True to form

Sitaram Yechury8217;s second-thoughts sophistry has proved abortive. It hardly redeems the opportunism which some at home might even equate with the cardinal sin of revisionism. No enemy propagandist no, not even Arundhati Roy could have exposed better the hollowness and hypocrisy of the claim of the party8217;s high priests to uncompromising consistency in their harsh response to a power-sharing proposal emanating from West Bengal, with its rider about a 8220;historical blunder8221;. The reaction to Jain is nothing like the rebuff to Jyoti Basu, who had the cheek to advise the DMK to support the government from outside to facilitate Congress support.

In theory, the leading party of the Left should have been the first among the members and friends of the United Front to make up its mind in the matter. Not sharing power at the Centre in a formal sense, it did not need to be nervous about losing it. Nor could fear of fresh elections be a factor in its case: it has no bases to lose but a couple that continue to be its bastions, supplying a number of parliamentary seats out of all proportion to its real national influence. It could not have been severely jolted by the stale non-revelations of the Jain Commission report. Or, compelled into a DMK-dumping course by a staunch anti-LTTE stance, which has not prevented its current alliance in Tamil Nadu with the militantly pro-Eelam MDMK of V. Gopalasamy to figure with some prominence in the cheap Jain thriller.

Above all, the ideology of anti-Congressism, on which the Marxists have always prided themselves, should have made their option pretty obvious. Alas, it has not. The CPIM, in the event, could not have tied itself into more tell-tale knots.

There is no mystery, of course, about the Marxist muddle. It is no different from the dilemma of any power-sharing partner of a ruling dispensation. Even if it shares power without a shred of a sense of responsibility. All power corrupts, even that exercised by proxy, and it is not without pragmatic logic that the party is loth to part with unofficial clout in the corridors of power. The status conferred upon Surjeet as an eminent statesman and Yechury as an economist is not something to sneer at, either. In the days of a Congress-CPI axis, polemicists of the CPIM used to scoff at the parent party8217;s policy of hunting with the hound and running with the hare. The Marxists are now reduced to the role of one outside supporter of a government that advocates its sellout to another. 8220;Anti-communalism8221; covers a multitude of contradictions.