Sri Lankan authorities provide no answers over disappearance of SEP member

By our correspondent
10 April 2007
 
Sri Lankan Socialist Equality Party (SEP) member Nadarajah Wimaleswaran and his friend, Sivanathan Mathivathanan, disappeared from the northern island of Kayts more than two weeks ago. Despite a stream of letters from Sri Lanka and internationally demanding an urgent inquiry, the defence ministry, the military and the police are engaged in what can only be described as a cover-up.

Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan were last seen on March 22 at about 6.30 p.m. at a naval roadblock on Punguduthivu island, preparing to enter a causeway to Kayts island. Wimaleswaran was on the back of Mathivathanan’s motorbike, having gone to Punguduthivu to collect some clothes from a friend’s house.

Punguduthivu navy camp commander Hemantha Peiris told the SEP that Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan had been noted in the register as passing through the roadblock. However, Velanai navy camp commanding officer Silva on Kayts has provided no information about the pair. He claimed the navy had not detained or arrested them.

The SEP’s own investigations have confirmed the presence of two Criminal Investigation Department (CID) police officers at the Kayts roadblock. The CID officers, who are fluent Tamil speakers, are attached to the Kayts police station and are often involved in questioning people. They are well known to locals, who describe them as the “secret police” because they do not give out their names.

An eyewitness saw the two CID police officers questioning Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan near the Kayts roadblock as they were heading to Punguduthivu at about 5.30 p.m. Obvious questions remain unanswered about what happened at the roadblock on their return an hour later. What did the CID officers question Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan about? Was the pair seized by the military and/or police officers? If they were allowed to pass through, why the extraordinary reluctance by authorities at all levels to provide any details?

After numerous phone calls to officials in Colombo and the northern Jaffna area, no information has been provided to the SEP about what took place at the Kayts roadblock. The self-evident line of investigation would be to question the naval personnel and CID officers who were present at the time.

* Additional defence ministry secretary H. K. Balasooriya told the SEP she has asked Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) director Chandra Vakishta if the TID police unit had arrested Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan. She said she had also asked the police Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in charge of the northern range about his investigation. However, Balasooriya has provided no answers and declared she cannot “pressurise” the police.

* SEP general secretary Wije Dias contacted additional defence ministry secretary Sunil S. Sirisena last Thursday. Sirisena said he would contact the navy commander over the SEP’s suspicion of naval involvement in the disappearance of Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan. No information has been forthcoming.

* The SEP last week spoke to police DIG (northern range) Mahinda Balasuriya, who said the police needed a week to complete the report. When pressed on the urgency of the matter, he declared that the police were unable to travel to many places in the north due to “security reasons”.

* The SEP has spoken to the officer in charge (OIC) of Kayts police to find out what steps had been taken regarding the party’s formal complaint. The officer claimed yesterday that the disappearance was being investigated by other officers and promised more information in two hours. Since then, he has been unavailable.

Since President Mahinda Rajapakse plunged the country back to war last year, hundreds of people have disappeared or been killed by death squads aligned to the military. On Kayts island alone, there have been 37 disappearances. Of those, three bodies have been found. Nothing is known about the fate of the remaining 34.

Kandiah Kanapathy Mahendran, for instance, disappeared in Velanai on December 10 after attending a wedding. His family members spent two months in Colombo trying to find out if he was being held at a detention centre in the south of the island, but to no avail.

The SEP is continuing its campaign to demand that the Sri Lankan authorities carry out an urgent investigation to locate Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan. Wimaleswaran has been an SEP member since 1998 and is well known for his internationalist socialist convictions, his determination to fight for defence of the rights of the working people and to oppose the war. We call on SEP supporters and WSWS readers to continue to send letters supporting our campaign.

Letters can be sent to:

Gotabhaya Rajapakse,
Secretary of Ministry of Defence,
15/5 Baladaksha Mawatha,
Colombo 3, Sri Lanka
Fax: 009411 2541529
e-mail: secretary@defence.lk

N. G. Punchihewa
Director of Complaints and Inquiries,
Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission,
No. 36, Kinsey Road,
Colombo 8, Sri Lanka
Fax: 009411 2694924

Copies should be sent to the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) and the World Socialist Web Site.

Socialist Equality Party,
P.O. Box 1270,
Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Email: wswscmb@sltnet.lk

To send letters to the WSWS editorial board please use this online form.

Below is a further selection of the letters sent so far.
***
April 5, 2007
Mr. Rajapakse and Mr. Punchihewa,

The Socialist Labour League (SLL) of India holds the Sri Lankan government and its security forces responsible for the disappearance of Socialist Equality Party (SEP) member Nadarajah Wimaleswaran and his friend Sivanathan Mathivathanan on the evening of March 22 in the Jaffna peninsula’s islands in northern Sri Lanka and demands that the Sri Lankan government and its military immediately conduct an investigation into their disappearance.

