Activist Kavita Krishnan on Thursday said that the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation has relieved her of all party posts and responsibilities on her request. She will continue to remain a member of the party, Krishnan wrote in a Facebook post.

Krishnan was a politburo member of the CPI(ML) and had been a member of its Central Committee for over two decades.

In her Facebook post, Krishnan said that she made the request to the party as she needed to pursue “certain troubling political questions” which would not have been possible if she continued to be a CPI(M-L) leader.

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There was a need to recognise the importance of “defending liberal democracies with all their flaws against rising forms of authoritarian and majoritarian populisms”, she added.

The activist said it was not enough to discuss the regimes of the former Soviet Union, its premier Joseph Stalin and that of China as “failed socialisms”. Instead, Krishnan said, they were some of the “world’s worst authoritarianisms”.

“...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,” Krishnan wrote on Facebook.

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In recent months, she has often criticised socialist and communist regimes.

On July 3, she wrote on Twitter that the industrialisation of the USSR under Stalin became possible due to “the violent subjugation of Ukraine’s peasants [starvation, execution, exile] and colonial expropriation of Ukraine’s grain”.

Commenting on allegations of police surveillance in China, Krishnan on June 26 described the country as a dystopian nightmare.

“If any Indian communist thinks it’s ok for ‘communists’ to rule like this, then they should ask themselves what kind of democracy they’re fighting for in India,” she had remarked.