They are back, ready to intervene, eager to redeem. They are India's self-chosen nation builders-cum-national clairvoyants. There is a crisis, and a funeral fragrance is wafting through the corridors of powerlessness, and the government may or may not die. Only they can do something, for the nation is calling. What timing. Ideally, they would have liked to solve the crisis in Kosovo, work out a brand new Warsaw Pact against the nasty NATO. But the immediate national nastiness called the BJP is begging for intervention. So our good old communists are back in action, their ancient cells suddenly throbbing with the idea of responsibility. Look, both the CPI(M) and the CPI want to avoid a midterm poll. Certainly a good idea, a very communist idea: the masses, who are more or less same as the people, should be kept out of the business of governance or governments, for leaders of lofty intentions are there to handle such things. Also, both the parties are confident of an alternative. Communists and alternatives,you know what they are all about: zero principle, more power and little responsibility. Thank Marx, what would have been India without the communists?More aptly, what would have been India without Comrade Harkishen Singh Surjeet? (The CPI, the little brother of the red parivar, is a bit player, despite the General Secretary's illusions of importance.) In the Age of the Coalition, he is Mr Manipulator, the wisest among the wise, the numerologist-in-chief. If Jayalalitha's national demands bring down Vajpayee's nationalist government, there will of course be a new government, conceived and constructed by Surjeet, who is reportedly spreading across the conclaves of conspiracy. How? A Congress government resting on the mighty pillars of the Third Front, which, as history shows, is a loose club of politicians whose constituencies are smaller than their egos, politicians whose national vision is defined by the worst kind of provincialism. But Surjeet and his party are high above them, and as usual, leastinterested in ministerial powers. Also, he has a historical role to play: a helping hand to the Congress in distress. The CPI(M)'s anti-Congressism? It has always been a sham.Well, the party itself is a sham. An enlarged pretence the size of which continues to be mocked by reality as well as history. For, the Marxists have nothing at stake, except the textbook and the slogan. They have lost India long ago, they have lost its classes and its castes. They have no empires to preserve, no prisons to guard. What is there, except a few Soviets in Kerala and West Bengal? The CPI(M) is a very very regional party with a Delhi-centric passion, with a mind that has internalised the remains of this century's biggest horror story. Still, it wants to be a defining force in Delhi, it wants power without responsibility. The party achieves it not by resorting to the people, sorry, the masses, but by Surjeetising the coalition confusion. And Marx won't miss the show: No new spectre is haunting Indraprastha. It is only aSurjeet. Sorry for the optical illusion.
