Indian famine worst ever

AS INDIAN politicians prepare for the campaign leading to February's election, the country is racked by hunger and violence.

The second crop failure in a year threatens the worst famine since the Bengal disaster of 1943. It is estimated that over 50 million people lace sheer starvation in the next tew months.

In Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, the drought has destroyed most of the crops. Stocks of grain are rapidly dwindling. Many peasants are moving into the towns to look for work.

The towns themselves are the scene of almost daily demonstrations and riots. Calcutta and Bombay have seen general strikes of 48 and 24 hours, protesting at the tood shortage and rising prices.

Students in particular have erupted in a series of violent demonstrations. Fights with the police amounting to pitched battles have broken out in many university towns, involving several deaths and hundreds of injuries.

The reactionary Hindu communalist organisation Jan Sang steps up its own agitation to divide the working class on religious grounds.

Sacred cow

On Monday, it led a big demonstration in Delhi in support of its 'save the cow' campaign, aimed at preventing the slaughter of the animals, sacred in the Hindu religion.

Hundreds of thousands were involved in battles with police and soldiers in front of the parliament building. Several people were killed when police opened fire on the crowd. Communist Party:

divided into Moscow and Peking factions, has led many of the movements on the food issue. But neither group preparies any struggle which can resolve the deep problems facing the sub-continent.

Meanwhile, the country's economic problems get worse. Unemployment increases and the foreign exchange position has hardly benefitted at all from June's devaluation of the rupee.

By forcing prices up still faster, this measure makes the plight of the workers and peasants still more desperate.

Ability queried This is the background against which Mrs. Gandhi leads the Congress to face its fourth general election. By means of all kinds of political juggling the giant national party of the Indian capitalist class has managed to hold itself together.

Now, doubt about its ability Religion -a dressing for reaction THE PROTESTANT UNIONIST (i.e., extreme Protestant Conservatives of the type who now follow Paisley) election candidates of the last two years have circulated very similar propaganda to the leaflet shown in a recent issue of The Newsletter. Demonstrations of Protestants are called with slogans like this :

'Protestants show O'Neill secrecy to Lemass and Co. Register your protest Surrender.' Paisley's newspaper, 'Protestant Telegraph', which has been appearing fortnightly since May this year, combines this political campaign with long and violent religious articles, together with the building up of Paisley himself as the saviour of Ulster's Protestants.

In the issue of July 30, Paisley's article The Reasons Why I Chose Jail' contains the following:

'With the grace of God anc the help of the Protestants of Ulster, the day will come when I will be in Stormont-the only. way true Protestant people can deal with the ruling junta of Lundies (traitors)

is to have someone there to root out the nest of traitors.' While Paisley rants on with his demagogy, his paper campaigns for some myth of rough simplicity of commonsense, at anti-intellectualism reminiscen of Hitler, combined with dark hints at the power of 'vested interests' behind all the deception.

DRESSING

Paisley uses Protestantism as a dressing for this reactionary message, the essence of which is that every man should work for the glory of God in the situation in which he has been placed. An example is this extract from an article on synthetic products in modern industry, published the •Protestant Telegraph' on May 28:

'All this is bad enough, but worse still is the double-talk of the politicians, and the steady, smooth deception of the public by powerful vested interests which make it almost impossible for us to think straight. Worse still perhaps, is the use of an evangelical vocabulary which has no real experience to back it. In this synthetic age in which we are being conditioned to a superficiality in thought and speech, the early witness of Society of Friends is needed more than ever it was:

"But let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil"' The verbal attack on vested interests is one of the tricks of all right-wing extremist and fascist movements. Those who are drawn into them must be per suaded that the whole corrupt set up of politics and business whose decay is threatening their existence will be thoroughly overhauled.

Hitler used to talk about a "permanent revolution' in the As Mrs. Indira Gandhi (left) leads the ruling Congress Party towards its fourth general election, the country again explodes into more widespread rioting. Begun because of the acute food crisis, these riots also express the lack of confidence in the pro-capitalist rulers. JOHN CRAWFORD reports to deal with its present problems are voiced, not just in India, but in imperialist circles.

The Congress regime arose from the agreement with British imperialism to partition the country in 1946. The Indian capitalists had to carry out the task which the imperialists could not face alone: to hold back the wave of revolution sweeping Asia.

