Opinion Righting the Left
CPM must refresh its platform and leadership, or risk ceding the important space it occupies.
The CPM politburo ended a three-day session of introspection on the Lok Sabha election results. With only 3.2 per cent of the national vote share now, and having effectively crumbled even in its bastions of West Bengal and Kerala, the party is finally coming around to the realisation that something’s got to give, in terms of its political platform, its cadres’ capacity to persuade voters and the priorities of its leadership.
In Kerala, though the Left Democratic Front doubled its seats, it added only 1 per cent to its vote share. Its voteshare in West Bengal slipped 12 per cent below that of the 2011 assembly election, where it was routed after 34 years of unbroken dominance. In both cases, the Left’s social constituencies have proven to be open to the BJP, whose vote share touched 18 per cent in West Bengal and 11 per cent in Kerala. This is a clear sign that the Left failed to capture gains from the anti-incumbent sentiment against the UPA or the state government, and also that popular motivations are more complex than is acknowledged by the ideological grid of Left parties.
While the Left has traditionally spoken of collective responsibility, seeing itself as led by its organisation and party platform, this time is different. Leaders do have a role in shaping a political party to decisive ends, and the party has been ill-served by the phalanx at the top. Its failures to build alliances in other states or form a national coalition certainly reflect on the leadership. This is more the pity, given that there is a clear space for the Left in today’s India. The fact that identity politics seems to have receded, to some extent, for material considerations, could have been used by it. TheLeft Democratic Front, for instance, made more political capital of issues that the Left could have taken up, whether it is decrying the distance between the government and the governed, public corruption or the complicity between mainstream parties and big business. Even now, the Left parties could forge a more expansive platform if they go beyond the organised workers who form a fraction of the labour force. Given the important role it plays in tempering economic policy, and in leading the way on social legislation, if the Left continues to haemorrhage, the loss would indeed be collective.
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