Why didn146;t Left profit

Priyaranjan Das Munshi said all the right things about respecting the president while returning the un-amended office of profit bill. Hints were dropped that while the legislature found the president8217;s objections too much to deal with now, it was nevertheless seized of their importance. A committee whose recommendations may end in a constitutional amendment was suggested 8212; a beautifully open-ended plan that holds no one accountable but allows everyone to say how sagaciously confrontation was avoided. So, everyone is happy, even the BJP, which gets a chance to somberly talk about constitutional proprieties to the national press, knowing that in Jharkhand the everything-is-fine rule adopted in Delhi will be the guiding principle.

No one championed that rule with more conviction and insistence than the Left. As the office of profit issue is given a burial though, the Left might want to ask itself whether digging in its heels was the smartest of strategies. Had the nine affected CPM MPs quit Parliament and sought re-election, the party would have gained something and lost nothing. It would have gained moral authority that didn8217;t accrue to the Congress after Sonia8217;s resignation other Congress MPs were sternly told not to resign. Remember the office of profit issue compromised all parties. The Left could have stood out, fairly shining and on a high ground from where it would have found negotiations with the Congress a far more pleasurable prospect. Who knows it could have caught the public8217;s imagination, something Marxists really need outside Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram. What were the Left8217;s risks? Hardly any. Re-election of the nine MPs was never going to be a big problem.

So, why didn8217;t the Left ever consider such a strategy? Perhaps because it is far more conventional and power clinging than it likes to imagine itself as the refusal to join the ruling coalition at Centre is also about power, exercising it without responsibility. This should be reassuring news for some: the Left is quite like the BJP or the Congress.