RCPI Statement Against the Proposed Charges on UPI Payments

On the night of November 8, 2016, PM Narendra Modi abruptly announced to the nation that he was banning the circulation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 denominated notes. This was done to turbocharge the adoption of digital payments across India. Ordinary Indians were forced to switch their modes of payment at the point of sword. About 100 people lost their lives while standing in long queues to deposit bank notes. 

Ten years on the BJP government is about to introduce a fee, a Merchant Discount Rate (MDR), on any UPI transactions above Rs. 2000. What is the proposal? In short:

• No charges for transactions below Rs. 2000; a fee of 0.4% to be levied on merchants for UPI transactions above Rs. 2000 (capped at Rs. 300)

• No person to person transactions will be charged

It is now claimed that widespread adoption of UPI transactions requires constant maintenance and even increased expenditure against rising security related threats. Recall, that the rationale behind pushing online transactions on to the people was its purported lack of friction. Now that millions have adopted online transactions, not entirely out of their own volition, this has caused enough friction in the system which requires a tax for its proper maintenance.

We must consider the following points in mind.

1. Even though the announcement proclaims a legal incidence on merchants only, in practice merchants are going to pass along an economic incidence of MDR on to consumers. At a time when there is a cost-of-living crisis with increased prices of LPG cylinders, and potentially increased prices of fertilizers, and food prices, this policy will be especially cruel for those who are already struggling. 

2. The MDR is a transaction fee and has qualities of a regressive tax. By charging on transactions, one is not charging on the person’s ability to pay, i.e. income or wealth. Thus, ordinary government employees, buying goods from Amazon worth more than Rs. 2000 using UPI will pay the same transaction fee as a rich corporate employee (because merchants will pass on the incidence to the consumers) making the same purchases.

3. Suppose one accepts that the increased costs of maintenance and guarding against security threats cannot be avoided. And suppose, as announced by the government, one accepts the logic that this should be borne by merchants, and not by consumers. Why not charge the merchants who are recording the biggest volume of UPI transactions a transaction fee on their total volume? Make the biggest merchants, say Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit etc. pay a fee on their total UPI transaction volume.

4. Lastly, let us note that there is only a 0.02% nominal fee on UPI payments to capital market intermediaries like mutual funds, stockbrokers, dealers and securities firms. That is a 20-fold less transaction fee for payments to capital markets like buying a mutual funds, investing in an IPO, buying shares through a broker, making an SIP/investment payment etc. Who makes financial payments such as those listed above? Think!

Suppose a person buys Rs. 75,000 worth of goods using UPI, they will be paying an MDR of Rs. 300. If another person invests Rs. 1 lakh in securities and mutual funds they will pay an MDR of Rs. 20. The class character of these fees are clear to ordinary people of India. 

The Revolutionary Communist Party of India strongly opposes the institution of the proposed MDR on UPI transactions to be introduced from October 15th. We demand that the government consider progressive taxes on income of the super-rich, and wealth and inheritance taxes at a time when working people are going through an enormous economic crisis.

Statement on the Pakistani State’s Attack on Free Media "Jeddojehad"

The Pakistani military establishment had launched an attack on the online Jeddojehad. Its editor, Farooq Suhleria’s, home was raided. He could not be arrested as he was not in the country. But it means he cannot return to his job. Another member of the Editorial Board was also raided. The website has been shut down.

This comes from the determined resistance of Jeddojehad to the Pakistani rulers’ attempt to treat Jammu and Kashmir as a bilateral issue between Pakistan and India, and the refusal to genuinely allow self-determination in the parts of Jammu and Kashmir under Pakistani domination. In opposition to this, Jeddojehad seeks to uphold the principles of revolutionary Marxism on the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, not restricting that hypocritically to the Indian side.

The Revolutionary Communist Party of India denounces the attacks on Jeddojehad. We demand its freedom to propagate its views. We demand a halt to all raids and restrictions on its staff. For democracy in every part of Jammu and Kashmir. Internationalist solidarity with our cothinkers.

Press Release: On Professor Sumit Sarkar's Demise

The Revolutionary Communist Party of India expresses deep sorrow at the passing of Professor Sumit Sarkar. Among those who can be counted as leading figures of Marxist historical research in India, he was one. On the one hand, he applied materialist conceptions profoundly in the study of History. On the other hand, while doing that, he was never to sink into what he himself designated as "vulgar Marxism". So he could see the Bengal Renaissance dispassionately and say that the Young Bengal were not always extremely radical, but also carry out the most important analysis of the Swadeshi Movement. In it, he could refute quite a bit of the criticisms hurled at Rabindra Nath Tagore's 'constructive Swadeshi' and show the limits of 'extremism'.