The circumstances under which Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan disappeared indicate that they could not have disappeared without the knowledge of the Sri Lankan army and navy, which have a tight and complete control of the islets of the peninsula where they were last seen.

In fact, all evidence now suggests that Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan could have been apprehended by the CID and the navy on Kayts end of the long causeway between the islands of Punguduthivu and Kayts.

The spot where they seem to have disappeared on March 22, about a few hours before the 8 pm curfew came into effect—the roadblock at the Kayts end of the causeway—was not only manned by 15 navy men but also by two CID men fluent in Tamil. These CID men were routinely involved in interrogating the local people at the roadblocks in the area and enjoyed powers to arbitrarily detain people “on suspicion”. Thus evidence strongly suggests that Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan were apprehended by the CID and navy on Kayts end of the Punguduthivu-Kayts causeway and at the very least, taken into their custody.

It is well known the world over, that hundreds of Tamils in the north and east of the island have been killed, abducted or have “disappeared” over the past year. It is also a well established fact that the forces behind these killings, abductions and disappearances are none other than the notorious death squads of the Sri Lankan security forces or their associated paramilitaries. The navy operates in collaboration with the paramilitary wing of the Eelam Peoples Democratic Party (EPDP)—a partner in the ruling coalition government of President Rajapakse—in the area where Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan were last seen.

Despite the mounting international protests and the formal complaints made to the defence ministry, the navy camps in Kayts and Punguduthivu and the police in Jaffna by the Sri Lankan SEP, no effective action whatsoever has been initiated by the Sri Lankan government, its police or its military to find Wimaleswaran and his friend Mathivathanan.

Last year the SLL in India collected hundreds of signatures from students of various colleges in the south Indian city of Chennai, to demand that the Sri Lankan government launch an urgent investigation into the murder of SEP supporter Sivapragasam Mariyadas at his home in Mullipothana, and prosecute the killers.

The Socialist Labour League will in the coming days and weeks step up its campaign in India among workers, students, youths, intellectuals and all other sections of the working people to secure the immediate and safe release of Wimaleswaran and Mathivathanan as well as to demand an immediate launching of an investigation by Sri Lankan government into the murder of SEP supporter Sivapragasam Mariyadas and to bring to book his murderers.

Arun Kumar,
National Secretary,
Socialist Labour League
India.

Source:

Sri Lankan authorities provide no answers over disappearance of SEP member

Dulal Bose, 1918-2001

Veteran Indian Trotskyist dies in Calcutta, aged 82

By Nanda Wickramasinghe
31 March 2001

Veteran Trotskyist Dulal Bose died in Calcutta on March 21 at the age of 82. He joined the Trotskyist movement in 1939 as a young man, fought tenaciously for its program in the Indian working class and remained committed to its principles throughout his entire adult life. In 1991, he joined the Socialist Labour League in India, which is in solidarity with the International Committee of the Fourth International, and devoted the last decade of his life to translating the works of Leon Trotsky into Bengali.

Dulal Bose was born in Calcutta on September 10, 1918. His father died when Dulal was young and he was brought up by his uncle. An intelligent and talented young man, he studied for a bachelor of honors degree in English but never finished the course. Like many of his generation he was drawn into politics by momentous events—the Russian Revolution, which occurred in the year before he was born, a growing mass movement against British colonial rule and the imminent Second World War.
What distinguished Dulal, however, was an understanding that the working class was the sole force capable of resolving the immense problems confronting the Indian masses. He was hostile to the Indian National Congress led by Gandhi and Nehru, which had accepted ministerial office under the British. Dulal was particularly affected when the Congress administration shot down striking workers in Kanpur, Bombay and Madras, and put down peasant struggles in 1938. He also distrusted the Communist Party of India, which took its line from the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow, and called for unity with Gandhi and the Congress despite the repression.
In the midst of this political turmoil, it was Leon Trotsky's Open Letter to the Workers of India that clarified for Dulal the political orientation that had to be fought for. Written in July, 1939 on the eve of World War II, the letter subjected the policies of the Communist International or Comintern, which argued that the Indian working class had to subordinate itself to the British in the interests of fighting fascism, to a withering critique.
After exposing the utter incapacity of Congress to wage a revolutionary struggle, Trotsky tore apart the arguments of the Stalinists. According to the Comintern, he wrote, in the event of a war over colonies, “the Indian people must support their present slaveowners, the British imperialists. That is to say, they must shed their blood not for their own emancipation, but for the preservation of the rule of ‘the City' [the financial centre of London] over India. And these cheaply-to-be-bought scoundrels dare to quote Marx and Lenin!” In the case of war, the Indian working class, Trotsky explained, had to fight for its own class interests independently of the British, Congress and the Stalinists and for that a revolutionary party was needed.
Dulal responded to this appeal and joined the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) formed in Bengal in 1939 to fight for Trotsky's perspective. The RSL merged with the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in Ceylon [now Sri Lanka] and other Trotskyist organisations on the Indian subcontinent to form the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI), which became a section of the Fourth International in 1942.
Dulal was present at the BLPI's founding congress and was a member of its Bengal regional committee. He devoted himself to work full-time for the new party and played a leading role in its struggle during and immediately after World War II.
Working under conditions of illegality, Dulal and his comrades succeeded in establishing the authority of the BLPI among a considerable section of the working class of Calcutta. The party produced an English-language journal, the Permanent Revolution, the newspaper Spark in English and a Bengali paper Inquilab (Revolution), which had over 2,000 regular subscribers and was circulated widely.

