The CPI(M) Politburo has done it again. It was not long ago that it did not approve of Jyoti Basu's comment about the party committing a "historic blunder". It has now dealt with similar sternness with general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet and articulate apparatchik Sitaram Yechury, besides Basu, in relation to a related subject.What the West Bengal Chief Minister had berated then was the epoch-unmaking error, as he saw it, of the party not participating in the Congress-backed United Front government at the Centre, preferably with himself at the helm.It was to a variation on the same theme that he reverted after a cooling-off period, but this time with enlarged emphasis on ties with the Congress and in the company of other Marxist luminaries. While advertising again his availability for the highest executive post, he made it clear that the Marxists could have no objection to collaboration with the Congress at the national level in the new context. Associates in the State CPI(M), slotted thus far asan anti-Congress section of the party, agreed, including Somnath Chatterjee who talked of its task of giving the country a government.Surjeet made no secret of which side he was on. He did not stop with his role as a special adviser to Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had no reservations at all about supporting a Congress-headed alternative to the BJP-led camp. The Marxist veteran even went to the extent of welcoming Sonia Gandhi's decision to campaign, and its impact on a till then cracking Congress morale.It is to the political implication of all this that the Politburo has responded with an emphatic no. The reasons for the response can only be speculated upon, in view of the secrecy shrouding the debate in the party's sanctum sanctorum. It cannot be seen as a sequel to the latest series of developments inside the Congress: the Marxists do not any more appear to consider dynastic politics a serious matter and the Politburo has displayed an uncharacteristic degree of indifference to the internal affairs of theCongress.The stand cannot be explained in terms of the political compulsions of State-level politics in West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura: not after the party's contemptuous rejection of such compulsions as a tenable ground for the Telugu Desam Party's "betrayal" in backing the BJP-led government. A clue to the Marxist motive is, perhaps, provided by the observation of CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan on the subject. It would be "counterproductive" for the Left, said the CPI leader, to back the Congress, in the emerging scenario of a political polarisation between the BJP and the Congress. What the Left and its Big Brother fear apparently is a further loss of their already reduced relevance. It may arguably appear better to be a balance-tilter in a disunited front than a mere tail attached to a bigger bloc.It is not, of course, as if the Politburo has laid down a `Lakshman rekha' of a political line for the Left and its leader. Famous and far from a few are the occasions when the Communist sophistshave successfully rationalised scantily covered support for the Congress. They may do so again. What the Left has, meanwhile, lost is the image it has been bidding for as the political camp with "anti-communalism" or anti-BJPism as its clear priority.
