Curious amnesia

There is enough in Harkishen Singh Surjeets profile to steel the political resolve of the ideologically focused CPM supporter. With his induction in the 30s in the Naujawan Bharat Sabha of Bhagat Singh,his early entry into the Communist Party of India and participation in peasant movements,and right through to his advocacy of Castros Cuba and the Palestinian case,his long political career caught most historical threads of Indias communist parties. So,the CPMs special booklet,released in the capital on Tuesday,was richly documented. But it is in the omissions of a full life that the CPM revealed its own dilemmas.

The booklet,while touching upon Surjeets lead in constructing coalition governments at the Centre in 1989 and 1996,is absolutely silent on 2004. Those three episodes showed not just Surjeets ability to get strange bedfellows together the BJP and the Left in their support to V.P. Singh in 1989,stridently anti-Congress regional parties like the TDP and Samajwadi Party in the United Front with the outside support of the Congress in 1996,and in 2004 the CPM itself to support Congress-led UPA. His craftiness was just a part of it. He was also intuitively aware of the political current of the moment: so the anti-Congress coalition in 1989 when the Congress system was coming apart,the third front in 1996 when the regional parties were not yet decided on whether to align with the national parties,and in 2004 when the Congress broke with its go-it-alone past.

It is speculative to wonder if the CPM with Surjeet around would have broken ties with the Congress over the Indo-US nuclear deal.

But for the CPM,that break,and the doomed third front experiment in the general elections thereafter,remains an unexamined episode. To touch upon the 2004 manoeuvre would be to ask the question whether the subsequent reversion to ideological purity has paid off. By all

accounts,the party is too fearful of a self-examination.