While quitting all her posts and responsibilities in the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation — including as a member of the CPI(ML)’s Polit Bureau and Central Committee, secretary of the party’s women wing All India Progressive Women’s Association and the editor of the party’s journal “Liberation” — Kavita Krishnan said that she needed to “pursue certain troubling questions” that was “not possible to explore” in her party fold. Among such questions highlighted by Krishnan, a prominent Marxist feminist and civil liberties activist, are those pertaining to the Indian communists’ inconsistency in not recognising the subversion of rights in socialist regimes that have been totalitarian, such as USSR under Stalin and China, while fighting such subversions in India. A failure to acknowledge these facts, said Krishnan, has prevented the Indian and global Left from standing with Ukraine – a victim of Russian and Soviet colonialism and imperialism. “The question is very simply about democracy. All my political life, the work that we have done is to advocate free thinking and the agency of people. The fact is that governments do not respect democracy – the State does not respect the people’s constitutional rights – and this can be seen in the atrocities carried out by the police including arbitrary arrests that we are increasingly seeing. There is a need to protect people from the power of the State – once we clearly acknowledge that, only then can we protect the rights of the people. This is something I have been thinking of for a long time now. The situation is worse since 2014, but even prior to 2014, citizen’s rights have not been respected,’’ said Krishnan while speaking to The Indian Express. Krishnan, who grew up in Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, began her political activism when she joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), going on to become the joint secretary of the JNU Students Union (JNUSU) in 1995. She also became the president of the All-India Students’ Association (AISA). Since the 1990s, Krishnan has been one of the leading Left activists, especially for gender rights. She emerged as a prominent face of the widespread protests that swept the country following the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape-murder in Delhi, playing since a key role in shaping the discourse on women rights and safety. Her first book, Fearless Freedom, published in 2020, examines women’s safety, the control and surveillance against women under the guise of protection, and the violence against women packaged as patriarchal safety. "Since 2014 we have been trying to protect even what may be a flawed democracy from Modi’s fascist and authoritarian regime. Modi wants the kind of State where only the duties of the citizens are stressed, abrogating their rights,” Krishnan charges, adding that this is “mirroring of Putin’s Russia” as “democracy is being reshaped in the country to simply affirm support for the ‘great leader’” and for an “Opposition-mukt Bharat”. “As we fight such a regime in India, how can we not look at the ways in which this regime learns from fascist and authoritarian states past and present? The comparison with Hitler is accurate and is made often. But Modi is also taking lessons from China next door, where a state calling itself socialist is putting Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps, using facial recognition tech to surveil and discipline citizens, suppressing all dissent, and backing Myanmar’s brutal and genocidal military rule. But if we oppose Modi’s attempts to run a one-leader, one-party, one-ideology government in India, we obviously cannot support such rule in China today, or such rule as it existed in the Soviet Union,” she said. “We continuously want supporters of the far right in India to accept and admit the reality of this regime – which is rising unemployment, prices and divisive government. But they are so invested in the myth that Modi rule will make everything right, that they find it hard to give it up even as they suffer. It is only right then that we throw light on and accept myths that we (the Left) ourselves are invested in and accept the oppression and atrocities by our gods, our heroes. We need to look at what Stalin had done. We need to be better than the BJP. People talk about how China has been successful in lifting its people out of poverty. But there are no civil liberties there, no freedoms! The Marxist poet Brecht said people need daily bread, but they also need the daily bread of justice. If a state brutally suppresses and denies the latter, can it be socialist? Is total communist party control over economy and polity and society, ‘socialism’? Surely socialism should be more free, more democratic than capitalist democracies?’’ Krishnan asks. The CPI(ML) general secretary, Dipankar Bhattacharya, told the Express that the issues raised by Krishnan were in no way “taboo” subjects. “These are discussions that we hold internally in the party all the time. As a matter of debates such issues, including those concerning civil liberties in China and Russia have always been discussed – even before the Soviet Union was dissolved. We have always had our critique of socialist countries – whether it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or their super-power syndrome, or Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine that we have condemned, just as we had condemned Tiananmen Square (episode) in China,” he said. “Probably the difference is that Kavita felt that this should be a more public discourse, while we debate these issues internally. She has made a choice, and we completely accept and respect that choice,’’ Bhattacharya said. He also said that the CPI(ML)’s priority now is to focus on “fighting fascism in India’’. “Fighting the fascism that is linked to the RSS ideology is our main priority right now. We will revisit other issues as and when they are required. Our sense of priority may differ,’’ he added. As far as Krishnan is concerned, it would be double standards to fight fascism in India while refusing to openly stand with victims of totalitarian China and the Stalin regime, and insisting on keeping criticism of these regimes “within the communist family,” something she compared to keeping domestic violence issues hushed within families. She is all set to take this discourse to a more public arena – through podcasts and meetings, where she is able to discuss issues “more freely” — while continuing to be part of movements for gender rights and civil liberties.
