Prakash Karat: Puritan communist

For one who jokingly says that others have made the most important decisions for him—even the date of his wedding was decided by someone else!— Prakash Karat has great political clarity. He keeps ‘politics in command’ without getting sidetracked by the ancillary aspects of a political problem. So, it was over the Indo–US Civil Nuclear Agreement that he steered the Left’s exit from the United Progressive Alliance in 2008, rather than on any other economic or political issue of globalisation or liberalisation.

Karat’s rise through the party hierarchy was swift; typically, it takes years of hard work to reach the party headquarters. He became a member of the party’s central committee in 1985 and was elected to the politburo seven years later. The youngest general secretary in the CPI(M)’s history (in 2005 at the age of 56), he had been piloting the fate and the future of the party even before that. Even during the period when Surjeet was the general secretary and Jyoti Basu, another stalwart, active, the CPI(M) was running on Karat’s wits.

Karat’s rise in the party has also shifted the role of the CPI(M) in national politics. A classical Marxist–Leninist committed to maintaining the purity of ideology and organisation above all else, he does not meet the requirements of mass and electoral coalition politics, and has left this job to Sitaram Yechury, the witty and sharp politburo contemporary who has excellent personal equations with people cutting across party affiliations. If Karat represents the E M S Namboodiripad heritage of dogmatic, puritan communism, Yechury is the true successor of the Surjeet school of mass and coalition politicking. Together, they form a very effective pair.

Karat is very stubborn. You can call it dogmatism, inflexibility, but whenever he’s had the chance to wield decisive authority, he has been uncompromising about the party’s core principles and its internal discipline. Party decisions taken during his term as general secretary of the CPI(M) reinforce his no-nonsense attitude. The expulsion of Somnath Chatterjee from the party tops this list.

Karat has emerged as the undisputed commander of the Left forces in the country. During the debate on the Indo–US nuclear deal, he held long discussions with scientists, other politicians and technocrats before coming up with an elaborate document explaining the Left’s decision to oppose the deal. During the meetings of the UPA–Left committee on the deal—formed to resolve the logjam—the UPA fielded Pranab Mukherjee for political counterpoints and two of their best legal brains—P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal—to defuse the legal objections of the Left. Karat singlehandedly took on all three, with Sitaram Yechury occasionally supporting him.

Heading into the 2009 general elections, many leaders in the Congress feel that Karat and company are the best coalition allies they can get. Karat too may have little choice but to join hands with the Congress after the polls (he can’t repeat Surjeet’s mistake of teaming up with the BJP to support V P Singh’s government).

©Business Standard. Excerpted from Business Standard Political Profiles: Of Cabals and Kings, by Aditi Phadnis. Published by Business Standard Books in 2009. Available in bookshops and also on www.business-standard.com/books. For more details, contact vineeta.rai@bsmail.in

The book carries detailed profiles of: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, L K Advani, Pranab Mukherjee, Prakash Karat, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rahul Gandhi, Jayalalithaa Jayaram; Amar Singh, Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Raj Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Rajnath Singh, P Chidambaram, Jaswant Singh, Narendra Modi, Omar Abdullah, Ahmed Patel, Arun Jaitley, M Karunanidhi, N Chandrababu Naidu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Nitish Kumar, Om Prakash Chautala, Mamata Banerjee, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Singh Badal, Chiranjeevi, Vijayakanth, B S Yeddyurappa, H D Deve Gowda, Digvijay Singh, Murli Deora, Sushma Swaraj, Jairam Ramesh, A K Antony