What is left of the Left!
Much has already been said about the defeat of the Left in recent elections in two of its traditional strongholds. There have been many in the mainstream media, who have seen this as the end of an ideology that belonged to the last (20th) century; a lot like Fracis Fukuyama’s famous pronouncement of the end of history adjusted for the Indian context.
Such pronouncements are nothing new, infact one can almost impulsively expect the mainstream media to be both obscurantist and frivolous about the judgements it passes on political and social events that unfold in this country these days. Owing to the larger corporate and ruling class interests that it has on stake, the issues of social-economic upheavals, movements, transformations have long been a low priority and their analysis only comes refracted through the prism of bourgeoisie ideology. A cognitive example of this is perhaps reflected in the way the media uses (thus sees) a word like ‘revolution’. Within a very status-quoist, ‘no-alternative’ neoliberal context ‘Revolution’ is either looked down upon as an otiose and nugatory concept or is ironically ascribed by the colourful media to be some hedonist moment of self-fulfilment and/or of instant gratification.
Moving on from the subject, one does however, quite sporadically find some ‘gems’ amongst the spectacle which the media creates around elections and electioneering in today’s neoliberal context. What I refer as ‘gems’ are the few instances which stand out amongst the entire hullabaloo and the hype. These ‘gems’ are most precious to the eyes of those informed and initiated and to the minds of those trained to look through the haze emanating from the befuddling concoction brewed by the sorcerers of our times namely (read: the corporate media).
Two of these gems that I was able to quite literally catch in the aftermath of the recent assembly poll results were television interviews; one, of AB Bardhan, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) by journalist and popular television commentator Karan Thapar, while the other was the interview of Ms Brinda Karat, Politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)) on a Hindi news channel.
Both interviews had their moments of shock, denial, disappointment, and acceptance demonstrated in varying degrees by the interviewees, though not necessarily in that (chronological) order (I take the liberty of calling these the four stages of grief, borrowing casually from Kübler-Ross five stage Model). However, what was of my chief interest was not the personal attitudes that these two individuals exhibited or the psychoanalysis of that which primarily sought to be projected by the visual medium, rather it was the issue of how each of them, both prominent leaders of their respective (left) parties, saw the future role of the parliamentary Left in this country.
Before I go on to scrutinize their responses however, there is a need to explain briefly the political career of the parliamentary Left [by which I specifically mean the CPI and the CPI (M) and not the parliamentary (ML) groups] that has quite literally put itself in a situation, which has been identified as a ‘debacle’ by not just Comrade Bardhan himself but many in this country.
The immediate answers for the occurrence of this debacle are not hard to find. The Left just has to look into the baggage of mistakes (some of which even bourgeoisie political realists will consider sacrilege) that it had accumulated in the past years to know of its follies. The CPI and the CPI (M) might disagree on this publically but privately it was known to the mindful party worker (since long) what lay in store for the party in terms of the electoral largesse. Many, though, still insisted that such a result came as an outright shock to them since it was only in the last assembly elections that the Left, under the leadership of Comrade Buddhadeb, had swept the polls comprehensively. However, it would be useful to remember that this victory was followed with a series of major losses in the Panchayat elections, and a drubbing in the Lok Sabha and Civic Body elections. Thus, what emerged as a shock for many party workers on the Friday, the 13th was nothing but the final nail in the coffin that was being prepared ever since the State Government took on its own people in the fields of Singur and Nandigram.
End of a Regime
It is claimed that within any political system that it is rather easy to see changes in the (ruling) party but rather difficult to see a change in the regime type. This is perhaps why, for many, this election is so significant, because it represents an end of a regime, a communist one, which ruled for thirty four (34) years the state of Bengal (the loss also came coupled with the loss in another of its bastion i.e. Kerala). The contrast in the results from the last election makes one wonder what could have gone so haplessly wrong for the regime in Bengal. Many deem it the dance of democracy - which possesses the amazing power to serve restorative justice in terms of punishing the non/ill performers and rewarding those who do. In my opinion though, election results in a multi-party liberal framework can only provide an obscure picture of any such kind of restorative justice. In fact, in a place where the electoral pendulum swung so vividly from one end to another, the results seemed more a case of retribution than an instance of mere restorative justice.
