Comrade Consensus

With the passing of Harkishan Singh Surjeet on Friday only one now remains of the nine founders of the CPM, that party8217;s first politburo. Jyoti Basu, in his home in the Kolkata suburb of Salt Lake, must feel very alone today. The last of his peers in the party has gone; gone too are the hopes that Basu and Surjeet had built up of a durable presence at the Centre for the communists. Surjeet famously demanded at a party congress why the BJP had occupied the anti-Congress space and not the Left; but he recognised that as the communists failed to make inroads in North India creative coalitions would be needed, with plenty of give-and-take. That realisation was his great contribution to our political culture, and it altered the landscape, possibly permanently. It is a pity that it appears to be close to being abandoned by his successors today.

Surjeet was one of the last few leaders in our main political parties capable of reaching out across divides previously considered impassable, or of finding common ground where none was believed to exist. In the politics which they lived through and helped create, one of state-level alliances of convenience in the 8217;60s leading to grand anti-Congress coalitions in the 8217;70s and 8217;80s and duelling fronts in the 8217;90s and beyond, such men are at a premium. There are operators in public life today who succeed in bringing individuals together, but few that can hammer out programmes on which ideologically disparate parties can agree.

Surjeet learnt as an agrarian leader fighting against increased water rates in Punjab that little could be achieved without allying with ideological 8220;enemies8221;, such as large landowners; the fight itself, against a capital gains tax, demonstrated to him that communists in a democratic state needed to accept even means of dubious ideological content to try and mobilise their constituency. The commonsensical pragmatism he developed at that time were to become integral parts of his approach, and allowed the Left to occupy more space in the national consciousness over time than their numbers would otherwise have permitted, and to have correspondingly greater influence over policy. As the political events of the last month show, with his retirement the Left became more marginal, and the polity less stable.