It’s not fadeout time for the Reds yet

Attacks on Communism and its adherents took place from all sides. When the Congress governments in the 60s realised it was tough to contain the Communist unions, they brought in toughies like the Shiv Sena to break the Communists’ hold on mills and factories.

The Marathi vs non-Marathi theory propounded by the Sena was wrong, but it was upheld by the workers’ fraternity because of risingunemployment. The Sena argument did not provide any answer to mill workers’ problems, it only gave them an “enemy” to target. “If you hit ’em, hurl a stone at ’em, you’ll get what you’ve been deprived of,” the slogan went. And the workers fell prey to it.

The rival unions, whether belonging to Datta Samant or the Sena or someone else, made fantastic demands which they themselves knew could not be met by mill managements. Our demands were realistic, but the workers were swayed by the apparently promising but, in actual fact, misleading demands of our political opponents.

Where we went wrong was in taking a page from their playbook. As the workers were weaned away by our adversaries, we failed to create awareness among the workers on what was in their real interest. Instead, as we gradually started losing our ground and were pushed back by other parties and their unions, we started blaming people in the party for the failure. Fingers were pointed by leaders at one another, and intra-party conflictsstarted taking their toll. Once forward movement stops, there is a need for introspection. But what the Communists did was not self-introspection but mud-slinging. That made the Communists directionless.

During Dange’s time, the party used to organise study circles where youths were given intellectual inputs about the socio-economic-political nature of the problems plaguing society. That helped youngsters understand issues in their totality. As youths became impetuous and very violent due to the widening influence of intolerant forces, the Communists failed to continue with this intellectual education. There was nobody to tell youngsters what actually lay at the bottom of their problems. The Communists’ inability to explain things in perspective also contributed to the slow death of inquisitiveness and the urge to understand among the city’s youth. The hunger for grasping the essence of important issues through a thorough dissection of such issues was thus extinguished. The Communist parties cannot shakeoff their responsibility for not halting this process.

Other vices of society too caught up with the Communists, but one that still hasn’t is corruption. Leaders like Ahilya Rangnekar and G L Reddy still lead the simplest of lives and are untouched by corruption. Self-sacrifice is still the abiding trait. Just the other day, Harkishen Singh Surjeet followed in the footsteps of one of our Mumbai-based comrades Hardikar and donated half his property to the party (After the split in the Communist party, Hardikar had given equal shares of his property to the CPI and the CPI-M).

The failure of Communism has not been the failure of ideology. The ideology is still very powerful and more relevant today than ever before. The opening up of the economy is going to create more problems for the city, the state and the country, and the only option we will have to turn to is Communism. The changeover to a Communistic pattern of society may not come too soon, but it is unavoidable. People have already begun questioningthe so-called advantages of liberalisation and globalisation and the culture spawned by such economic systems.

However, Communism will rise only when the gap between ideology and its implementation is bridged. And the methodolody of implementation has to be modern. We cannot go back to Communism as it existed at the time of Marx, Engels or Lenin. Times have changed, and so have the social and economic circumstances. We must implement a new Communism in keeping with the spirit of the times. Only then will the long-losing streak of Communists in this city come to an end.