New Delhi: Kavita Krishnan, who has been a politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation [CPI (ML) Liberation] for over two decades, decided to leave all party posts raising “troubling questions”, which are being seen as ideological differences with the party.Although she told The Hindu that she would continue as the party’s primary member, the CPI(ML) Liberation leadership decided to remove Krishnan from party membership as well.In an announcement, posted on her Facebook page on Thursday, September 1, she said a request was made to the party’s central committee to relieve her of all party posts. “The party Central Committee has agreed to my request,” she said.Her questions touched upon the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and the current Chinese government, and their parallels with India under Narendra Modi.“The need to recognise that it is not enough to discuss the Stalin regime, USSR, or China as failed socialisms but as some of the world’s worst authoritarianisms that serve as a model for authoritarian regimes everywhere,” she said, adding that she would not be able to ask such political questions if she continued in party posts.She further went on to write, “For our fight for democracy against fascism and growing totalitarianism in India to be consistent, we must acknowledge the entitlement to the same democratic rights and civil liberties for all people across the world, including subjects of socialist totalitarian regimes past and present.”Krishnan, who has been a prominent commentator on TV and Twitter on a variety of issues, told The Hindu, “It was not possible to write on these questions remaining in the leadership. It is not a resignation, it is a mutually agreed stepping aside from the responsibilities. There is no quarreling with the party.”Over the past few months, she has been posing troubling questions directed at Communist parties in India. In July, she had said the industrialisation of the USSR under Stalin was done with “violent subjugation of Ukraine’s peasants”.“If any Indian communist thinks it’s ok for ‘communists’ to rule like this, then they should ask themselves what kind of democracy they’re fighting for in India,” she had said in a social media post in June, on reports about surveillance of citizens in China.On her future course of action, she said, “I will be writing on the substantive issues mentioned above, soon, to share my thinking as it evolves. But I do not wish to address the media further (beyond this statement) on the question of my being relieved from CPIML leadership.”A prominent civil liberties activist, Krishnan is the former secretary of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) and former All India Students’ Association (AISA) president.
