The Left in Centre

I wondered why that was not yet happening within the CPM in India. Why are the right lessons not being learnt from the experience of the Soviet Union and China? Why this pretense of calling oneself a 8220;communist party8221; when the CPI and the CPM had in practice become social democratic parties, like the then 8220;Euro-communists8221;?

8220;It will take time to educate the cadres,8221; he said. 8220;We are too rigid in our thinking. It will take time.8221;

Fourteen years later the entire country wants to know what India8217;s communists are all about. The real question is, do the communists know what they are all about? Has that education that Basu talked about in 1990 happened? Are they still so rigid in their thinking? The last time there was a public test of that, in 1998, they failed and committed what Basu has repeatedly called a 8220;historic blunder8221;. Will they blunder again this time coming to grips with another historic opportunity?

The magnitude of the electoral sweep in the Left8217;s favour, a sweep that can easily get reversed at the next polls, as everyone knows, has fostered hubris. Nowhere was the hubris more evident than in the haughty contempt that CPI leader A.B. Bardhan showed the markets on Friday driving the Mumbai Sensex down 300 points!

Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore live in a world very far from Kolkata and Kochi and they want to know what the arrival of the comrades on Raisina Hill means for them. There is an entire generation in these cities that has not seen a 8220;communist8221; in life and blood and who can8217;t figure out if a 8220;Merlin the Magician8221; look-alike called Harkishen Singh Surjeet is the real 8220;commie8221; or is it that suave, handsome and articulate Sitaram Yechury? Should one measure them by the practice of a pragmatic Buddhadev Bhattacharya, or the 8216;8216;partyspeak8217;8217; of the enigmatic aparatchik, Prakash Karat?

A decade ago such questions were asked of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Who is this party? The stoic Govindacharya, the ranting Sadhvi, the Nehruvian Vajpayee, the Ratha Yatri Advani, the ante-deluvian Murli Manohar Joshi, the glib Arun Jaitley? Even today people want to know what to expect of the BJP in the future. Will it be led by the likes of a 8220;Let8217;s Fix-it8221; Mahajan or a 8220;Let8217;s Fix-them8221; Modi? If that is a fair question to ask of the BJP, so is it fair for the country to want to know what 64 Marx-mouthing MPs mean for the markets.

When asked the question, the Left response most often is to point to the experience of West Bengal over the past three decades. Look at our record, the economy of Bengal has prospered under the Left. Today its rate of growth is among the highest in the country. Kolkata is becoming another IT hub. Businessmen in Kolkata are happy to be doing business there, etc, etc. All that is true. Yet there is a disconnect.

The disconnect is between the rhetoric of the Left8217;s ideologues and the practice of Left governments. Those who know what is happening on the ground in Bengal feel less concerned about the Left8217;s arrival on Raisina Hill. But those who listen to Left rhetoric are often shell-shocked.

There is, of course, the other fact that for many in western, northern and southern India it is not particularly comforting to be told 8220;Bengal shows the way ahead8221;. That was a reassuring slogan of a bygone era, when Rabindranath Tagore and Jagdish Chandra Bose represented all that was modern and hopeful about India. Today it is not Bengal but Bangalore that shows the way ahead. So to be asked to take comfort from three decades of Left rule is not particularly helpful at least for metropolitan India.

The underlying issue, however, is quite different. It is about the mismatch between rhetoric and reality. The rhetoric of the CPI and the CPM is still that of early 20th century European communism and 1950s and 1960s Soviet and Chinese communism. The reality is that in practice the Left Front governments of Bengal and Kerala have run West European style social democratic governments with a heavy emphasis on social welfare and human development. And the world is quite comfortable living with the politics and governments of European social democracy. It is the mismatch between the rhetoric of communism and the practice of social democracy that perplexes many Indians about the Indian communists of the 21st century.

Even that communist turned social democrat, the late Mohit Sen, who first introduced many like me to the writings of Marx and whom Sonia Gandhi described as her mentor, her friend, philosopher and guide, could not finally come around in his autobiography A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist, Rupa, 2003 to admitting this fact that he was by then a social democrat. He died wanting to be still called a communist!

Fourteen years after Basu saw the need to 8220;educate the cadres8221; the cadres have still not been fully educated. That is why they committed the historic blunder of 1998 and that is why the churning within still about participating in a social democratic government at the Centre.