The BLPI not only had to counter the dangers of arrest by the police but also the threat of Stalinist informers who had no compunction in providing the British colonial authorities with information about the activity of Trotskyists. Throughout this period, the BLPI sheltered leading Trotskyists from Ceylon who had escaped from jail after being imprisoned for opposing the war.
The immediate aftermath of the war witnessed an upsurge in the struggles of the Indian working class. The BLPI won the leadership of a number of trade unions. In Bengal, it led the paper workers', match workers' and fire fighters' unions. Dulal became secretary of the Titagarh paper workers' union and the Calcutta match workers' union. He also played a prominent role in organising anti-British protests among students and workers, and in doing so won a reputation as an effective speaker and dynamic figure.
In 1946, a mutiny by British naval ratings broke out in Bombay over the decision to send them to Indonesia to back Dutch military forces seeking to crush the anti-colonial movement. The BLPI leadership decided to send Dulal to Bombay where he organised medical students to distribute leaflets supporting the mutiny to major factories in the city.

The emergence of Pabloism

Faced with mounting opposition to colonial rule, the British, with the backing of Congress and the Communist Party, set about organising a transfer of power to the Indian bourgeoisie based on the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines into India and Pakistan. The granting of independence in August 1947 set off a communal bloodbath that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Bengal itself was divided and Dulal was sent to what became East Pakistan and later Bangladesh to politically guide the work of BLPI members there.
In a famous speech at Ulubaria near Calcutta following the assassination of Gandhi in early 1948, BLPI leader Colvin R de Silva explained the fraudulent character of the independence that had been granted by the British. “What has taken place is not a transition to independence but a switch over by imperialism from direct to indirect forms of rule via a realignment of its alliance with the Indian bourgeoisie... British imperialism has not abdicated but only retired to the background, leaving its Indian partner solely in charge of the business...”
Dulal was at the meeting and later recalled the prophetic character of the remarks that de Silva had made about the “poor Trotskyists” who thought that “independence” had brought about a fundamental change. Within the ranks of the Fourth International, an opportunist trend was emerging in the Indian subcontinent and internationally, headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. They were abandoning the struggle for the political independence of the working class and argued that the Trotskyist movement in each country had to adapt itself to the existing Social Democratic, Stalinist and bourgeois national leaderships.
This opportunist trend had a devastating political impact on the Trotskyist movement in the Indian subcontinent. Pablo pushed for the break-up of the BLPI along national lines and the entry of its members in India into the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), a petty bourgeois radical organisation. In Sri Lanka, notwithstanding his earlier words, Colvin R de Silva and the BLPI unified with those “poor Trotskyists” who had accepted independence as a genuine advance and had re-established a separate LSSP.
These decisions created enormous political confusion in the BLPI. Dulal and the majority of the BLPI members in Bengal opposed the decision to break up the party and dissolve its Indian section into the CSP. But unable to identify the political roots of the opportunist orientation, they carried out the decision. Dulal, who could not accept having to work within the CSP, left politics and Calcutta in 1949. He returned to the city in 1951 and began collaborating with his former colleagues in publishing Inquilab. But in 1954, the group joined the Communist League, which was affiliated with the Pabloites, and he again withdrew from political life.
Cut off from the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), formed in 1953 to fight the opportunist trend, Dulal was not able to resolve the political issues thrown up by the emergence of Pabloism. What is significant, however, is that when he did finally meet representatives of the ICFI, decades later in 1991, he quickly came to agree with its analysis. His life reflected not only the considerable political difficulties confronting the Trotskyist movement in the post-war period but the deep roots that it had put down in the Indian working class.
When he first met with a member of the SLL from Madras, he complained rather wearily, at the age of 72, “We are old bones. You young people must carry on.” But as the discussions proceeded it became clear that there was considerable life left in those “old bones.” Dulal wanted to know the ICFI's attitude to the crisis of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He was particularly drawn to its analysis of Pabloism that had had such a devastating impact on his political life. He enthusiastically read David North's The Heritage We Defend, which sums up the protracted struggle of the Trotskyist movement against opportunism, and in 1993 made the difficult train trip of well over a thousand kilometres from Calcutta to Madras to meet the author.
Joining the ICFI breathed new life back into Dulal. Despite his advanced age, he was determined to use his considerable knowledge and skills to benefit the Trotskyist movement by translating its works into Bengali. He produced translations of David North's The Heritage We Defend and the End of the USSR and the ICFI statement Oppose Imperialist War and Colonialism, as well as Leon Trotsky's I Stake My Life and In Defense of the October Revolution. He also translated a number of World Socialist Web Site articles into Bengali and contributed to the SLL's Bengali language paper. At the time of his death, he was working on a translation of Trotsky's classic The Revolution Betrayed.
As this writer can testify, Dulal was a remarkable individual. Cultured, systematic and thoroughly versed in the works of Trotsky, he could quote passages with great accuracy on the spur of the moment. When he spoke in meetings one was given a glimpse of his abilities as a public speaker. He retained from his early years in the Trotskyist movement the mannerisms of an orator capable of explaining complex political issues to a large audience of workers. He always showed great warmth and hospitality towards visiting comrades as did his wife and children. Their home in Calcutta became a venue for political meetings and discussion.
What animated Dulal right up to his death was the conviction that the future for the working class and mankind as a whole lay in the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. Despite a gap of nearly 40 years in his active political involvement, he has made an indelible contribution to the struggle to build the Trotskyist movement throughout the Indian subcontinent and internationally. His work will live on in the translations that he so tirelessly laboured to complete before his death. The Socialist Equality Party in Sri Lanka and the Socialist Labour League in India send their deepest condolences to his wife and children. 

