18.12.1997

Breathtaking hypocrisy

Harpal Brar’s election to the SLP’s National Executive Committee is hardly shock news - being on the ‘recommended’ list ensured the NWCCMA’s 3,000-vote backing.

But why was he recommended? Over the last two years he has shared platforms with Scargill at the ‘Uphold the banner of communism’ rallies organised by the openly Stalinite Committee to Celebrate the October Revolution. More importantly though, he is prominent in the Indian Workers Association (Great Britain) and editor of its journal, Lalkar. For Scargill the politics of Brar are a positive recommendation and his leadership of, and affiliation to, the shadowy Association of Communists can safely be ignored

Thus, we have the ‘unconstitutional’ situation where an NEC member is a member of another political organisation and, in the form of Lalkar, is busily engaged in the writing and promotion of “separate and distinctive propaganda”, as the constitution puts it.

Comrade Brar’s political history makes interesting reading. It would be eminently fair to say that it has been characterised since the 1960s by a fanatical “anti-revisionism” - which, coming from the lips of the comrade, means a belief in the infallibility of JV Stalin. An essential part of this commitment to “anti-revisionism” is an intolerance towards any questioning of the ‘labour dictator’, even from fellow Stalinites in the Maoist milieu - from whence comrade Harpal Brar originates.

Brar has made it his life’s work to promote the ideas of Stalin. Thus in the 1970s he published a series of duplicated pamphlets such as JV Stalin: on the mechanics of class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat, a work dedicated to the “immortal memory and work” of Joseph Vissarionovich, and which dismisses all criticisms of “Stalin’s alleged errors”. He set up what was then the Communist Workers Association, whose overriding concern was to do battle with Maoist grouplets which had strayed down the “revisionist” path. This political orientation has been transferred wholesale to Lalkar, with its promotion of North Korea, Viktor Anpilov’s Communist Workers’ Party and Cuba, even if the latter does make its politics not entirely consistent (surely Fidel Castro is in Brar’s terms an arch “revisionist”?)

Now, by a splendid irony of history, comrade Brar is in a party full of “revisionists” of all hues. But it is even worse than that. He is in a party which also contains its fair share of out-and-out “counterrevolutionaries” (ie, Trotskyites), some of whom will be sitting round the same NEC table as him. No wonder Fisc refused to cast the black section’s 75 votes for him, despite the NEC’s own recommendation.

Not even Nostradamus himself could have predicted that the ‘new party of recomposition’ would vote onto its leadership an individual whose politics, whose mindset, comes straight from the 1930s

Danny Hammill