The Israeli regime’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza has claimed the lives of well over 20,000 people and driven at least 85 percent of the enclave’s population from their homes. Throughout the more than two-month-long onslaught, US imperialism has backed the far-right Netanyahu government to the hilt, above all through its supply of the weaponry used by Israel to indiscriminately slaughter Palestinian men, women and children.

The daily commission of horrific war crimes by the Zionist state with the full-throated backing of its imperialist sponsors has provoked outrage throughout the world. Millions of people on every inhabited continent have joined protests condemning the genocide in Gaza. These protests have also taken place in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-supremacist BJP government have extended full support to Israel.

India’s main Stalinist parliamentary party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and its Left Front, have been forced to call protests against the Gaza war. Starting from the first week of November, the Stalinist-led Left Front held protest demonstrations and rallies in several cities, including Kozhikode in Kerala in the south and Kolkata in West Bengal in the east.

The Stalinists, in keeping with their decades-long role as the “left” flank of the Indian establishment, are seeking to confine the opposition of workers and youth to the slaughter of the impoverished and dispossessed Palestinians of Gaza within the reactionary framework of capitalist politics and great-power diplomacy. While they chant slogans against US imperialism, they are implacably opposed to the building of a global working class led anti-war movement in opposition to the imperialist world order.

They seek to pressure the Indian government into withdrawing its support for Israel, and call on the UN—an organization dominated by the same imperialist powers that back the genocide in Gaza and whose predecessor, the League of Nations, Lenin labeled a “thieves kitchen”—to enforce a “two-state solution” to secure “peace” in the Middle East.

The Indo-US alliance and the CPM’s calls for an “independent foreign policy” and a “multi-polar world”

In the Left Front protest rally held in Kolkata on November 8, the Stalinists called for the Modi government to “stop being the cronies of imperialism and pursue an independent foreign policy as before.” This is a reference to India’s Cold War-era “nonaligned” policy, in which New Delhi maneuvered between the USSR and the US and the other imperialist powers. This policy was junked by the Indian bourgeoisie in 1991 along with its failed state-led capitalist development project, as the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy was restoring capitalism and dissolving the USSR.

Over the past three decades, the Indian bourgeoisie has transformed India into a close military-strategic ally of American imperialism, and sought to enrich itself by integrating India into the imperialist dominated world economy and placing its workers, rural toilers and resources at the disposition of global capital.

A Left Front statement calling for protests against the Gaza genocide called on “the Modi government to stop endorsing the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians and to join the global call for an immediate cease-fire.”

This appeal is made under conditions in which Modi was one of the first world leaders to express their full support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians. As the World Socialist Web Site has previously explained, the Modi government’s staunch support for Israel arises from the Indian bourgeoisie’s alliance with US imperialism, which is codified in New Delhi’s Global Strategic Partnership with Washington. Forged between the Congress Party led-UPA government and the administration of George W. Bush as it was waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indo-US alliance has been repeatedly enhanced and expanded during Modi’s decade in power. As a result, India has been transformed into a frontline state in Washington’s all-sided strategic offensive against Beijing and plans for war with China.

Washington views its alliance with India as crucial to American imperialism’s waging of what is increasingly emerging as a third world war, against Russia in Eastern Europe, Iran in the Middle East and China in the Asia-Pacific.

The Indian ruling elite’s support for the Israeli genocide must be seen in this context. It views US imperialist support as critical to advancing its own predatory great-power ambitions and making India the go-to alternative cheap-labour production chain hub to China.

Updating their call for the Indian bourgeoisie to pursue an “independent” foreign policy, the Stalinists promote the chimera that a “multi-polar world” would constitute a progressive alternative to a “unipolar” system dominated by the US and enable India’s capitalist government to wield greater influence in world affairs. To this end, the Stalinists urge the Indian bourgeoisie to strengthen its ties with the European imperialists, the capitalist-restorationist regimes in Russia and China, and other BRICS states.

While they use Marxist sounding rhetoric, the CPM leaders are hostile to social revolution and determined to keep the working class in the thrall of capitalism, which they claim can offer prospects for further social progress if only there were greater balance in “international relations.”

For the Stalinists, Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and the US-NATO instigated war on Russia are not part of a rapidly developing world war that, like the two world wars of the last century, is rooted in the fundamental contradictions of capitalism—a systemic crisis for which the only progressive solution is the international mobilization of the working class to put an end to the profit system and the outmoded system of rival capitalist nation-states in which it is historically rooted.

Rather, according to party general secretary Sitaram Yechury and his predecessor Prakash Karat, these wars are the product of an overly rapacious US imperialism, which needs to be better constrained within a restructured global capitalist inter-state system.