Source:

Veteran Indian Trotskyist dies in Calcutta, aged 82

Police and union officials mount frame-up of dissident textile workers in India

By our reporter
22 August 1998
 
The Socialist Labour League, the Indian organization in political solidarity with the Fourth International, is mounting a campaign to defend five textile workers facing frame-up charges after an altercation with union officials. Two days before the incident, local leaders of the Confederation of Industrial Trade Unions (CITU) threatened dissident union members with violence and struck one, a well-known supporter of the SLL.
 
Four of the five workers facing frame-up charges--E. Ramdoss, H. Anandhan, J. Srinivasan and A. Leela Nandhapushnam--were among 14 workers victimized for leading a strike last year at the Well-Knit garment factory in Chennai (Madras). The CITU, which is affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), assisted management first in suspending and now dismissing the 14.
 
Last year's strike began as a walkout by 60 workers to press for an increase in their piece-rate wages. It culminated, two weeks later, in a strike of Well-Knit's entire 2,000-strong work force. The Hong Kong-based company then suspended 23 workers, of whom 9 were reinstated after they renounced their role in the strike.
 
From July 1997 to last May, the 14 workers were on suspension, but after Well-Knit and the CITU agreed on a new contract the company moved to dismiss the strike leaders. The new contract, which increases the garment workers' base wage by just 125 rupees, or about US$3 per month, has been widely denounced by the Well-Knit workers as a sellout.
 
On August 1 a group of some 40 workers went to the CITU office to ask when the union will hold elections, which according to its constitution should have been held last May. The bureaucrats responded by demanding that the workers give 125 rupees each to organize a union conference. The CITU joint secretary, Sivakumar, declared, "If anyone opens their mouth without giving 125 rupees I will kick you all out and there will be no union election." He then turned to the SLL supporter and declared, "It is you who is responsible for instigating all this trouble." Sivakumar, who is also a leader in the Stalinist CPI(M), then punched the SLL supporter in the face and in menacing tones urged his fellow bureaucrats to "put him in the auto and take him to our area." But the crowd of workers stood their ground and the SLL supporter was able to leave with them.
 
Two days later there was a second altercation between Sivakumar and a group of dissident workers. The CITU official has now filed charges accusing five dissident union members of attempted murder and robbery. The fifth accused is K. Bakraj.
 
The police have used this incident to mount a terror campaign against the Well-Knit workers. One of the five, Srinivasan, was badly beaten by police from the Tambaram Police Station when he was arrested on the evening of August 9. The following day, police from the same station assaulted a group of workers near the Well-Knit factory, only to find that none of those they attacked even work at the garment factory. Four workers were injured in the assault.
 
