Communism and its uncle

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s CPM is accused now of severe and serial compromises over Singur and Nandigram. But its critics from the “true” Left (they include some CPM insiders) must understand they are misreading history. The CPM has happily compromised before. Middle class communists — my uncle was an exemple — are a big part of that happy compromise. The same kind of Bengali communists would happily settle for another major compromise — one that brings Bengal back to industrial limelight.

In a 1971 book (Radical Politics in West Bengal) that still makes for wonderfully educative reading, Marcus Franda argued that Bengalis took to communism for some very non-revolutionary reasons. Communist political activity was a means to asserting regional identity. This search for identity was inspired in part by Bengali gentlemanly classes — bhadralok —feeling that they had lost out in independent India to the Hindi heartland’s elite in the competition for the pole position in the national mainstream. And communism was internalised by these educated classes mostly as an ideas package, an attractive, intellectually and morally satisfying alternative to bazaar politics. This kind of communism allowed variegated departures from orthodox praxis. There were and are thousands of “gentleman” communists. The CPM was and is a good host for them. Which is to say, the CPM has never been particularly revolutionary.

True, the faction that broke away from the CPI in 1964 to form the CPM boasted inheritors of the M.N. Roy line — no compromise with national elites, which then politically meant the Congress. But in 1967, when the CPM joined the United Front (UF) government in Bengal, the party split. The Maoists formed a separate party. Naxalbari and assassinations of class enemies were to follow. More interestingly for our purposes, the departure of Chairman Mao’s Indian foot soldiers weakened the more radical of CPM leaders, and strengthened the moderates. Moderates have ruled the CPM ever since. The CPM was part of the Bengal UF government that looked at Naxalites as a law and order problem.

When the CPM came to power in Bengal in 1977, moderation became more pronounced. Many objective studies have shown that more land was redistributed during the two brief periods (totalling 19 months) of UF rule, when the CPM was a coalition partner, than in the first decade and a half — land reforms stopped after that — of uninterrupted CPM governance. Thus even in Bengal CPM’s famed agrarian/rural reforms that excited radicals round the world, conservative moderation was the watchword. Operation Barga and the panchayats were never intended to start an agrarian revolution. The CPM wanted and has built a support base among the rich and middle peasantry.

Even on the industry question, the focal point of the Singur and Nandigram confrontations, Bengal CPM has often been de facto moderate. “I think people are feeling confident that more stress is being laid on the private sector — when well-known companies come in — it helps us.” Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in 2006? No, Jyoti Basu in 1985.

But India in 2006 is different from India in 1985. And the CPM in 2006 is even more different from the CPM in 1967. These two differences explain why the CPM’s need for another compromise is urgent but why the means to achieve that may be out of the party’s reach this time.

Growth competition is unexceptionable in India now, unlike in the mid-1980s. States are fighting for investment. Politics has changed. Then, Congress PM Rajiv Gandhi called Calcutta a “dying city” and enraged Basu. Now, Congress PM Manmohan Singh supports Bhattacharjee’s industrialisation plans and angers the “true” Left. Bluntly put, Basu didn’t face the urgency Bhattacharjee does, because India then didn’t feel the urgency either.

So why can’t, over time, Leftists who oppose more liberal policies be left behind, or be made to understand that there’s no place for them, as Sundarayya did when he resigned as CPM general secretary, protesting the loss of radicalism? Because in the CPM of 2006, modernisers and their foes are all prisoners of the machine.

The only area where the CPM in Bengal practised communism has been in electoral politics and institution grabbing. Bolshevik principles of party organisation and mobilisation have been applied for years. In his fine study of Bengal’s contemporary history (The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism) Partha Chatterjee estimated that nearly two million CPM cadres were mobilised during an early 1990s election — a staggering number when one considers Bengal’s electorate at that time totaled just over 40 million. And there isn’t a major institution in Bengal — from Calcutta University to Calcutta Police to panchayats — that hasn’t been totally commandeered by the party. The CPM doesn’t practise bourgeois, half-hearted, let’s nominate some of our own chaps strategies favoured by the Congress and the BJP. It remodels institutions to serve the party.

All major leaders — those who support Bhattacharjee, those who don’t, Bhattacharjee himself and those gentleman communists — in the Bengal CPM are implicated in building the machine and are served by it. If the industry issue becomes a critical question in determining the CPM’s future political direction — as agrarian radicalism was in 1967 — can today’s moderates afford to split?

They should. It would be good for Bengal and for India. Bhadralok communists will cheer it. But today’s moderate CPM leaders will confront pure survival questions: will they inherit the machine, can the machine split?

As Uncle Joe, aka Joseph Stalin, would have pointed out, Stalinist structures don’t take well to divisions. My uncle, who I know would have been all for “Buddhababu”, would have had no answer to that.