What Should Communists Do?

India’s repertoire of horrific rape cases is growing at a rapid rate. Every Indian woman knows of the brutal 2012 gang rape and murder known as Nirbhaya that shook the entire country. Then came Badaun in 2014 where two Dalit sisters were gang raped then hanged to death from a tree. Unnao followed in 2017 where an elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representative raped a young woman who later attempted to self-immolate. 2018 gave us Kathua, where an 8-year-old Kashmiri Muslim girl was gang raped and killed by seven Hindu men as a means of intimidating the community. 2020 brought Hathras, where a young Dalit woman was gang raped by four upper-caste men, simply because they felt they could. She also died. The list goes on.

These are a fraction of names from recent memory that made national and international news owing to their gruesome nature. The reality is far bleaker, especially for Dalit, low-caste, minority and working women. According to a 2018 government report, a rape was reported every 15 minutes on average that year—and those are just the ones that were reported. The latest case to gain national attention is R.G. Kar, named after the hospital in West Bengal where a young woman doctor was raped and murdered by a volunteer cop as she was trying to get some sleep after a 36-hour shift.

This latest case saw a repeat of the same pattern that erupts in Indian politics every time a rape becomes national news: huge protests break out, only to die down some weeks later, having changed nothing in the slightest. The bubbling anger gets channeled into the courts and mainstream discourse amounts to debating the severity of the punishment: is it death or life imprisonment? Meanwhile, establishment political parties use these horrific incidents to undercut one another, blaming their opponents in government for this or that failure in the hopes that they can ride to power next time.

Drowned in this mess, the left plays an utterly hopeless role, offering no clear path forward for the women masses other than outrage, calling on the state for protection, or publishing tirades about how all oppressions are interlinked and the need for united struggle. Yes, there is such a need. But what should communists do to advance this struggle now? Any left group worthy of its name must be able to chart a concrete course of action in defense of women, not merely on the job, on the streets, but also against the most heinous of crimes against their bodies! To see how the left once again failed to advance the cause of women, let us first turn to the particular dynamics of the R.G. Kar movement and offer our own view on the role of communists therein.

An “Apolitical” Movement in Defense of Women

When news broke about R.G. Kar and the attempted cover-up by the hospital administration and police, it unleashed deep anger, bringing people from all layers of society on to the streets in major cities in India. In Kolkata, protests were led by the doctors’ union at R.G. Kar hospital and feminists under the slogan “Reclaim the Night.”

Dominated by petty-bourgeois educated professionals and feminists, the movement centered around various liberal demands to the state and the hospital to address the plight of women: to have more CCTVs and bathrooms; increased police presence, especially female cops; to fill the vacant positions for healthcare staff; to provide more public transit at late hours, etc. While some of these demands are supportable, the main problem is that the perspective from which they stem is based upon reliance on government institutions, such as the cops and courts, whose central function is to defend the existing social order. Time and time again, these institutions have not only done nothing to help women, but have often colluded in covering up violence against them.

This fundamentally liberal perspective was reflected in the fact that the movement declared itself consciously “apolitical.” As one journalist notes: “the ‘apolitical’ character of the protests has been its main currency. The participants—whether the junior doctors or people hitting the streets in solidarity—are resisting politicisation attempts by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), the two main Opposition parties” (The Wire, 15 September 2024).

There is a contradiction here which is important to understand. On the one hand, the opposition to “politicization” stemmed from people being completely fed up with the main parties and saw them as part of the problem. In this sense, the sentiment behind attempts to keep it apolitical indicated a thirst for a real alternative. However, at the same time, this movement was in the hands of the urban petty bourgeoisie which has an interest in keeping the anger of the broad masses contained in order to maintain its own leadership. The insistence on staying “apolitical” on the part of the organizers of the movement was in fact an abdication of the struggle to find a genuine solution to the problem, and thus kept the movement stuck in its liberal-feminist tracks.

There is no vacuum in politics. Lacking a viable and meaningful alternative that could advance the material interests of the working masses and women, the door was wide open for reactionary views to enter the fray. Indeed, the Hindu-chauvinist BJP benefited from the “apolitical” nature of this movement as it was able to appeal to certain conservative segments of the movement through its emphasis on traditional family values, whereby the well-being of women is achieved through submission to father, brother or husband, and sometimes even the son.

After weeks of protests, what did this “apolitical” movement achieve? Nothing that actually advances the fight for women’s conditions. Instead, the case has been used as a political football between the ruling party in West Bengal and the BJP, which is trying to win the state elections next year. The anger has been channeled into a state inquiry. And having lost steam, the protest movement has retreated onto college campuses. This is liberal feminism in action. But that events unfolded this way and not otherwise is squarely due to the failure of the left.

A Communist Answer

Every time a horrific rape occurs, the left melts seamlessly into the movement. It becomes difficult to distinguish the left from liberals and feminists because it typically does not have a qualitatively different answer for fighting back against the most intimate and violent crime against women.

It should be the exact opposite. The role of communists is to show why a genuine answer is one based on a proletarian strategy. In the R.G. Kar movement, this meant putting forward a program that could link the burning needs of the women masses, brought to the surface by this case, with broader social discontent, fusing the two to present a real alternative to the hell that is life in India. As an example of what such a program could look like, we propose the following four demands.

Open the police and administration files. This horrific incident was covered up by those in charge. Demand that the police and the hospital open up their files to scrutiny so the public can know the whole truth. Anyone who opposes this elementary demand is not on the side of women.