The SLL is rallying support for the Well-Knit workers throughout the working class. It is also urging that messages of protest be sent to the police to protest their treatment of the workers and to demand the dropping of all charges.
 
Messages should be sent to:
Inspector of Police Sugumaran
Tambaram Police Station
Tambaram, Madras-3
Tamil Nadu, India
 
and to:
Chief Minister Complaint Cell
Secretariat
Fort. St. George, Madras-9
India
 
Please send copies to: editor@wsws.org
 
See Also:
Sri Lankan SEP holds protest to demand release of Tamil socialists
[21 August 1998]
Crisis in South Asia reflected in Colombo summit
[4 August 1998] 

Source:

Police and union officials mount frame-up of dissident textile workers in India

Druba Jyoti Majumdar: pioneer Indian Trotskyist dies

27 January 2005

On the morning of Sunday, January 16, pioneer Indian Trotskyist Druba Jyoti Majumdar died at his home in Katwa, West Bengal, of asthma. He was 75.

Majumdar, who was known to his family and comrades as Durbo, joined the Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India (BLPI), the then section of the Fourth International in the Indian subcontinent, in 1946 at the age of 17. Throughout the remainder of his life he considered himself a revolutionary socialist and Trotskyist. But Durbo’s political development was cut off for decades by the dissolution of the BLPI’s Indian unit into the petty bourgeois Congress Socialist Party in 1948.

Not until the early 1990s did Durbo and a group of Kolkata (Calcutta) socialists with whom he was associated—most of them BLPI veterans—learn of the decades-long struggle that the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) had waged against Pabloism, a virulent opportunist tendency that arose within the Fourth International under the pressure of the post-World War II restabilization of capitalism. Led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, this tendency claimed that objective forces would compel the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, its satellite parties, the social-democrats, and, in the countries oppressed by imperialism, the national bourgeoisie, to play a progressive and even revolutionary role. The task of Trotsykists, therefore, was not to wrest the leadership of the working class from these alien class forces, but to pressure them to the left.

The ICFI’s critique of Pabloism shed an entirely new light on the BLPI’s dissolution—for which Pablo had pressed—and on the bitter political experiences that the members of the Kolkata group had subsequently made as supporters of the Pabloites’ international organization, now known as the United Secretariat. After extensive discussions with ICFI representatives, the Calcutta group, including Durbo, Dulal Bose, Ganesh Dutta, Nirmal Samajpathi and Dinesh Sanyal, joined the Socialist Labour League, the Indian organization in political solidarity with the ICFI.

Alongside Dulal Bose, Durbo henceforth played a leading role in developing the SLL’s work in West Bengal, the principal bastion of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist). Although hobbled by asthma, he wrote extensively for the SLL’s Bengali newspaper Anthrajathik Shramik (International Worker) and its predecessor Shramiker Path (Workers’ Path), addressed public meetings of the SLL in Katwa and Kolkata, made many Bengali translations of articles published on the World Socialist Web Site, and collaborated in preparing the Bengali-language edition of David North’s The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International.

A philosophy professor at Katwa College, Durbo had a keen mind and wide-ranging intellectual interests. He had studied the Marxist classics and both ancient and modern Indian philosophy. Fluent in Bengali, Hindi and English, he was an amateur philologist. When comrades visited from other parts of India or abroad he would delight in discussing and discovering the relations between words in different languages, including links between Sinhalese and Bengali.

Durbo made an exhaustive study of psychology and sought to illuminate psychological problems from a materialist perspective in the Bengali journal Manabman (Human Mind) and a two-volume work published in 2003-04, Manabik Chetanar Sawrup Sandhane (In Search of Human Consciousness). The West Bengal government has published his pioneering English-Bengali dictionary of Abnormal Psychology and Psychopathology.

Till the end of his days Durbo retained a boyish spirit. Although his asthma made it very difficult for him to travel, he was ever eager to contribute to the work of the Socialist Labour League. His concern for his fellow comrades’ health and well-being was testament to his generous spirit and to his understanding of the demands placed on, and the vital importance of, revolutionary cadres.
Durbo and the BLPI

Durbo was born on March 3, 1929 in Bapna, in the Rangpur district of present day Bangladesh. The second of five children, he came from a privileged Brahmin family. His father was a Deputy Magistrate entrusted with doling out British imperialist justice.

Under the influence of India’s mass anti-imperialist movement, the mounting struggles of the working class, and the horrors of fascism, world war, and the British-provoked Bengal Famine of 1943-44, Durbo rebelled against his upbringing. At the age of thirteen he participated in the Quit India movement, the spontaneous nationwide rebellion that erupted after the August 1942 arrest of senior Congress leaders.