In the twentieth century, his most significant work was certainly Modern India. He showed the plurality of India's freedom movement, and instead of taking one of the binary poles of harsh Gandhi criticisms versus adoration, he sought to show how and why Gandhi was able to unite diverse opinions and build a nationalist movement on a much wider public space. For Marxist politics, this understanding is vital, because we cannot leave the responsibility for the success of the bourgeois nationalists to the "betrayal" by the revolutionary leadership. That can create temporary heat but cannot show the path ahead.

In the early stages of Subaltern Studies, he was associated with the current. But he was aware that excessive reliance on post-colonialism and post-modernism pushes the centrality and reality of class. In Writing Social History, he highlighted his own views.

In the article The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar, he was among the first to step forward and unmask the fascist nature of the RSS. He and Tanika Sarkar were among the historians who wrote the important pamphlet Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flag. Again, during Nandigram, both stood firmly with the movement.

The volume in the Towards Freedom series raised the anger of the Vajpayee government with good reason.

Since the distortion of history is a core ideological site of the Hindutva Fascist project, a historian like Sumit Sarkar is not merely an ally but a leader in that particular battlefield. In his passing, both the scientific study of history and the progressive democratic movement have lost a rare comrade.

Unity Statement of RCPI and Radical Socialist, adopted after discussion on 9 and 10 August 2026

 

Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI) was formed during the Indian freedom struggle from a split in the then Stalinist and class collaborationist CPI in 1934, initially as Communist League, and subsequently changed into RCPI when it became a party. The central leader of the RCPI was Saumyendranath Tagore, an Indian delegate to the 6th Congress of the Communist International, who was to gradually question the Colonial Thesis, the decision to expel Trotsky and the sectarian line during the rise of Hitler, as well as the bureaucratic decline inside the USSR. In the late 1940s, there was a sharp division within the RCPI when Tagore opposed what he saw correctly as an ultraleft and adventurist line of armed uprising advocated by the majority of the leadership under Pannalal Dasgupta. This led to a split. Sudhin Kumar was able to ensure a recovery of that group after steering out of Dasgupta's politics of untimely locality-based armed struggle. Subsequently, all sides underwent a decline, but the RCPI continues to exist as a left party and achieved re-unification.

The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, emerged as a result of a split in the international communist movement in the early 1930s against the Menshevik, Kautskyan class-collaborationist deviation and bureaucratic degeneration led by the Stalinist clique, reflected in almost all the countries in the world. In India, it was the formation of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma, later the BLPI, that became the Indian Section of the Fourth International. The Indian Section of the Fourth International has undergone several political and organisational debacles and had different formations (as political groups) at different times, like Communist League, Inquilabi Communist Sangathan, Radical Socialist (RS), etc., but it has maintained a common lineage throughout. RS (as a political group) was operating as the section of FI in India.

Both RCPI and the Indian section of FI have some glorious legacies as well as dark spots in their history. Both tendencies have key commonalities in their formative ideologies, with some differences as well, some of which have faded into irrelevance with the fall of the Soviet bloc and the changes in China. However, the journey together by these two tendencies has never really happened, although some efforts were taken at different times.

In spite of proximity in the formative ideologies, there have been certain differences between the two political tendencies in their actual practices over the last several decades. However, with the changing political terrain and the crisis of the left movement in India, RCPI and RS felt the necessity of coming together and uniting based on their original and formative ideologies as the axis of such unification. While not ignoring the mistakes committed, the dark spots and the deviations in the past by the two organisations (or their predecessors), but considering them as political lessons to be acknowledged, the unified organisation upholds only their positive heritage for their unified journey together in the days to come.

The unified organisation is a NEW IDENTITY carrying forward the revolutionary ideology of RCPI and RS, naming itself as RCPI because of its continuity in maintaining the name, which is absent in the case of the Indian Section of the Fourth International.

The RCPI, as hereafter we shall call ourselves, stands for the following principles:

1. That socialism, our endeavour and goal, is possible and desirable but not inevitable. It will be built by the self-emancipation of the working class, leading behind it all the other exploited and oppressed categories—national minorities, oppressed genders and sexualities, castes, adivasis, and, in certain cases, oppressed religious minorities, without ignoring class realities.

2. A working-class-led revolution must inevitably result, if successful, in establishing the rule of the working class, supported by its allies through institutions of the broadest democracy, cutting out from the beginning bureaucratic and authoritarian institutions that curtail democracy. This was what Marx meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, not the rule of one party and its bureaucratic leadership, or even one great leader or the Ek Nayak.

3. We reject both Popular Frontism (strategic collaboration with bourgeois parties) as well as ultra-left versions of Stalinism, where minority heroism and armed action are promoted against mass mobilisations and mass struggles.

