No little plans

After the election results that prised open the Lefts tight hold over West Bengal and,to a lesser extent,Kerala,the CPM remained resolute that the verdict was not an indictment of the party or its ideology. They have pointed to their 41 per cent voteshare in West Bengal,the fact that they emerged the single largest party in Kerala,and attributed the Bengal loss solely to the voters desire for change,after 34 years of a Left government. This desire for change,however,is not a vacuous desire for new faces it is a sign of something that went terribly wrong in the last few years. As recently as 2006,the CPM under Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee seemed invincible but it unravelled rapidly. The panchayat polls,the Lok Sabha election and now these assembly elections testify to the fact that something decisively snapped during this period,and the Left would do well to look harder into that,and make some gesture of explanation,if not expiation,to the electorate.

It is easy to focus on whether the leadership should change. Or ask and answer the question,is the Left finished? Clearly not. But its task is to address the more complex,difficult questions about how to reach out to larger constituencies,how to reconcile its convictions with a changing context. The CPIs A.B. Bardhan has been more candid about the Lefts larger missteps. One big blind spot,in his view,was the fact that Indias large and diverse middle class did not factor into its calculus at all. The middle class that had once partly internalised the Lefts logic,has now changed,and its ideology no longer appealed to the more consumerist and careerist young,Bardhan said. Given its outsized influence on public opinion,it is not tenable to alienate the vocal middle class,he said.

This is a moment for introspection and a degree of humility,rather than the insistence that the Indian Left is the most creative in the world. It is accountable to the electorate,and not just to the card-carrying faithful. And this could be a productive juncture,if the Left looks within.