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Workers Vanguard No. 962
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30 July 2010
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Revolutionary Perspective for India
(Quote of the Week)
The founding document of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of
India (BLPI), written while India was under British rule, emphasized the
proletariat’s unique capacity to lead all the exploited and oppressed in the
struggle for their emancipation. Applying the Trotskyist perspective of
permanent revolution, the BLPI program stressed the fight for the political
independence of the proletariat from the Indian bourgeoisie, which is today, as
under colonial rule, a counterrevolutionary force beholden to imperialism.
The leadership of the revolution, which the peasantry cannot
provide for itself, can come only from an urban class. But the Indian
bourgeoisie cannot possibly provide this leadership, since in the first place,
it is reactionary through and through on the land question itself, sharing as it
does so largely in the parasitic exploitation of the peasantry. Above all, the
bourgeoisie, on account of its inherent weakness and dependence on Imperialism
itself, is destined to play a counter-revolutionary role in the coming struggle
for power.
The leadership of the peasantry in the coming petty bourgeois
democratic agrarian revolution that is immediately posed can therefore come only
from the industrial proletariat, and an alliance between the proletariat and the
peasantry is [a] fundamental pre-requisite of the Indian revolution. This
alliance cannot be conceived in the form of a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Party” or
of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” in the revolution. It is
impossible so to fuse within a single party or a dictatorship the policies of
two classes whose interests only partially coincide and are bound to come into
conflict sooner or later. The revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and
peasantry can mean only proletarian leadership of the peasant
struggle and, in case of revolutionary victory, the establishment of the
proletarian dictatorship with the support of the peasantry....
Despite its subjective weakness in organization and consciousness,
inevitable in a backward country and in the conditions of repression surrounding
it, the working class is entirely capable of leading the Indian revolution. It
is [the] only class objectively fitted for this role, not only in relation to
the Indian situation, but in view of the decline of capitalism on [a] world
scale, which opens the road to the international proletarian revolution. The
proletariat needs above all to develop its own independent political party, free
from the influence of the bourgeoisie, and armed with the weapons of
revolutionary Marxism, to lead it not only in the day to day struggles but above
all in the coming revolution. Without such a party the proletariat must fail in
its historic task of leading the masses of India to revolutionary victory.
—“Draft Programme of the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India” (1942),
reprinted in Charles Wesley Ervin, Tomorrow Is Ours:
The Trotskyist
Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935-48 (2006)
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