While the communist party of India (marxist) , is not in power as of now , they have had history of winning elections, however there is a fatal flaw in their ideology , when it comes to fighting against opperession , while they agree upon existence of class disparity and want to work on the goal of removing it , the oldschool communists do not recognise caste system. For those who are not aware , caste system is a problem specific to indian subcontinent , it is like a dominant class of people who are called the upper castes ( tho in minority) , had deprived the lower castes , into not allowing them to get educated or get any other work that they were assigned at birth , by the family name they were born in . That kept the lower castes poor and deprived for ages. The CPI(M) is mostly flooded with the upper caste and do not recognise this systemetic opperssion that has been in place since ages !
I have heard about this criticism of the CPI(M) before.
Is there any specific statistics or articles that speak on this matter?
Because I know for a fact that there are materials on the CPI(M) website that mentions caste.
CASTE AND CLASS IN INDIAN POLITICS TODAY
and
CLASS STRUGGLE AND CASTE OPPRESSION : INTEGRAL STRATEGY OF THE LEFT .
A relatively more recent article on this subject: Caste and the CPI(M) in Tamil Nadu
This was from a quick online search I did months back when I was curious about the topic.
Do you believe that the party has not adequately addressed the issue despite all this?
Is it a case of not walking the talk?
I am very curious, because back in my home country, caste among Malaysian Indians is considered quite antiquated. From what I understand, and know, it is not as pervasive as in the past, and perhaps the nature of the political economy here destroyed any material basis for caste oppression specifically.
I’m just gonna address this. It is possible that that is true for Malaysian Indians (I don’t know much about Malaysia so sorry about that) but emigrated diaspora still dabble in casteism sometimes. It is something that does not get much attention but bubbles up to the surface sometimes. For example: California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee’s caste. The city of Seattle also banned caste discrimination recently though I don’t know what prompted that.
Oh of course. I assume that the diaspora still has some remaining casteism but I just mean in terms of like political organization it is not a relevant factor over here.
An issue that is prominent in Malaysia specifically is Tamil dominance in politics and of course just general race-based and communal issues. Especially with regards to other Indian minorities like Malayalis, Punjabis, etc.
And I don’t really expect anyone to know much about Malaysian history, that’s all fine.
Malaysian Indian history especially is neglected in the literature as well.
Personally, I have complete respect for my Indian comrades. It was the Indian proletariat that lead the struggle for labour unionisation and became prominent union leaders in our history.
Well the party just does namesake announcements like every party does , however the party higher ups are actually full of the upper caste people who think that solving class issues would solve caste based issues , they are more like liberals when it comes to most social policies i feel , may be economically left!