It is thus imperative to understand the causes underlining this act of retribution against a communist regime that claims to be a party of the poor, the downtrodden and the working class:
The electoral landslide in West Bengal is hugely attributed to the inflammatory issue of land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram. However, these were just the trigger for people’s outrage against a government, which had for thirty four (34) years, ruled the state and tirelessly developed an effective if not efficient organizational structure and which were gradually used against the very people that it was meant to serve. The rabid decadence of a budding local level institutional structure, both at the rural and urban level was witnessed by at least one generation of poor people, who also saw the promise of emancipatory land-reforms remain a chimera. Over the years people had started complaining of the local party cadres and their high handed behaviour with non party individuals and the ordinary plebeians. Such was the situation that party functionaries and local goons became indistinguishable from one another. A system of ruthlessness which worked on the basis of intimidation, threat and violence was regularised by the ruling state government. Corruption and red-tapism was widespread.
Meanwhile, the so called Bhadralok; the Bengali middle classes as well as the intellectual elite’s infatuation with the Left and its revolutionary ideas seemed to be reaching its tipping point, though this was in my opinion less of the fault of the Left and more of the way society started aligning itself in the liberalized world. However, the Communist Party itself, under ‘moral’ pressures from these classes itself started feeling ‘left-out’ and it was this feeling, coupled with the phenomenon of an astounding electoral victory, which strengthened the resolve of the party leadership to indulge in ‘new’ experiments; seeking a reformed Marxism, ‘one which was in tune with the times’. This ‘reformed Marxism’ of comrade Buddha was however concealing an unbridled view a world that was anything but based on tenets of communism. This became clear as the party leadership, over a period of time/ started taking not just a pro-corporate, pro-capital, but anti-people stance. In this sense it had lost touch of the people’s needs and aspirations. It banked on promoting a vision of development that was ideologically on the same side as that of the big corporations and was endorsed by the centre.
Not only was a particular vision of Tata’s and Salim’s given credence (to) against those of the people’s, state machinery resorted to violence in order to brutally and unabashedly repressed any resistance arising from the various struggles of the poor and the marginalised inside the state. This was not however the first time though that the Left had resorted to such brutal tactics against its own people in its (ruling) history. The maxim of using state machinery to smother the voices and demands of its own people put it side by side (in the category of) other coercive authoritative regimes that back (and are backed by) the interests of capital and capitalists and often use state apparatus as a brutal tool to oppress any organized resistance of people.
The feelings of discontent and anger against the government were to escalate when the state government welcomed central forces within its own territory under the name of ‘Operation Green Hunt’ last year (2010). Military operations in impoverished tribal areas of Lalgarh, Junglemahal, where the Maoists groups were active, were sites of violence, murder, loot and plunder by the local goons of the party popularly known as the Harmad Vahini (the private army of the cadre goons). These utterly neglected tribal areas thus became a testimony to bloody battles between the state and the most marginalised. It came as no alarm that a relatively large number of lives were lost in a very short period. The spurt in violence and practice of coercion made people even on the Left sceptical to the ethical and political designs of a government that called itself communist. It looked as if coercion had become an embedded quality of the state mechanism, so completely different from the desired stateless state of communism where coercion would become vacuous.
The sheer neglect of the minority groups in the state was another major dilemma, which was revealed to us by the Sachar Committee report - this along with the killing of Rizwan-ur Rahman (that pointed towards shameless political and administrative complicity in this communal act of violence) exposed the level that the party’s political as well as moral and ethical conduct had degenerated to. The Muslim community in Bengal, numbering almost one-third of the electorate (out of which almost eighty five percent belong to the backward classes), could not have been expected to take to this kindly.
Politically also, the party’s wisdom raised apprehensions; primarily that of joining hands with parties such as the AIADMK, the BSP, TDP and the BJD, etc. to resurrect the United National Progressive Alliance (UNPA) before the general elections of 2009. The declared aim of the alliance was to provide an alternative, a Third Front to the two main political contenders of the country; the Congress - the distinct party of the Indian bourgeoisies and the BJP- the communal adversary. This experiment however, was destined to go hopelessly wrong. Not only had the CPI (M) and the CPI become weakened in their own backyards by this time, but politically and strategically also it was a gaffe to align with opportunist parties such as the AIADMK, the BSP, the TDP, the JD(S) etc. – most of whom had been previous political as well as ideological allies of the two bigger parties in their own right, at one point or the another.