The Indian Stalinists’ perspective of pressuring New Delhi to adopt an “independent foreign policy” so it can pursue a “progressive” role in world affairs is bound up with their fraudulent claim that the Indian state is a product of and incarnates, even if imperfectly, the mass anti-imperialist struggle that convulsed South Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. In reality, “independent India” was the product of the suppression of the democratic and social strivings of the working class and rural masses. Fearing a growing revolutionary storm, the Gandhi-Nehru-led Indian National Congress made a deal with British imperialism, whereby South Asia was partitioned along communal lines, into a predominantly Hindu India and an expressly Muslim Pakistan, and the Indian bourgeoisie took over the colonial state apparatus and direct responsibility for defending the holding of foreign and domestic capital.

The Indian Stalinists’ promotion of the reactionary, imperialist-promoted “two-state solution”

The CPM’s attempt to divert the global movement against the imperialist-back slaughter and continuing dispossession of the Palestinians into futile and reactionary efforts to pressure the UN, the Modi government and western powers is of a piece with its efforts to subordinate the working class to the Indian bourgeoisie and its state. For decades, the CPM has tied the working class to and supported governments led by the Congress Party, till a decade ago the bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, and various regional bourgeois parties on the grounds they constitute a “secular” alternative to the far-right, Hindu-supremacist BJP. In reality, by implementing right-wing policies when in power and conniving with the Stalinists and Stalinist-controlled unions to suppress the class struggle, the Congress and its regional allies have played a pivotal role in paving the way for the BJP to emerge as the dominant force in Indian bourgeois politics.

Through their promotion of the INDIA electoral alliance, the Stalinists are seeking to bring an alternative Congress-led bourgeois government to power in the next general elections slated for the spring of 2024. The political record of Congress and its regional allies prove that such a government would not be fundamentally different from Modi’s regime. It would continue implementing pro-investor economic policies, assist US imperialism in preparing for war with China and attack democratic rights.

The CPM’s reactionary politics are the outcome of Stalinism. That is the nationalist politics and ideology of the privileged bureaucracy that usurped power from the Soviet working class and repudiated the program of world socialist revolution on which the Russian Revolution had been carried out under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. In the name of “socialism in one country,” the Stalinist bureaucracy maintained its ill-gotten privileges by sabotaging the struggles of the global working class in pursuit of alliances with the imperialist powers and, in the countries historically dominated by imperialism, the national bourgeoisie.

The imperialist-backed partition of Palestine and the formation of the Israeli Zionist state took place in 1948, just one year after South Asia’s communal partition, and the creation of the rival “independent” capitalist states of India and Pakistan.

In the case of Palestine, the Kremlin bureaucracy in Moscow—supported by the various Communist Parties, including the Communist Party of India (CPI), from which the CPM emerged in 1964—backed the creation of Israel. It did so as part of its broader effort to reach a modus vivendi with the imperialists through its suppression of the global revolutionary upsurge of the working class in the aftermath of World War II.

In India, the Stalinist CPI, having helped sabotage the “Quit India” movement during the war, systematically subordinated the working class to the Congress Party and the Muslim League on the grounds that they, as the political representatives of the national bourgeoisie, were the rightful leaders of the anti-imperialist democratic revolution. The CPI supported, and, where it had representatives in India’s legislatures, voted for the “transfer of power agreement” reached between Britain, the Congress and Muslim League, and for the communal partition of the continent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and a predominantly Hindu India, which they proclaimed was the realization of “self-determination.”

In opposition to the Indian Stalinists’ pathetic and reactionary appeals to the imperialists and the Indian bourgeoisie to stop the genocide in Gaza in which they are all implicated, the World Socialist Web Site insists that this task can only be achieved through the mobilization of the international working class.

We call on the workers and youth who have joined protests throughout the world to turn to the working class for support. Workers should organize strikes and other actions to stop the supply and production of all conceivable military equipment destined for Israel. This must be linked to the fight for an international political general strike, and the struggle to fuse the fight against imperialist war with the growing mass upsurge of working people around the world against capitalist austerity and the assault on their social and democratic rights.

The only progressive answer to the barbarity of imperialism and the developing global conflagration into which crisis-ridden capitalism wants to throw humanity is the arming of the global anti-Gaza protests and working class upsurge with a socialist perspective.

In opposition to the reactionary two-state solution, the unity of Arab and Jewish workers across the Middle East must be forged in the struggle against imperialism and all forms of nationalism, both of the Zionist and Arab varieties, and for workers’ power and the establishment of the United Socialist States of the Middle East.