Among the believers

Once again,the CPM tries to scour itself of bourgeois influence. To what end?....

You have to admit this about the Left they have never been afraid of taking a good hard look at their own navels. Unlike other political parties,the communists periodically examine their own workings and hold it up to the hard catechism of their ideology.

Now,after another exacting rectification ritual,the CPM has decided that there has been a certain erosion in the primacy of its working class outlook,and that the demands of our parliamentary democracy which make electoral pacts with bourgeois parties inevitable have ended up corroding the partys virtue. The party document derides the slow creep of careerism and conspicuous con-

sumption,the influence of vested interest in places where the CPM is strong,corruption,and the tendency to rely on large donations from affluent sections rather than mass collections from the people. Indeed,the CPM has valiantly attempted to align its practices with strict theoretical stricture. In a situation where 70 per cent of its national leadership is drawn from the middle class,nursed by university politics,it is proving difficult to work through the incongruities. Only recently,before the tragic Varadarajan suicide,the party had undertaken another such organisational scrutiny to rid itself of unethical and dishonest acts,a self-centric mentality and craving for sensual pleasures. A similar exercise was conducted in 1996. Of course,communist rectification has a hoary past,drawing on the Confucian tradition of introspection and attitudinal change,as well as Soviet disciplinary methods which relied on the systematic study of documents and self-criticism. In Maos view,it was the Partys project to find the contradictions in historical periods and wrestle with them,gleaning the progressive aspect from these struggles. The Party mirrors and resolves the contradictions of a wider society.

Or so says the script. Unfortunately,as Eric Hobsbawm has

underlined,India is an exception in a world where the idea of a classical non-regime communist party is largely extinct. And so,Indias communists find themselves without a navigational guide in a world that has moved on. Instead of the willingness to improvise and route around events,they fall back on their dusty manuals. Their ambivalence about Indias parliamentary give-and-take takes this absurd form,where they flagellate themselves for every adjustment to reality. Even as they conduct clear-eyed appraisals of the machines parts,they are unable to confront the machines obsolescence.