Nehru saw the Chinese revolution reach the frontiers of India. He worked to obtain a deal with the Stalinists which would enable him to balance between imperialism and the Indian masses.

Neither Shastri, nor Mrs.

Gandhi, could continue this that he joining in our ranks. No German state, and Mussolini went much further than our English Liberals of 1966 with calls for workers' control and an end to the betrayals of the Labour politicians. relish to his 'exposure, added Paisley is able to give attacks by a spate of 'scandal' stories about the Roman Catholic Church and the 'betrayal' of so-called Protestants who turn a blind eye to these abuses.

Paisley's paper runs a column along these lines called 'Do You Know . .., which is suspiciously reminiscent of an almost exactly similar one which used to appear in the British fascist paper in the 1930s, the 1930s, though that one was devoted to anti-Jewish stories. Here is a sample:

'Did You Know... "That the Roman Catholic Church in Toronto has been forced to purchase a large Tudor Mansion in which to house the drunken alcoholic priests of Canada? The official Romanist figure states that there are about 4,000 alcoholic fathers in the Canadian Church.' Fascism is not defended by its ideological content: it can be seen clearly that anti-Catholicism plays here the same role as antisemitism in Britain and Germany before the Second World War.

insisting on the religious 'truths' of Protestantism, as interpreted exclusively (among the living, that is) by Paisley himselt, Paisley builds up an ideological barrage against the socialist movement which is the only salvation of the working class in every country.

ROT THREATENED

Everywhere capitalism is in crisis; its decay: threatens to rot and destroy every vestige of the cultural heritage of mankind, built up by human • labour and genius over thousands of years.

In one of the countries which has been among the worst victims of this process, Paisley concentrates everything on making the people look backward to the pure days of the Protestant settlement, before science and sophistication 'corrupted' mankind.

Take for example his use of a quotation from Martin Luther:

'Martin Luther, the German reformer, thundered the following regarding higher institutions of learning: "I. am afraid the universities will prove to be the great gates of hell, unless they diligently labour to explain the Holy Scriptures and to engrave them upon the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount. Every precarious balance without great dangers. For none of the problems of Indian society, national, economic or cultural, can be answered by the Congress or its capitalist backers.

Without nationalization under workers' control, the destruction of landlordism and imperialist solutions are possible.

this implies a smashing of the Congress regime and an alliance of the Indian and international working class.

That is why the building of an Indian section of the Fourth International is vital for the solution of India's desperate problems.

Cliff Slaughter deals with ideas of the Rev. lan Paisley institution where men are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt"!

The task of the working class is to sweep away the power and property of the capitalist class which has misappropriated all the conquests of mankind.

In order to do this the working class, through Marxist theory, builds upon and improves upon all the past material and intellectual products of society.

It is this future of the working class against which Paisley nghts with his propaganda and his religious rhetoric.

Paisley's , movement, whatever its future in Ulster, not the dominant bourgeois terests decide to use its political and military organisation as its weapons against the working class, is a warning to the labour movement of all Britain and Ireland. The very emergence of such a movement indicates the depth of the social crisis and the seriousness of the political tasks facing the working class.

OPPOSITE

We see also how the much-vaunted 'democratic' and 'compromising' traditions of the history of British bourgeois society, established by the 'middle classes' in the period of the rise of capitalism, turn into their opposite and provide adequate material for fascist demagogy.

The fact that the social-democratic leadership of the labour and trade union movement continues to avow allegiance to these very traditions, and • that the so-called Communist Party cats for the unity of all demodefeat fascism and racialism, is again only a sure sign of their having long since gone over to the side of the exploiters.

The answer to Paisley and those interests which stand behind him, both now and as a potential instrument big capital, is the building of à movement with socialist policies for all the problems facing the working class-employment, cost of living, housing, education—as well as the national-democratic tasks left unsolved by the Irish bourgeoisie.

These policies will only win the following of the working class in the course of a fight to expose the false leaders of social-democracy and Stalinis Marxists must fight in the labour movement for organised resistance to the splitting activities and intimidations of the Paisley-ites and their ilk.

It is along these lines that the Young Socialists and Socialist Labour League will fight in Britain and Ireland.