Around this time Durbo cut off his “holy” thread, the symbol of a male Brahmin’s religious observance and caste superiority. Later he would defy the Indian tradition of arranged marriages.

Durbo first came into contact with the BLPI in 1947 in Calcutta, where he was studying economics at Presidency College. The two years between the end of World War II and the dissolution of Britain’s Indian empire were filled with momentous struggles of an incipient revolutionary character, including strikes, peasant rebellions, anti-feudal movements in the princely states, and mass demonstrations against the incarceration of members of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. Although India and Bengal were to be partitioned along communal lines in August 1947, these struggles invariably united Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians.

Durbo, as a result of his reading and study of events, had by this point already decided to become a Marxist. He well recognized the bourgeois character of the Indian National Congress. Under Gandhi’s leadership, the Congress mounted controlled mass mobilizations in order to pressure India’s colonial overlords to relinquish control over the state apparatus, while adamantly opposing any independent action of the working class or challenge to capitalist property.

Durbo had also taken the measure of the Stalinist Communist Party of India. In the name of defending the Soviet Union, the CPI had openly allied itself with the British colonial regime from the beginning of 1942 through the end of World War II, and it condemned and agitated against the Quit India uprising. During the semi-insurrectionary struggles of 1945-47, the CPI subordinated the working class to the rival parties of the national bourgeoisie, calling on workers to press the Congress and the Muslim League—whose leaders had daggers drawn against each other—to recognize their “responsibility” to combine and lead an anti-British National Front.

For a time in the mid-1940s, Durbo considered himself a follower of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), which had played a leading role in the Quit India rebellion. A faction of the Congress, the CSP sought to combine Gandhianism with Fabianism and Marxism. By 1947, Durbo had grown troubled by the CSP’s acquiescence before the Congress leaders’ drive for a settlement with British imperialism, under which the Congress would take control of the colonial state machine.

Against the Congress, the radical nationalists of the CSP, and the Stalinists, the BLPI alone advanced a revolutionary perspective.

Founded in 1942 on the initiative of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the BLPI united Trotskyists in all parts of British and princely India and Ceylon.

The development of a pan-Indian revolutionary working class party was a strategy flowing from the LSSP’s adherence to the Fourth International and attempt to develop the program of permanent revolution. The tasks of the democratic revolution would be realized, the BLPI insisted in its founding documents, only if the working class across South Asia wrested the leadership of the struggle against British colonial rule from the bourgeoisie, mobilized the peasant masses on a revolutionary program against landlordism, and made the anti-imperialist struggle a component part of the socialist struggle of the world working class.

This perspective won powerful support, with the BLPI emerging in the leadership of major working class struggles in Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai), and Madras (Chennai). The press vilified the BLPI for the leading role it had played in mobilizing workers in Bombay to strike and establish barricades in support of the February 1946 mutiny of Royal Indian Navy (RIN) sailors. Ultimately the RIN rebellion was broken as a result of the combined action of British troops and the Congress and Muslim League leaders’ demands that the mutinous sailors surrender.

Fear of the rising tide of worker-peasant struggles and their impact on the British Indian armed forces caused the Congress to become all the more desperate for a quick settlement with British imperialism.
The destructive impact of Pabloite opportunism

In 1947-48, as Durbo was emerging as a leader of its youth wing, the BLPI took a courageous and principled stand that remains of great contemporary significance. The BLPI opposed British imperialism’s transfer of political power to the national bourgeoisie and the carving out of three “independent” capitalist states in South Asia that have incarnated and fostered communal divisions from their birth. While the Congress and Muslim League oversaw the bloody partition of British India into a Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie baptized its new state by denying citizenship rights to the “Indian” Tamil plantation workers—who, not incidentally, constituted the most powerful component of the island’s working class.

But rather than deepening this analysis and drawing out for the South Asian and world working class the central lessons of the national bourgeoisie’s abortion of the anti-imperialist struggle, the BLPI’s Indian unit devoted its 1948 congress—the first attended by Durbo—to debating whether to dissolve into the Congress Socialist Party.

Undoubtedly the subsiding of the mass anti-imperialist movement and the popular illusions in the Congress and the new political order in South Asia were powerful factors in the political confusion and disorientation that led to the BLPI’s dissolution. But the proposal to liquidate the BLPI had been resisted for several years by the majority of BLPI leaders and members. Decisive in the political disarming of the BLPI was the opportunist political perspective being developed by Pablo and Mandel, which replaced a unified world revolutionary strategy with a national-tactical orientation toward whatever force presently dominated the working class movement in a given country.

