Mainstream Weekly

CPM's Kozhikode Congress cuts the Last Thread Connecting it to Tantriki Sruti's Tradition

Sharad Patil — 2012-06-20T17:15:07Z

While terminating its 20th Congress at Kozhikode in Kerala the Marxist Communist Party (CPM) excluded V.S. Achuthanandan from its PB, the only member of the first generation of Kerala Communists headed by E.M.S. Namboodiripad. VS was the CM upto the recent Assembly elections. The State Secretary, Pinarayi Vijayan, had persuaded the PB when it met at Thiruvananthapuram not to field VS in the Assembly elections. But the people demonstrated and forced the PB to field VS in the Assembly (…)

- 2012

Electoral Results Unlearnt

Sharad Patil — 2011-09-28T20:08:59Z

[The following article had reached us quite sometime back but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. —Editor]
The present plight of the communist and Dalit movements brings to mind a Mahabharatan myth. Brhadratha, the king of the rajaka Magadha state, was sonless. He got a fertility fruit from a sage, which he gave to both of his queens. They delivered the halves of an infant. Furiously they were thrown on a dung heap. The mother-goddess Jara saw it and joined them. And (…)

- 2011

L(D)F's Irrevocable Tragedy in the Assembly Elections!

Sharad Patil — 2011-05-23T23:55:36Z

Unilinear Marxism is in world crisis. Jyoti Basu, the CPI-M's longest serving Chief Minister of West Bengal, said before his death that ‘socialism is not practicable'. The Left (Democratic) Fronts of Kerala and West Bengal can no longer lay claim to the titles of Socialist or Communist. That is why irrevocable tragedies wait for both these Fronts in the coming Assembly elections. Disillusionment will seize their sincere cadres in the post-election period and they will strive to seek the (…)

- 2011

Can the Left (Communists) become the National Alternative?

Sharad Patil — 2010-06-10T00:40:22Z

I have slightly modified the title of Chaturanan Mishra's paper in Mainstream (May 8, 2010). There is no traditional Socialist—even Lohiaite—party in India today. All Lohiaites have formed, according to Mishra, casteist parties. No united front with casteist parties, he declares; but as the Congress or its splinters, like the Maratha Sharad Pawer-led NC, are ‘secular', the CPs may have united front with them in order to prevent the ‘communal' BJP from coming to power.
This shows that the (…)

- 2010

Diagnosis of Left‘s Debacle Still Undetected

Sharad Patil — 2009-07-11T18:34:29Z

A spate of articles are appearing in periodicals on the debacle of the Left in the recent parliamentary elections. They are descriptive and do not go into the correct cause. The CPM leaders attribute it to the futility of the Third Front and to the blunder of withdrawing from the UPA on the issue of the atomic agreement.
The Economic Conjecture
Kripa Shankar comes closest to the correct diagnosis in his paper in Mainstream (June 12-18, 2009). To quote him:
The Congress had enacted (…)

- July 2009

Search For Aborigines, or Sudra Varna, or Caste-Ending Equality?

Sharad Patil — 2009-03-02T17:08:11Z

For A Programme of Caste-Ending Bourgeois Democratic Revolution And Socialist Transition
‘…. He (communist/socialist) will be compelled to take account of caste after (socialist) revolution if he does not take account of it before revolution…You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform unless you kill this monster.' Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar [Writings and Speeches, Vol. 1, p. 47]
After discussing with Vaman Meshram, the President of the BAMCEF, Vilas Kharat, the Director (…)

- February 2009

Creatively Abstract the Legacy of Buddhist Samgha

Sharad Patil — 2008-08-10T06:35:11Z

Communication
After the parliamentary session on the trust vote was over, Communist veterans in Kerala and West Bengal, who were thrown out of the party, raised the outcry against Somnath Chatterjee's expulsion from the CPI-M that “there is no democracy in the CPI-M”. Their complaint is against the ‘centralised democracy', in the communist jargon ‘democratic centralism'. The issue is not between centralised democracy versus non-centralised one as is still taken to be. Stalin, who is still (…)

- August 9, 2008

'Marxist' Metamorphosis and the Positive Alternative

Sharad Patil — 2008-06-02T09:15:45Z

COMMUNICATION
You are bravely exposing the criminalisation of the Left Front's rule in West Bengal. The CPI's Chaturanan Mishra's call for discussion on socialism is being responded in earnest.
The murder and rape squads formed by the CPM in West Bengal are but copies of similar squads in Kerala. I had similar experience in the CPM in the seventies before my district unit resigned from it in 1978. Nikhil-da had the courage and integrity to publish my ‘Struggle for a New Line' in 1978. (…)

- May 31, 2008