Kavita Krishnan resigns from CPI-ML raising ‘troubling questions’ on Soviet Union, China

Kavita Krishnan, one of the most prominent faces of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, on Friday quit all her party posts and responsibilities, pointing to some “troubling questions” about the Soviet Union under Stalin and the current Chinese government, and their parallels with India under Narendra Modi.

She resigned as member of the CPI(ML)’s polit bureau and central committee, secretary of the party’s women wing All India Progressive Women’s Association and the editor of the party’s journal Liberation.

Flagging troubling issues

Krishnan said that she needed to “pursue certain troubling questions” that was “not possible to explore” in her party fold. Among questions highlighted by Krishnan are those pertaining to the Indian communists’ alleged failings in putting up a vigorous and consistent fight for protection of democracy and civil liberties against “fascism and growing totalitarianism” in India, and in flagging their subversion in “totalitarian socialist regimes” like China and Stalin’s USSR that manifested in invasion of Ukraine by Russia earlier this year.

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“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,” she wrote in the announcement on Facebook.

“[There is a] 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 wrote.

‘Need to defend liberal democracies’

There is a “need to recognise the importance of defending liberal democracies with all their flaws against rising forms of authoritarian and majoritarian populisms not just in India but around the world,” Krishnan added.

Since the 1990s, Krishnan has been one of the leading Left activists, especially for gender rights. She emerged as a prominent face of the widespread protests that swept the country following the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape-murder in Delhi, playing since a key role in shaping the discourse on women rights and safety. Her first book, Fearless Freedom, published in 2020, examines women’s safety, the control and surveillance against women under the guise of protection, and the disappearance of women from public spaces in the country.

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“Since 2014, we have been trying to protect even what may be a flawed democracy from totalitarianism and Modi’s authoritarian regime. The kind of State where only the duties of the citizens are stressed, abrogating their rights,” Krishnan told The Indian Express, adding that this is “mirroring of Putin’s Russia” as “democracy is being reshaped in the country to simply affirm support for the ‘great leader’” and for an “Opposition-mukt Bharat”.