The dissolution of the BLPI had a devastating impact on the development of the Fourth International in South Asia. The Trotskyist movement in India was effectively liquidated. In Ceylon, Pablo encouraged the BLPI unit to merge with a renegade group that had opposed the formation of the BLPI in 1942, stolen the name LSSP for its own organization, and voted for Ceylon’s 1948 independence agreement. The merger of the BLPI with the rival LSSP was a major step in the centrist downsliding of the Sri Lankan Trotskyist movement that culminated in the LSSP joining a bourgeois coalition government led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party in 1964 and becoming a bulwark of the capitalist order.

Durbo was part of a group in West Bengal, of which Dulal Bose was a principal leader, that vigorously opposed the BLPI’s dissolution. They rebutted those who claimed that joining the Socialist Party of Jaya Prakash Narayan and Ashoka Mehta would bring the Trotskyists “closer to the working class,” by noting that the CSP had functioned as the left-wing of the Congress in its betrayal of the anti-imperialist struggle, was a party of union functionaries and radicalized sections of the middle class, and was rapidly atrophying into an electoral party.

Subsequently Durbo and others in West Bengal who had opposed the BLPI’s dissolution organized themselves around Inqulab (Revolution), formerly the BLPI’s Bengali newspaper. But they were cut off from the struggle within the Fourth International that resulted in the opponents of Pabloite opportunism establishing the International Committee in 1953. They therefore were unable to establish the social roots of the opportunism that had resulted in the BLPI’s liquidation or to clarify the key questions concerning the role of revolutionary leadership and its relationship to the working class involved in refuting the Pabloites’ incantations about the need to integrate into the mass movement.

The leadership of the LSSP, the largest and most politically tested Trotskyist party in Asia, must bear much of the responsibility for the Indian Trotskyists’ ignorance of the ICFI’s opposition to Pabloism. The LSSP leaders opposed many of Pablo’s opportunist formulations, particularly concerning the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy, but they opposed the decision to rally the genuine Trotskyist elements in a separate organization, fearing that the political rearming of the Fourth International by the International Committee would disrupt their increasingly explicit parliamentary and trade-unionist orientation.

Durbo and the other BLPI comrades who rallied to the IC in the early 1990s always recalled the subsequent four decades with bitterness and shame. In 1954, the Inqulab group fused with the Communist League, the Indian section of the Pabloite international. Under Pabloite influence Durbo and his comrades became increasingly fixated on tactical maneuvers aimed at gaining influence, not clarifying the central political problems facing the working class.

In the mid-1960s, the Inqulab group sought to enter the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM. A split-off from the CPI, the CPM denounced the CPI’s toadying to the Congress party and parroted some Chinese government criticisms of the Soviet leadership, but upheld the entire tradition of Stalinism, from the two-stage theory of revolution and socialism-in-one country to the Moscow trials.

After the CPM leadership refused to allow “counter-revolutionary Trotskyites” to enter their party, Durbo joined the CPM as an individual. However, he quit not long after, when the CPM joined hands with the capitalist state in suppressing the Maoist-Naxalite rebellion.
Political rebirth

“Politically speaking,” Durbo would tell representatives of the SLL and the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka, “I was born again after I met you and other comrades of the ICFI. Because of the persistent and patient efforts of the young ICFI comrades and leaders to explain, discuss and clarify issues I and other comrades from the BLPI who were of an earlier generation were able to overcome the confusion, disillusion and frustration into which Pabloite liquidation had pushed us into for nearly four decades. We feel that we are back in the old and proud BLPI days and the Fourth International of Trotsky. Thanks to the ICFI and its leadership we are happy, clear in our thinking, and confident in the future of our world Trotskyist movement. At last after all these decades we are at peace with our Trotskyist convictions.”

The long years of political confusion and isolation took their toll on Durbo’s health. Had he ever wanted an easy road, the Stalinists in West Bengal, who have led the state government since 1977, would have found him a place in their apparatus, believing his political past and intellectual fortitude would lend them lustre. But Durbo was not open to such blandishments. In 1965 he had been elected the General Secretary of the West Bengal College Teachers Union, but the following year because of his opposition to the unions’ Stalinist leadership he flatly turned down the proposal that he again contest the union elections and instead quit the union.

Because of his political intransigence, Durbo was ostracized by the Stalinists at his workplace and in intellectual circles. He was also subject to police surveillance and his house raided by armed commandos on the claim that he was lending support to the Naxalites. In reality, in his discussion with Maoist-leaning students, Durbo had vigorously opposed the Naxalites’ theories of individual terror and their blood curdling calls for “class annihilation,” that is the murder of local landlords. But he did speak out forcefully against the state’s ruthless repression of the Naxalites and for that he and his family would long suffer police harassment.