For the right of women to bear arms. Unless you’re a Bollywood star or Nita Ambani, India is hell for women. A deeply felt demand that emerges every time a rape happens is to “end rape culture” in the hopes that if only enough people demonstrated and explained why rape is bad, then gradually women’s safety would become a reality. This won’t happen so long as India remains defined by mass poverty and scarcity of resources that are responsible for the brutal conditions of women. An immediate step to combat the impunity with which women are attacked is to arm women—whether day or night, anyone in a bus or on a street or in a hospital will think twice about their decisions if they are facing an equal threat to their own personal safety.

Unions must control safety and working conditions. R.G. Kar and most public hospitals are falling apart. There isn’t enough time and space for doctors to rest or do their jobs safely. Management squeezes doctors, especially junior doctors, to compensate for the lack of resources. As a result, healthcare workers other than the top doctors not only work in poor conditions, but are worked to the bone. The R.G. Kar case poses a basic question: who should run hospitals? Workers must be in charge of deciding safety and working conditions, not management or the state! Form shop floor committees of workers from all departments, including nurses, cleaning and maintenance.

For a massive jobs program to address the crisis of healthcare and unemployment. Not only is healthcare non-existent for the broad masses, India also faces a mass unemployment crisis. An obvious solution to both is massive investment in healthcare to build more hospitals and facilities so the public can have adequate access, to deliver free training for all healthcare jobs so people can get qualified, and to guarantee well-paying jobs for all new trainees so that work can be spread out among healthcare workers. But neither Mamata, nor Modi nor Rahul Gandhi can deliver this because doing so demands a huge encroachment on the interests of those they serve: the Indian capitalists and foreign corporations. For a working-class opposition to all the mainstream parties!

The Mini-Maxi Left

In contrast to the demands of the liberals who rely on the government, our demands insist on the need for the masses to rely on their own strength. From our point of view, only such a strategy can polarize the movement along class lines and break the masses away from the petty-bourgeois liberal program that constrained the movement. This was what communists needed to do. What did the left actually do?

The Hopeless Stalinists

One trend on the left is the class-collaborationist “minimum” wing that completely liquidated into the movement, becoming its left tail as it cheered on its main slogans and politics. This includes the Indian Stalinists, such as the CPI(M), which has maligned the term communist. It “demand[ed] that the central government act urgently to enact an appropriate law.” Calling on a Hindu-chauvinist anti-woman government to protect women is bad enough, but since the crusty Bhadralok Stalinists in the Polit Bureau couldn’t even be bothered to specify which law, this three-paragraph statement cannot even be characterized as a left intervention.

The Feminist Stalinists

Another minimum trend is the CPI(ML) Liberation, the slightly left cousin of the CPI(M), which was more energetic in its liquidation. Activists from its student wing, All India Students Association (AISA), became co-organizers of the “Reclaim the Night” protests alongside the feminists, pushing the same politics. According to them, what is needed are “special initiatives…to increase sensitization within the police administration and ensure equal participation of all gender identities at all levels of the force.”

This is an utterly scandalous position for any organization calling itself “communist.” It spreads the deadly illusion that women will be defended through changing the gender composition of the armed enforcers of the Hindu-chauvinist Brahminical patriarchal Indian state whose institutions have time and again blatantly defended perpetrators of violence against women. Consider the recent ruling by the Chhattisgarh High Court that acquitted a married man who anally raped his wife by fisting her repeatedly, landing her in medical care where she eventually died.

As for hiring more women cops—they are in fact more brutal toward women because they view it as their special duty to put women in their place. And they do this with impunity since it is done woman to woman and doesn’t have the same social stigma as a male cop beating a woman. Calling for more women cops is the grossest capitulation to the urban petty-bourgeois feminists who understand nothing of the reality of the poor toiling women workers.

A Missed Opportunity for Trotskyists

The trend in opposition to the Stalinists is much smaller, but politically more interesting. This is the “maximalist” trend best exemplified in this case by a small Trotskyist group in Kolkata called the Communist League (CL). In their latest propaganda, they correctly talk about turning the movement into a united struggle of the masses against capitalism. As we understand it, they correctly criticize the Stalinists, the main force on the left, noting that:

This raises the question: what did the CL do to link the R.G. Kar struggle to an anti-capitalist perspective? How did it try and take a leading role in this movement for democratic rights? On this score, we are left disappointed.

The maximum answer we find is a declaration that there is a need for united struggle and to raise the red flag of the international working class. But what is completely lacking is a concrete course of action that could advance the movement in opposition to the liberals and their Stalinist tails who were holding it back by rerouting it into legalistic and governmental avenues.

To advance the movement and take a leading role, what was needed was to provide working-class answers to the immediate needs felt by women—safety from the danger of rape—and tie them to the broader struggle against the ruling class. This could have channeled the energy of the protests into a working-class alternative to the status quo parties, in opposition to which the movement declared itself “apolitical.” And this would have opened up the possibility of a class differentiation within the movement, thus giving Trotskyists a real hearing in a region once politically dominated by Stalinists, thereby advancing the struggle for Trotskyism in India.

R.G. Kar was a historic opportunity. The case unleashed a burst of elemental anger not seen in West Bengal since the CPI(M) crushed the 2007 Nandigram protests. That this opportunity was missed is due to the failure of small groups like the CL to chart a concrete course of action that links the immediate struggles to a proletarian perspective.

The R.G. Kar movement is flatlining. It is good that leftists and students on college campuses want to carry on the struggle. But to go forward, they must confront the reasons behind its dissipation. It can still be revived, but only if it has a clear political answer that can link the burning needs of women to the necessity for a struggle against the entire foundations of Indian capitalism. This article has sought to provide such an answer.