'INDIA bloc need of the hour,' says Dipankar Bhattacharya, North India's biggest Left leader

Barely days after the draft electoral roll in Bihar drawn up after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) saw the elimination of over 65 lakh voters, the general secretary of CPI(ML) Liberation Dipankar Bhattacharya on Tuesday said that INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc was the need of the hour.

The Left leader's remarks have come two days before the INDIA Bloc parties are scheduled to meet on August 7 to thrash out a common strategy to fight what Dipankar termed the "unprecedented disenfranchisement" caused by the SIR. 

"There are people who say that the INDIA alliance that came up before the 2024 was just a one-election arrangement. I don't look at it that way. It is the need of the hour," Dipankar said while delivering the 24th Narendran Memorial lecture on 'Bihar: Trial Run for Mass Disenfranchisement' in Thiruvananthapuram on August 5.

He said the way the INDIA bloc came together for the Bharat Bandh in Bihar on July 9 was an example of how the alliance could put up a united fight against the neo-fascist BJP regime. On that day, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was flanked by Dipankar on his right and CPM general secretary M A Baby on his left.

Dipankar said the BJP had grown at the expense of all the non-fascist parties; the Congress, the CPM, the BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party).

"Think about Mayawati. She was a four-time Chief Minister. Now her party does not have a single MLA or MP. The BJP is growing at the cost of every ideology and every political stream. If we fail to understand who the common enemy is, we will be doing so at our own peril," Dipankar said. Earlier in the day, Mayawati said in an X post that "the BSP is neither part of the BJP-led NDA alliance nor the Congress-led INDIA bloc, or any other front."

The CPI(ML) Liberation leader said he was fully aware of the political compulsions of INDIA bloc parties, and how power equations work in contradictory ways in various states in the country. "But beyond that it has to be realised that all non-fascist ideologies in India (right from the Congress to socialist and communist movements) were co-partners in the freedom movement," Dipankar said. He wanted non-fascists to come together for this second freedom movement.

Dipankar also said that there should be greater unity among communists. "Probably it is a matter of time. There can at least be closer unity in action and clarity of thought. After all we were one party till early 1960s. Then India had only one communist party," the CPI(ML) Liberation leader said. "So if the situation demands, we can be one party once again," he said.

CPI (ML)L now has two seats in the Lok Sabha (two short of the CPM's four), 11 seats in the 243-member Bihar Assembly, and two seats in the 81-member Jharkhand Assembly

Nonetheless, he said that the unity of communist parties was not a precondition. He said the parties could also function independently and still be on a single platform. He gave the example of the Sangh Parivar in which there is a "multiplicity of organisations with a common agenda".

Whether as a single party or individually in a common platform, Dipankar said it was time for the communists to work together. "When something like Operation Kagar (against Maoists in Chhattisgarh and Telangana) is attempted, they say it is state policy, that you have to make India Maoist-free. Amit Shah says India would be Naxal-free before March 2026 (the deadline he has set)," Dipankar said. 

On May 14 this year, Shah declared that 31 Maoists, including top leader Nambala Keshava Rao alias Basavaraju, were killed by Indian security forces as part of Operation Kagar, which began barely a month ago on April 21. Home Minister Amit Shah had told Parliament that it was the first time in three decades that a Maoist of Basavaraju's seniority had been killed by government forces. 

"See the way he (Shah) celebrated these murders in Parliament. Let us not look at it and say it is done only to Maoists. If it is done to Maoists, it will also be done to Marxists, it will be done to every socialist, anybody who talks about social transformation in this country," Dipankar said.

He said that Maoists were, in fact, ready for talks. "I was told that Basavaraju was caught alive. He should have been tried under the law. Instead, he was killed. So Operation Kagar is not against a particular stream of communist movement. It is an anti-Communist witch-hunt, it is an anti-Left witch-hunt," Dipankanr said.