4. We reject the idea of revolution by stages. A revolution led by the working class cannot stop at some arbitrary point short of seizing the means of production from the current ruling class; it cannot stop at an imagined National, People's or New Democratic stage. We agree that this persists as a consequence of the uneven and combined character of capitalist development in India, tasks that in the 19th century could have been called tasks of the democratic revolution. While this needs special attention, we reject the view that this means a separate stage of revolution. Political power, the essence of a revolutionary overturn, must be under working-class leadership, whatever pre-capitalist remnants and capitalist distortions need to be tackled. 

For us, communism is learnt from the experiences of nearly three centuries of working-class struggles, successful and failed revolutions, from the revolutionary practice of proletarian organisations since the Communist League of 1847, the first three Internationals during their periods of greatness, and other progressive social struggles and teachings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Lev Trotsky and Saumyendranath Tagore and many other Marxists thereafter. That is why our Marxism is also a method to incorporate the lessons of concrete material reality for social change. For this reason, we want to highlight that a contemporary revolutionary programme must take into account the developments since the 1940s.

1. We hold that the collapse of the USSR and the Transformations in China mean the restoration of capitalism in present-day China and Russia. While we continue to see US imperialism and NATO as the leading imperialist threats, we oppose any alignment with Russia, China in the name of anti-imperialism. BRICS, containing as it does many imperialist-sub-imperialist powers of its own, is not an anti-imperialist bloc.

2. We are all aware of global warming and other ecological issues. But we need to bring them explicitly into a socialist, class-struggle framework. The struggle against climate change must therefore be made coherent with the struggle for socialism.

3. What we stand for in today’s world and today’s India is gender justice, the rights of ethnic national entities, the full emancipation of oppressed castes from Brahmanical and upper caste oppression, and the linking of Adivasi rights with ecological concerns. We do not support extreme forms of identity politics, but we recognise the reality of multiple oppressions and identities. Identities are real, and exploitation, oppression, alienation, based on them trample all human rights. There is no advance to socialism without addressing these, because the worst victims of identity-based division and oppression are the working classes themselves. We do not consider that all organisations fighting for identity rights should be rejected. We must draw close to progressives among them.

4. We propose a transitional programme, a bridge between the immediate economic and other partial struggles and the struggle for a socialist alternative. It is important to combine the global perspective with immediate and localised demands. To win people away from the capitalist system, to encourage them to resist, successful struggles are needed that give courage and demonstrate that partial victories are possible. Successful struggles require better organisation. This is always true in principle, but today—in times when organised working-class struggles are weakened, and the left is fragmented—it is important to promote practical cooperation in a non-sectarian way, especially among the anti-capitalist left, and at the same time to support workers in their self-organisation.

5. We need concrete programmes and recognition of what we have failed to do for women and sexual minorities—participation in women's rights and LGBTQI+ struggles, recruiting them, ensuring more space for them in party meetings and party leaderships. In the same way, we need concrete programmes and recognition of a specific orientation to the multiple oppressions and exploitation of Dalits and Adivasis and to recruit them, creating more space for them not just in the membership but also in the leadership of the party.

6. We are for the building of a Leninist party, which is not a structural prescription of the organisation, but a fundamental political pillar of socialist revolution and devoid of any Stalinist or social-democratic distortions. For us, the significance of democratic centralism is political and is much higher than its organisational dimension and is not some fixed format in the changing or escalating dynamics of class struggles. The right of all sections of the party to have their views communicated to other sections, unity in action when decided in consistency with the programmatic understanding, the right of minorities to question the majority, the right to act separately when decisions contradict the basic programme, regular publications, conferences, meetings, including virtual meetings, etc., are some common practices.

7. ‘Workers of the World Unite’ is not a mere slogan for chanting but for practising internationalism. We therefore conclude with our wish to obtain the status of a ‘permanent observer’ of the Fourth International. We shall also strive to collaborate with like-minded organisations all over the world.

★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭ ★☭

On the 91st Anniversary of the RCPI

Dear comrades and sympathisers of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India,

On this proud occasion, the 91st anniversary of our Party’s founding on 1 August 1934, the moment when Comrade Saumyendranath Tagore courageously broke from the CPI to establish the Communist League, later renamed the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI), we salute each one of you who carries forward the torch of revolutionary communism.

Our party’s ideology stands firmly against capitalism and reformist deviations, embracing a determined, proletarian-led socialist revolution that unites the working class, peasants, working intellectuals, and all exploited strata of society under a single banner of class struggle. We reject collaboration with bourgeois elements and uphold the timeless teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, and many other revolutionary theorists, and above all, Tagore’s insistence that “democracy can exist and blossom only in its proletarian form”.

