, a rail union leader Jan Sangh, the main party in the bloc and conservative-nationalist. Between November and January it

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RAC S G-T LIST PRESS, Mcdecadey 3 1 /ше 1976