The brouhaha over the Planning Commission’s consultative capers, especially the Marxists’ explosions and explanations, are much like the streets in Prufrock’s lovesong — “they follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent.” The outcome, that is, the dissolution of the committees and the jettisoning of all controversy, because the fifth columnists including World Bank men, globalisers and imperialists, scholars of the Left, Right and the Centre have all been dropped, nevertheless lifts and drops a host of questions on the Indian political establishment’s plate.The crux of the problem is a visionary defect; in the long run, viewed at a distance, developmentalists, socialists, communists et al are all absolutely correct that globalisation and its ideological foundations — imperialism — never did any good for the “people”. Irrespective of the clarity of the hypermetropic vision, the Left seems to have lost sight of the proximate, urgent, immediate problems of growth, employment, trade and transition, to which the answers seem to lie in learning to live with the enemy.The Left did not choose the issue over which it went to war and it tactically and tactfully did not confuse the Planning Commission’s decisions as a decision of the Congress-led UPA. Nevertheless the stridency of its opposition reflects its edginess. The Left’s argument against the inclusion of “foreign experts” was framed in terms of its continuing struggle against imperialism and globalisation, communism’s enduring goal. But the episode points to a worrying problem; the Left, or at least those sections of it that participated in the skirmish against M.S. Ahluwalia, seems to have embarked on a quixotic adventure in which windmills take on the appearance of dragons. Sitaram Yechury’s admission, post breakfast meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that the issue was “unnecessarily blown out of proportion” suggests that even he felt the reaction was a bit overdone. The visions and revisions of the Left, especially “before the taking of toast and tea”, is as indicative of its Prufrockian dilemmas about daring to disturb the universe. For mouthing formulae against globalisation is easier than figuring out the Left’s relationship with its own theory and practice and the future of its alliance with the Congress plus its coalition.Accusing the Congress of being obsessed with FDI-globalisation-privatisation to the exclusion of the commonly agreed developmental agenda outlined in the Common Minimum Programme hides the fact that the Left has spent more time and effort in mobilising its troops on the globalisation issue than it has over development goals. The Left’s indecisions seem to be suspended between agitation and agenda. It can, therefore, swing between accusing the Congress of remaining a class enemy, representative of feudal landlords and big bourgeoisie, and pushing for a more intimate connection.Back in May, a small minority of the CPI(M) — including Jyoti Basu who charged Ahluwalia of being a “World Bank man” and had said much the same thing about the prime minister in 1991 — was in favour of joining the government. Subsequently, it settled for giving outside support and then reversed its position by setting up a coordination committee. From all accounts, it now wants a closer tie, for it wants to be involved in overseeing policy making for which it requires access to policy documents. This brings the Left perilously close to wanting the impossible, as Marx would have said, “namely the conditions of bourgeois existence without the necessary consequences of those conditions”. For the Marxists cannot disregard what they ought to have learnt when they embraced their ideology that the state even though it is the superstructure reacts “back on upon the structure,” which is another way of saying that the political impinges itself on the economic as much as the other way around.One person who seems to have figured out the dynamic nature of the relationship is West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. For him the Left’s sustained political struggles against globalisation are the foundation on which the Left Front in West Bengal enjoys unprecedented success in power. For him, it is the government, at the Centre and in the state, that must work out the “composition”, or “synthesis” — that is, the third stage in a dialectical progress, after position and opposition.Having successfully crossed over from being an outsider in terms of power, the CPI(M) has become a member of the ruling class. Its position has been recognised as such since at least 1996. Therefore, its pursuit of distant targets for maintaining its brand value seems unsuitable, especially when it neglects its responsibilities towards those constituencies of the poor, including labour, the majority of whom are vulnerable for they belong to the unorganised sector, marginal and landless peasants, by losing sight of development goals. Between ideology as the overarching embrace and experiences in real time, the Left has to find a policy solution that allows it to participate in governance and impact the economic through its politics.
