The blame game

Defeat pulls out aspects of ourselves that would otherwise remain subterranean. The logic of self-repeating victory is simple: as long as the money comes in,no one asks how and whence. Its when the money goes out that every long-unasked question flies in every direction. After 34 uninterrupted years in power,the Left Front spectacularly lost this years assembly polls in West Bengal. But it was not an unforeseen catastrophe,albeit unprecedented. Naturally,the CPM would investigate and then introspect gathering information from its zonal and district committees and analysing the same to understand and explain the defeat. Now that such information has been processed,what lessons has the CPM learnt? Apparently,one right and some very wrong ones.

At the partys state committee meet,attended by CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat,the blame for the debacle was laid squarely on former Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and his government. Now,what has the party got right? The fact that there was indeed an unbridgeable gulf between the electorate and Bhattacharjees administration. There was enough discontent among voters to eject the CPM from power after three-plus decades. However,the CPM has done much worse than merely making Bhattacharjee its scapegoat. Bhattacharjee was far from perfect as CM,and his high-handedness and injudicious words and actions as over Nandigram were certainly going to cost the CPM. But in first unlearning and then re-writing history,the CPM is betraying its instinct,and by now near-consensus,to return to its Luddite days. We had seen that in its rectification document,which had called for its old mass agitationist activism. Now,in a fresh call for a return to roots,the party is choosing to run back to a politics that is passé.

The CPM is forgetting an important fact grasped under Bhattacharjee,notwithstanding his electoral rout that the only relevant space left to the Left is of a reformed and reformist agenda,which does not stand out as an anachronism in Indias vastly changed politics and polity. After a defeat that has pushed it to the margins of national politics,the need for a new,different,adaptive worldview is stronger now than it ever was. In brief,the Left,and big brother CPM,must modernise and re-invent itself,rather than water its moribund roots. In fact,the party should recall Bhattacharjees soaring popularity when he embarked on his reformist,industrialisation drive. What he got wrong was his modus operandi,not his idea.