The crisis of the Left

GOVERNMENT AS PRACTICE
Democratic Left in a Transforming India
Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
Cambridge University Press
273 pages; Rs 750

Five years after the Left Front government was ousted from power in West Bengal a new Assembly election has sparked a fresh wave of analysis of its 34 years in power.

Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya in his book Government as Practice seeks to provide a novel analytical tool to assess the experience. This means looking at the Left Front with "the idea of government as a process that evolves with practice and that defies functional, structural or ideological bipolarity between attributes that are 'positive' and 'negative'."

According to Mr Bhattacharyya, the Left Front government in its initial years attempted to stop the exploitation of tillers by landlords through land reforms. It felt the bureaucracy was either unable or unwilling to effect the changes the post-colonial state was undertaking. Hence, the Left Front decided to make the village panchayat the locus of politics, the first government in India to do so, deepening democracy in the process.

In the chapter on land reforms, the author highlights the role the village panchayat played in ensuring the success of the reforms by empowering the masses. Mr Bhattacharyya quotes government data that show that of the 2.01 million people from the Scheduled Castes who benefited from land reforms, 49.5 per cent were from West Bengal. Among the Scheduled Tribes, 62 per cent of beneficiaries were from the state.

However, the author argues, after the initial years, the Front was more interested in maintaining its core constituencies and not sharpening class struggle. In this way it undermined the work done in previous years and slowly went back on its promises and ideals. This was because of what the author calls the "party society". In a party society, "the overriding goal is to protect the constituency of the party's support base and expand it periodically from election to election."

The author argues that over time the dedicated cadre of the party got replaced by careerists and self-seekers, who gained control over the machinery. This then led to an erosion of the party's support base. It also brought in a divide between the party and its core constituency, the poor and marginalised. The Left, which according to the author had married its spirit of ideology-based movements from below with pragmatic reforms from the top, was now left unconnected with the rural masses.

This paves the way for the author to look at the industrialisation drive of the Left Front, beginning in the previous decade. Here, Mr Bhattacharyya takes pains to present the different views on the Left about the nature of capitalism that came into being in India.

Some theoreticians have argued that industrial capital did not overcome feudal societal relations because the independent Indian state was a coalition between the bourgeoisie and landlords. Others have criticised this view, saying capital has never fulfilled this role in the developing world.

In the Marxian analysis, capitalism disrupts the feudal order by divorcing peasants from the land and creating a proletariat that has nothing to sell but its labour time, a process Marx called primitive accumulation. This disruption caused large-scale unemployment in Western Europe too. However, as Prabhat Patnaik has pointed out, Western Europe overcame this crisis through colonialism and the mass migration of people to the "New World."

The author criticises the Left for a flawed analysis of capitalism and the nature of change it would bring. He criticises the West Bengal government for competing with other states and wooing and acquiring land for the Tatas in Singur and the Salim Group in Nandigram to set up factories and a special economic zone. However, the Left has always held that agrarian economies need to move towards industrialisation to modernise the economy and overcome feudal relations.

Mr Bhattacharyya, however, fails to talk about the contradiction of a leftist state government's existence in a neo-liberal national economy. Clearly, such a government will have far less room to manoeuvre than an entire nation ruled by a left-wing government. The other contradiction the author fails to dwell upon is the seemingly limitless mobility of capital and the immobility of labour. The effects of this were shown recently in Greece. The sovereignty of nations is no longer a given, and they must comply with the financial markets or face a flight of capital.

The author is right in pointing out that the crises of Singur and Nandigram were because of the faulty communication of the party with the people, a practice it invented. Its support base was no longer able and willing to include the masses in decision-making in the same way as before. The spectre of defeat and erosion of support lead to the subsequent desertion of its cadre, who joined the Trinamool Congress en masse, because the composition of its cadre had changed.

For the Left to come back to prominence it will have to try and theorise about these new contradictions. It must have the courage to "begin at the beginning", as V I Lenin said. Mr Bhattacharyya's book is an essential read in this regard because of the sweep of its scholarship.