Study groups

The late Marxist historian,Victor Gordon Kiernan,embodied a conspicuous irony. The man who,long before Edward Said,laid open the designs and perceptions of the imperial West vis-a-vis the colonised peoples the same who would later constitute much of the post-colonial third world,was also a very important reason for the post-World War II intellectual dominance of British historiography. But for the latter,CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat would not have spoken at the Lessons of Empire conference in memory of Kiernan at Cambridge University last week. Recounting Kiernans friendship with Indian Marxists and his candid criticism of the undivided Communist Party of India,did it strike Karat that theres no escaping the Empire in more ways than one?

It took this British Marxist,after all,to mark the exact missteps of Indian communists in their early days an insight the Indian Left apparently used years later to see through the Soviet blinkers of the Indian bourgeoisie as progressive. A lesson urgently pertinent to Karats complaint about how powerful Indian capital traditionally under-researched has grown under the neo-liberal dispensation. Close on the heels of the Rectification Document,Karat would have the CPM/ Left undertake a new thought project to compensate for a significant lack in theory. Apart from Indian capital,this process would presumably acknowledge the fact that caste had been a non-factor in the Lefts doctrinaire politics another failure to theorise locally? or that it missed a historic nationalist opportunity during World War II. The current challenges for the Left include the new developments in India and the growing closeness with the US.

Ideology,as existing and unreformed theory,hasnt been much help here. Is Karats formula for relevance really a course correction? It may perhaps need less theorising,and a lot more practice. The Left parties are currently watching their map of influence shrink. Theres a very clear foreboding about losing their stronghold in West Bengal in the assembly election due next year. But the lack of political coherence draws from a failure to read the verdict in the last two general elections. In 2004,the communist parties gained immense clout on the national stage; but instead of reading it as a mandate to come closer to the centre of Indian politics,from where coalitions at the national level have been traditionally run,they squandered this enhanced relevance by drawing thick red lines around the Central government,dictating what it could do and with support from whom. Since the 2008 break,the Left has been trying to reclaim relevance. Indeed,Indian politics needs the Left parties to re-acquire their feistiness. But that can only be achieved in the messiness of the political landscape.