CPI(ML) Liberation: The Call of April 22, 2025

This April 22 we are observing the 56th anniversary of the foundation of our great and beloved party and also the 155th birth anniversary of Comrade Lenin. Today we once again pay our homage to all our great martyrs and departed leaders and renew our pledge to fulfil Comrade Lenin's clarion call to defeat imperialism and build socialism.

Despite losing its independent majority and having to depend on allies including parties like JDU and TDP that have at times moved away from the BJP, the Modi government in its third term has further intensified its fascist offensive. It has rushed through legislations like the Waqf Amendment Act and Uniform Civil Code that directly target the Muslim community and has launched a brutal war on Adivasis and alleged Maoists in Chhattisgarh in the name of making India Naxal-free by March 2026.

The repealed pro-corporate farm laws are being attempted to be brought back through the backdoor as a new policy framework for agricultural marketing. All existing labour laws are set to be replaced by a set of four labour codes that will vastly erode many of the hard won rights of India's working class. The Right to Information Act is being amended in a manner that will take away the rights of citizens to demand transparency and accountability and allow the state to get away with arbitrary and corrupt practices and brazen abuse of power.

There are renewed attacks on campus democracy and academic freedom, to kill dissent and debates and promote bigotry, hate and superstition, so as to refashion India's universities and other institutions of higher education and research as laboratories of cultural regimentation and ideological indoctrination. And incited by hate-filled films and other means of propaganda, Hindutva mobs are ruling the streets with daily doses of anti-Muslim, patriarchal and casteist violence.

While we in India have to deal with the fascist assault of Modi 3.0, the US and the whole world are now faced with the reign of disaster unleashed by Trump 2.0. In an open alliance with Elon Musk, the world's richest person, Trump is waging a massive war on democracy within America, linking it up with a global tariff and trade war and a virulent anti-immigrant campaign including deportation, revocation of visa and various forms of persecution directed against undocumented immigrants and pro-Palestine activists. Like Modi's 'Achhe Din' rhetoric in India, Trump calls it MAGA or Making America Great Again.

In spite of Modi's claims of special friendship with Trump, and complicity with the Trump-Netanyahu combine in the continuing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the Trump Administration seems to have singled out India for the most humiliating kind of treatment with the Modi government meekly capitulating to the American acts of arrogant arm-twisting. No previous government in independent India has hurt India's national pride and strategic interests as much as the Modi regime. Meanwhile, Amit Shah makes derogatory remarks about Ambedkar on the floor of Parliament and Mohan Bhagwat negates the legacy of India's freedom movement by describing the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya as the symbol of India's 'real independence'.

Against this backdrop we will be facing the crucial Bihar elections later this year. The entire party must help Bihar comrades to score bigger victories in this all important battle. Our success in Bihar in the 2020 Assembly elections and in 2024 Lok Sabha elections has greatly enhanced the party's political profile and the Left ranks and the entire progressive camp are now looking to Bihar and especially our party to come up with a stronger performance to stop the Modi-Shah-Yogi juggernaut and save this bastion of people's movement from falling into the BJP's hands. From this April 22 onward, let us resolve to work on war footing to give our very best to the election campaign.

With the fascist offensive intensifying by the day, the battle for democracy calls for greater unity, strength and determination. As revolutionary communists, we must play a vanguard role in this battle. We need to develop greater mass strength by forging closer ties with the people and taking up every issue related to their lives, livelihoods and liberties. We need a bigger and more vibrant and dynamic party organisation with greater ideological strength and courage.

2025 is the centenary of the organised communist movement in India. It is also the centenary of the foundation of the RSS. All through India's freedom movement and the subsequent decades of parliamentary democracy in independent India, the communist ideology has fought relentlessly against the fascist design of the RSS. For large parts of these hundred years, the RSS remained quite isolated, but today as it operates from the vantage position of state power, it is doing everything possible to tighten its ideological and cultural grip on the whole country. We must save India from the ravages of this growing fascist disaster.

During the freedom movement, the Indian bourgeoisie had succeeded in establishing its leadership in the national awakening, but today when the dominant sections of Indian bourgeoisie are rallying around the fascist project, it is for the working people to come forward with the banner of people's democracy and national advance to break free from the fascist and imperialist stranglehold. As inheritors of India's radical legacy of anti-colonial anti-feudal struggles, revolutionary communists must today emerge as the leading force in the anti-fascist surge of democracy and social justice.

All for a bigger, stronger and more vibrant CPI(ML)!

Down with fascism and imperialism, victory to democracy and socialism!