CPM’s foreign policy frozen in Cold War era

While China has moved on and forged a mutually advantageous relationship with the US, the CPM refuses to assess the Chinese position with a degree of candour. Party insiders agree that if the CPM’s economic perspective is changing, it is because the party is running two state governments in West Bengal and Tripura.

On foreign policy issues, the party refuses to admit the changes in the international environment because it doesn’t really have a stake. After all, foreign policy is the headache of whoever is at the Centre.

The American ‘‘hegemony’’ is a reality and instead of ‘‘wishing it away’’, the CPM has to think of ways of dealing with it far more concretely. But ‘‘America’’ is such a dirty bourgeois word that even comrades who want a frank discourse on the issue dare not refer to it for fear of being branded a stooge of Washington. The Chinese does not accept the American world view but still does business with Washington.

Linked to this inability to react to the changing international scenario is the CPM penchant for keeping alive dead Communist icons. The party continues to befriend and even flaunt its camaraderie with the North Korean Communist Party without realising the degree of isolation that its soulmates from Pyongyang faces. Even the Chinese do not give them the kind of protection they used to when dictator Kim Il Jong was still alive. Two North Korean delegates were present at the last congress.

In fact, the CPM is not really evaluating what the neo-Communists are thinking and doing in the rest of the world. The Indian Communist experience can never really be compared with the Latin American model, however much the CPM looks up to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez as a cult leader. Democracy is not as deep-rooted in countries south of the Panama Canal, and Communist governments that have gained power in different South American countries have tended to be dictatorships or at best small oligarchies.

The CPM lashed out at Bush’s foreign policies without taking a closer look at the “positives” resulting from Washington’s prolonged Iraq war. It did not look at the resurgence of Communist parties all over Europe. It did not even look at the new trends, including how Communists have come closer to the environmental groups or small peacenik organisations during the war to liberate Iraq. Instead, it took the easy path of America-bashing as it has done through the Cold War days.