Quantcast
Channel: Folk Theorem
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 7

What’s left of the Left?

0
0

In the course of five years, the fortunes of India’s Left parties have come crashing down around their ears. Sure, in electoral terms, the Left was never a pan-India phenomenon. It was hugely influential in two pockets of India, Bengal and Kerala.

It also did a world of good in distant Tripura, where it runs an efficient and clean administration which has managed to wipe out militancy. The Left is expected to sweep the Lok Sabha elections in Tripura. But so what? Tripura accounts for only two seats in Parliament. Bengal and Kerala, which send 42 and 20 legislators to the lower house, respectively, carry far more heft.

In Kerala, electoral fortunes swing between the Congress-led United Democratic Front and the CPM-led Left Democratic Front. And 2014 will also see a pitched battle between the two rival coalitions. But in Bengal, the Left is looking at annihilation by the ballot box. Only three years ago, this would have been unimaginable.

So, how did this happen? The popular myth is that Bengal’s red fortress crumbled under the unstoppable march of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by an indomitable Mamata Banerjee. This is only partially correct. The TMC was a clueless, bumbling organization which managed to send only a handful of MPs, including Mamata herself, to Parliament for years.

This would have continued, if the Left had not shot itself in the foot while gunning down poor farmers protesting forcible land acquisition in Nandigram and Singur, in Bengal. Exactly why the Left, which posed as the protector of peasants and workers in Bengal, did this, is unclear. But these incidents underlined a great conflict that was tearing up the party as early as 2006.

Then, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, a protégé of Jyoti Basu, had won elections with a solid majority. Head swollen by this verdict, Bhattacharjee decided that the way forward was to shun the empty slogans and false ideals of Bengali bhadralok Leftists and embark on the path of capitalism. This, to Bhattarchjee, obviously meant that fertile farm land would have to be cleared of pesky farmers and allotted to industrial projects.

Well, Bhattacharjee slipped on that banana peel. Around the same time, another crisis was unfolding in the CPM, a crisis of leadership.

In 2004, the Left parties had agreed to support the Congress-led coalition in Delhi. This seemed to work well, because the CPM was led by Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the charming veteran of Left movements in pre-Independence Punjab. Surjeet had friends in every party and could drag dour comrades from Kerala or Bengal to meetings where no Stalinist would ever otherwise go.

Another anchor for the CPM was Surjeet’s friend Jyoti Basu, quintessential Bengali bhadralok on the outside, speaker with a dry sense of humour in public and steely administrator in power. Surjeet and Basu were the last survivors of the nine original comrades, the navaratnas as they are called, who split from the CPI in 1964 to found the CPM. The others included stalwarts like EMS Namboodiripad and A K Gopalan, fighters like P Sudarayya, disciplinarians like Promode Dasgupta and dogmatists like B T Ranadive.

In 2005, Surjeet stepped aside from leading the CPM and Prakash Karat took over the party. By 2008, Surjeet was dead and Karat, a bookish man steeped in Marxist classics and the thrillers of Ian Rankin, but entirely innocent of the realities of electoral politics, was sowing the CPM’s seeds of destruction.

Karat led the CPM’s opposition to Manmohan Singh’s campaign to sign the nuclear deal with the US, believing that atomic alignment with the Evil Empire would fill India’s working masses with shock and horror. As it happened, voters didn’t care a hoot and the UPA II came back to power with bigger numbers for the Congress, which did not need the Left’s crutches anymore.

Karat had earlier criticised the Bengal Left for daring to inch towards capitalism. The Bengal Left repaid this compliment by abusing him for breaking the coalition in Delhi. The Bengal and Kerala units of the CPM, which had earlier cheerfully worked together drifted apart, because Bengal’s communists believed that their Kerala comrades were rooting for Karat.

But still, the game was not over, because the last of the navaratnas – Jyoti Basu – was still around and seemed to exercise some sort of restraint on the comrades’ infighting. That disappeared with Basu’s death in 2010. With this, the CPM was rid of its last anchor and predictably, things went to pieces in Bengal.

Its formidable cadre, a bunch of vicious, lumpen thugs was the first to sense the change. Overnight, the Communist Cadre turned into Didi’s Brothers. With the enforcers now firmly on her side, Mamata was set up for the inevitable victory of the summer of 2011.

And so, rudderless, leaderless, devoid of ideology, money or muscle, the CPM drifts on, looking more and more like two regional parties headed towards electoral irrelevance this year.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 7

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images