The Left marks time

A case of ideological bankruptcy

It is fitting that former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee refused to attend the 20th congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), at Kozhikode. Mr Bhattacharjee cited ill health for staying away; but as one of the few – if not the only – leaders of India’s largest communist party imbued with some understanding of the modern world, he would have been at odds with the proceedings as much as he is with the leadership that, showing little self-awareness, accused him of “arrogance”. Indeed, anybody listening to the inaugural speech of CPI (M) General Secretary Prakash Karat could be forgiven for thinking they were in a time warp. Devoid of a single new or original thought, it denounced the US (for “imperialism”) and the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (for “neo-liberal policies”) and urged the party to reconnect itself to the struggles of the working class and peasantry. Since this is what the party has purported to do since Independence, Mr Karat should perhaps have asked why it has lost its hold on West Bengal after 34 years, and how it comes to rule just one state from three. Or why it finds itself with 16 seats in the current Lok Sabha, from 44 in the previous one. There was not a word on that subject.

The purpose of the congress, the first since the party withdrew support to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in 2008 over the Indo-US civil nuclear deal, was to provide a platform for introspection. Yet little of that precious commodity was on display. On the contrary, the political review approving the withdrawal of support to the UPA was unanimously accepted. The question of how the party needed to realign itself in a world that jettisoned political Marxism two decades ago did not provoke fresh thinking, either. Instead, a draft ideological document framed by Politburo member Sitaram Yechury highlighted “negative tendencies” like inequalities, unemployment, corruption and nepotism that have surfaced in socialist countries that have undertaken reform. While the implicit criticism of the CPI(M) ideological anchor, the People’s Republic of China, is of interest, it nevertheless seems to have escaped Mr Yechury’s notice that these “tendencies” were quite oppressively visible in those countries in pre-reform times — including in pre-Deng China and licence-raj India. Mr Yechury declared that the party was under “no illusion” that peaceful social transformation could be achieved through parliamentary democracy, an echo of a statement at a similar congress held by the CPI last week that grandly declared parliamentary democracy “illusory”. It is, of course, tempting to say this just after you have been given a historic hammering at the polls.

If the party leadership had truly chosen to introspect, it may have asked itself, for instance, why legislation to improve the lot of unorganised sector workers, who work in Dickensian conditions everywhere in India, was never passed during its stint as a UPA supporter. Or whether providing Mr Bhattacharjee some solid support for his enlightened reform programme would have changed the face of declining West Bengal and reversed the party’s fortunes. Victor Hugo famously said it is not possible to resist “an idea whose time has come”. For the CPI(M)’s out-of-touch Delhi-centric leadership, it is impossible to resist an idea whose time has passed.