Tags:
Journalism of Courage
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-
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.