In different parts of the country, our party sustains its presence in students’ movements, trade unions, youth organisations, and among other oppressed social groups. Today, as we commemorate decades of struggle and sacrifice, we honour those courageous revolutionaries who gave everything—time, family, job, freedom, and even life—for the cause. We salute countless unnamed comrades, imprisoned, lamed, or assassinated, who faced repression rather than betray the revolutionary principles.

Comrades, on this foundation day, let us renew our pledge to uphold RCPI’s mission of revolutionary communism, to deepen our roots among workers, peasants, intellectuals, students, and youth. Let our struggle today be worthy of the sacrifices made by those who came before us. Let every protest, every pamphlet, every mobilisation carry the spirit of our ideology forward.

We extend revolutionary greetings to all members and sympathisers of the RCPI.

Long live the Revolution!

Biren Deka
Party Secretary

Trade Unions’ Strike on July 9

In 2019-20, the Government of India, demonstrating its anti-worker position once again, introduced four labour codes that include the Code on Wages Act, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code Bill, 2020, the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code Bill, 2020, and the Social Security Code Bill, 2020.

According to the 2025 Global Rights Index report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), India occupies the second-worst position, with a rating of 5 on a scale ranging from 1 to 5+, where 1 indicates the best conditions for workers and 5+ the worst. In such a country, the government is further trying to worsen the working conditions and curtail their rights by introducing these codes.

The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code permits firms to assign women to potentially unsafe jobs and makes accessing maternity leave difficult. Workers are eligible for paid leave only after 80 days in the job, allowing private employers to dismiss them beforehand and avoid payment. The Code also raises the threshold for its applicability—from 10 to 20 workers in firms with power supply, and from 20 to 40 in those without. Since most workers are employed in smaller firms, this change excludes them from protection. Additionally, the Code lacks a judicial process for resolving labour disputes, further weakening workers’ rights.

The Industrial Relations Code permits companies employing up to 300 workers to hire and dismiss employees without seeking prior approval from the government. Earlier, this exemption applied only to firms with up to 100 workers. In addition, it places restrictions on the right to strike. It mandates that trade unions must provide a 14-day advance notice before initiating a strike, and this notice remains valid for only 60 days. Strikes are also prohibited during the seven days set aside for conciliation efforts and for a period of up to 60 days following the conclusion of tribunal proceedings.

The Wage Code 2019 contains several provisions that shift power in favour of employers. It allows employers to deduct wages for losses caused by workers’ neglect or default, enabling wage cuts that could reduce demand and employment. It expands exemptions from bonus payments, letting more firms deny workers these benefits. These provisions imply that profits benefit employers, while losses are passed on to workers. The Code does not specify minimum wage rates within the legislation, leaving this to the appropriate government. While it includes informal workers within its scope, it does not provide strong mechanisms for wage enforcement across all sectors.

The Code on Social Security fails to extend universal social security benefits to informal sector workers. Rather than strengthening protections, it limits the authority of labour officers to assess the amount of provident fund and state insurance owed to workers by employers. The Code also prevents the reopening of older cases, leaving many workers who were previously underpaid or denied benefits without any legal remedy. Additionally, it weakens the role of labour inspectors responsible for ensuring compliance, shifting instead to a system where employers self-certify their adherence to labour laws.

Opposing these labour codes, the Revolutionary Communist Party of India will stand with the working class on the streets during their General Strike today, on 9th July 2025. The various other demands of the working class in India must also be fulfilled.

Long live the revolution!

Condemning the State-Sponsored Murders under the Banner of Operation Kagar in Chhattisgarh

The Revolutionary Communist Party of India condemns the murder of Nambala Keshava Rao, General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), along with approximately 30 other members of the party, in Chhattisgarh. While there could have been peaceful talks between the party and the government, the latter chose violence and has continued its practice of extrajudicial killings, under the guise of Operation Kagar. 

The use of lethal force instead of legal procedures suggests that the government is unwilling to understand what the Maoists are fighting for. The rights of the adivasis—a central concern of the CPI (Maoist)—remain unacknowledged and neglected by the government. If the armed forces knew the whereabouts of the cadres, they could have arrested them rather than resorting to lethal action, particularly when the party had proposed a ceasefire and negotiations.

The RCPI demands a judicial inquiry into the killings and the publication of the findings. We also call for a thorough investigation into the lives and backgrounds of those killed. In the past, innocent civilians have also been killed by the Indian armed forces on suspicion of being “terrorists”.  However, that does not in any way justify celebrating the recent killings—even if the victims were members of the party.

Despite our differences in ideology, tactics, and strategies with the CPI (Maoist), we demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to Operation Kagar.