State Formation and Radical Democracy in India by Manali Desai

Author:Manali Desai [Desai, Manali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Ethnic Studies, Democracy, Human Geography, Political Ideologies, Developing & Emerging Countries, Social Science, India & South Asia, Political Science, World, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Asia, History, Sociology, Asian, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781134133321
Google: 8Wh9AgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17478829
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

The response of the dominant classes, and their use of the Congress machinery to obstruct the growing left-led peasant movement in Bihar is undoubtedly of enormous importance when we compare with Kerala, for in the latter case, landlords and ‘rightist’ Congress members were unable to obstruct the CSP to any significant degree (until 1940 when they were expelled from the Congress Party). But this hypothesis could be tested and pushed further. In Andhra Pradesh, when challenged within the Congress Party, communists were able to organize an extremely powerful challenge to landlord domination outside it. In Bihar, rightist Congress members had, in fact, severed the peasant association (Kisan Sabha) from the Congress Party, arguing that its activities had become anti-Congress (Saraswati 1940: 271). Why then did the Bihar Kisan Sabha not launch a more protracted struggle against landlordism, with or without the Congress Party?

Once again the answer only emerges in a comparative framework. It appears to lie in the relative weakness of the relationship between left party formation and peasant organization/movement in Bihar, as compared with in Kerala. With regard to Bihar, the historical evidence is replete with incidents of infighting, bickering, indecision and strategic disagreement among the political leaders of the CSP, with whom the Kisan Sabha was first associated. The leader of the peasant movement, Swami Sahajanand, gradually grew disillusioned with the CSP because its leaders were overwhelmingly inclined to adhere to Gandhian, non-confrontational tactics (Das 1983). Branding Sahajanand a ‘faction leader’, the CSP in effect expressed its bitter animosity towards the communists towards whom it (accurately) perceived Sahajanand to be sympathetic.20 Unlike in Kerala, where the CSP was largely in agreement about its strategy of critical dissociation from the ‘right’ Congress, in Bihar such consensus did not exist. Within the Kisan Sabha in Bihar, the push at the local and grass-roots level was far more radical than from the leadership. Thus, although the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha leadership had prohibited the forcible occupation of land, frontline activists and tenants were using slogans that called for a more violent approach towards landlords. This put pressure on the Kisan Sabha, which as Damodaran argues, ‘ran the risk of being sidelined by a developing mass movement over which it would then have little control’ (1992: 109). The disorganization of the leadership, and strategic disagreement among the leaders, prevented it from formulating a consistent and sustained relationship to this developing mass radicalism. The effect of what can be called the ‘unresolved intra-class struggle’ upon the ‘class struggle’ in Bihar, then, was one of demobilization and disorganization. The Kisan Sabha in Bihar eventually fragmented into several political parties – CSP, CPI, Forward Bloc – and its membership began to decline by the 1950s (Das 1983).

Comparative analysis with Kerala suggests another key factor – the uniqueness of the CSP–CPI alliance in Kerala, indeed the merger of the two, and the particular effects of this on a coordinated strategy of left party advance. Despite the CPI’s conscious decision to work within the Congress Party at

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