By the time he came in contact with representatives of the SLL and the Sri Lankan SEP, physical and emotional strains and stresses had made Durbo an invalid. To keep his asthma at a bay, he had been compelled to depend on a cocktail of medicines, including steroids. He could travel about very little and visits to Kolkata were trying because of the dust and pollution.

But Durbo was rejuvenated by his association with the ICFI. His re-entry into the ranks of the Fourth International coincided with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the last service rendered by the Soviet bureaucracy to imperialism, the open the turn of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy toward capitalist restoration, and the Indian Stalinists’ embrace of the neo-liberal economic reform program of the bourgeoisie. Durbo was eager to do battle with the Stalinist CPM at every level.

“Many people round the Stalinist movement try to justify their support for the politics of the Stalinist party on the ground that the working class is not mature for revolutionary politics,” he commented in one discussion. “But they cover up a decisive fact: that this unpreparedness has been prepared by the politics of the Stalinist party and the Pabloite revisionists who covered up for them.”

Durbo, his wife, Jarana, and daughters, were always pleased to provide accommodation and food to comrades visiting Katwa. In his home town he was renowned for his political knowledge and commitment.

As the WSWS observed in a 2001 obituary for the aforementioned Dulal Bose, his life and that of the other BLPI veterans who rallied to the ICFI in the early 1990s reflected not only the political difficulties that the Trotskyist movement confronted in the post-war period but also the deep roots it had put down in the Indian working class.

A new generation of revolutionary workers, youth and intellectuals in India will draw strength from Durbo’s tenacity, courage and passionate belief in the emancipation of the working class. But above all what he would want them to draw from the vicissitudes of his life are the political lessons that cost him and his generation so much to learn: There are no short-cuts in the protracted struggle for the political independence of the working class; tactics must flow from and be subordinated to a world revolutionary strategy; the Marxist prefers temporary isolation to short-term gains that are purchased at the expense of the political clarification of the working class, because he recognizes that the transformation of the working class into a revolutionary force takes place through the struggle for a political line that articulates its independent, historical interests as a class.

The SLL of India, the SEP of Sri Lanka and the WSWS send their deepest condolences to the family of Comrade Druba Jyoti Majumdar. 

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Druba Jyoti Majumdar: pioneer Indian Trotskyist dies
By Nanda Wickremasinghe and Ganesh Dev

Socialist Labour League of India to hold public meeting on Nandigram peasant massacre

16 April 2007

The Socialist Labour League of India will hold a public meeting Sunday, April 22, in Chennai, the capital of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, to discuss the need for workers in India to draw the lessons of the Nandigram peasant massacre and adopt a socialist-internationalist program.

Fourteen peasants were killed and at least 70 injured on March 14, when West Bengal police opened fire on peasants protesting government plans to seize 10,000 acres in the Nandigram area for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to be run by the Indonesian-based Salim Group. The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led West Bengal state government sent 4,000 heavily armed police to reassert government authority into the Nandigram area knowing full well that a bloody confrontation might result.

Right wing bourgeois parties, including the Trinamul (Grassroots) Congress and the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) are seeking to exploit mass sentiment against the pro-investor policies of the West Bengal government to promote their own right-wing agenda.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) and its Left Front allies bear full responsibility for creating conditions in which these discredited right-wing parties can pose as defenders of the toilers against a nominally “left” government that seizes land on behalf of Indian and international capital. At the national level, the CPM-led Left Front is today sustaining in power the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government, led by the Congress Party. The UPA government is implementing a neo-liberal socio-economic program that is having a devastating impact on the working class and rural toilers and is pursuing a strategic partnership with US imperialism.

The Socialist Labour League meeting will examine how the CPM’s role as a henchman for Indian and international capital is the end product of a decades-long degeneration, in which the Stalinists restricted the working class to trade union militancy and parliamentary maneuvers with the reputedly anti-imperialist wing of the bourgeois political establishment.

In opposition to the policies of the ruling elite and its political appendages—the CPM and the Left Front—the working class must advance its own independent program to address the social problems of working people and the landless and poverty-stricken rural poor.

This program can only be realized, as part of the struggle for international socialism, by mobilizing the working class in alliance with the oppressed peasantry to establish workers’ and peasants’ governments—in the form of the Union of Socialist Republics of South Asia. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its organ, the World Socialist Web Site, advance this perspective.

The Socialist Labour League, which supports the ICFI, urges socially conscious workers, youth and intellectuals to attend the public meeting to discuss this perspective and join the struggle to build a section of the ICFI in India.

Time : April 22, Sunday, 10 am

Venue: Small Seminar Hall, Periyar Thiddal, (Next to Thinathanthi office), Vepery, Chennai -600 007.

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Socialist Labour League of India to hold public meeting on Nandigram peasant massacre