Possibly the intent of this political compromise by the parliamentary Left was to recover lost ground or even expand but ultimately, it lost its credibility in the eyes of many for the sake of (short term) poll gains. Though this egregious error of judgement was accepted by leaders of both CPI and the CPI (M) later, but the realisation came very late (after the elections) and reflected on the sate of political and ideological thinking inside the party as being in utter disarray.
Given the tumultuous reign of the Left in the previous years, one is compelled to ask the question - what lies at the base of such erosion of political and ethical values? Unlike the media, which jumps at any opportunity to vindicate its position of the redundancy of the Left ideology in today’s world, I would simply raise the fundamental issue of the crisis in the democratically elected communist state and its conception of (association with) ‘people’. Is there a pattern that can be identified with the CPI, CPI (M) programmatic understanding of the term ‘people’ and which guides its activities in a particular manner or is it just an incidental decay of a system that has refused to reform adequately (as many would have us believe)?
“Hell is other people”
Jean Paul Sartre, in this line from one of his famous works, asserts how others (people) are the actual manifestation of hell; one cannot shun them, cannot escape them and they always haunt one like a spectre. This privately existential description can perhaps best describe the manner in which the parliamentary Left might have come to perceive ‘its’ people. In fact, it is a common irony in this country, that those groups that call themselves the party of the common people, of workers and of labourers, seem to understand little (or chose to forget?) of what ‘people’ mean.
However, just like Sartre later clarified that his statement was not really an expression of abhorrence for people, rather it was an expression outlining the crude necessity of (other) people in one’s existence, the Parliamentary Left in India would also do well to learn from this experience (of being ousted from power) and to realise the indispensable value of ‘people’ for its own survival. Infact, it should have ample time to think, rethink, reassess reconceptualise its ideas about ‘people’ and its own role afresh.
Coming back to the twin interviews; listening to the two leaders, one could perceive their slight recognition of the demand for ‘parivartan’. There was also a restrained acceptance of the fact that it was indeed people’s anger that effectively wrecked havoc on their party’s chances in the elections.
From Bardhan’s side, it was quite evident that the Left had no option but to address the need for change in its strategy. As for comrade Karat, it was a plain question of the party going to the people, a phrase was used by her to this effect; “the communist should mix with people, like fish in water”, invoking Mao to stress the importance of people to the communist ideology. Bardhan too on his part stressed the need for the party and its lowest (on the ground) cadres to get disciplined and to work among people and struggle with them; “go to the people with humbleness and they shall except you”, was his message.
Such responses pointed at two things; first, there was acceptance of the parliamentary Left’s separation from people’s needs and aspirations and second, there was an alarm sounded for this separation to end. Though somehow, it sounded much like what one has gotten used to hearing in the recent past– a call for rectification and discipline ‘in the party’.
The real Parivartan
However, no amount of rectification exercises can lead to an actual rectification, if the ways to go about it are not made amply clear ((as has been the case with the CPI and the CPI (M)). It is often said ‘a wrong prognosis cannot lead to the right cure’. Individuals, groups, organizations do not learn- or learn from mistakes- automatically; there is a complete hermeneutical process that goes into it; starting from the perception of the problem, to its internalization and then to practice (the expression). Similarly, saying there has been a ‘separation of the party from its people’ can only be the first step in this protracted process of rectification. The Parliamentary Left can do well to learn from its mistakes by comprehensively overhauling its organizational mechanisms, such that it cadres stand by the people in their struggle against the neoliberal forces and not against them. It can do well to learn and align itself with other Left and progressive (parliamentary-, extra-parliamentary) forces, but of course, this would mean a change in the hitherto dominant stance regarding the neoliberal state-capital and ‘people’ in the party circles, but this ‘parivartan’ is sure to bring it face to face with burning issues that people (right from workers, to the most marginalized in terms of identity, ethnicity and religion) across India encounter, whether in the South or in the North (where the Left traditionally has lesser presence). However, a synthesis cannot be reached until the preceding stage of the contradictions between the thesis and the anti-thesis has been overcome.
The Left’s relevance today does not need to be written on a piece of paper to be justified, it is there for people to feel and see in this era of neoliberal capitalism and the mounting assault of the imperialist forces on innocent people of the world are ominous signs. ‘People’, no doubt realise this, and the Left too should not be caught on the wrong foot.
