Articles by Ajit Roy

Hopeful Beginning

It is the duty of the Left to formulate and pursue a policy that can simultaneously take care of both the Congress(I) and the communalists-fundamentalists. This can be done only by stepping up the campaign against the Congress(I) as the fountainhead of all anti-democratic and anti-secular developments in the country whose by-products are the growing Hindu revivalism and the Muslim fundamentalism.

WEST BENGAL CPI(M)-CPI Relations The Basic Issues Ajit Roy The basic issues involved in the current differences between the CPI(M) and the CPI in West Bengal have implications that go far beyond the question of relations between the two parties and affect Left and democratic movements in the country directly IN March last, the 14th Congress of the CPI, in session in Calcutta, had made ardent pleas for the unity between itself and the CPI(M). About two months later, the West Bengal state conference of the party meeting in the same city persisted in making the same plea, but with an unmistakable note of bitterness. While differences in the approaches of the two parties at the national level continue to impede the coming together, as desired by the CPU the cause of its new bitterness lies in some of the recent developments in West Bengal. More pertinently, the basic issues involved in these differences have implications that go far beyond the question of CPI-CPI(M) relations and affect the left and democratic movements directly. Two of these issues that have come up very sharply are: (i) the question of chalking out a course of militant working class actions to resist the growingly severe offensive of the industrial employers against the workers, particularly in the jute textile industry, and (ii) the issue of basic human right

Ajit Roy Perestroika and glasnost are most welcome, not only in the interest of progress of the USSR, but also of the entire human society. But Mikhail Gorbachev's claim that the Soviet state and the CPSU have 'renounced everything that deformed socialism in the 1930s' is an exaggeration which only reveals a certain lack of comprehension of the enormous dimensions of this historical legacy. In fact, certain basic digits of thought, uncritically taken over from the past, like the idea that the USSR is in the state of 'developed socialism' and that the Soviet state is now an all people's state, along with the concept of the CPSU as the vanguard of society, carry in them germs of a possible neo-Stalinist development in the future.

Darjeeling: Hopeful Turn and Remaining Obstacles WITH the unanimous rejection of a 'do or die' struggle by all the 148 delegates with votes in the Gorkha National Liberation Front (ONLF) convention of its front organisations at Darjeeling on July 10, hopes for an early settlement of the grow- ingly explosive Gorkhaland agitation in the hill areas of Darjeeling have become really bright. The new found personal regard for each other expressed by the two chief protagonists in the confrontation, that is, the GNLF president Subhas Ghishing and the West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu, provide a further assurance of a continued exchange even if the final agreement is delayed, thereby precluding the possibility of a recrudescence of widespread violence that has raged in this region during the last two years. The more recent news of disciplinary measures decided upon by Ghishing against the more militant Kalimpong activists is a further confirmation of the prevailing climate of goodwill.