Viva la socialism?

The death of El Presidente Hugo Chavez was a chronicle long foretold. Almost nobody survives three rounds versus the crab. He was an unusual man, winning power through elections and surviving a coup, after starting his political career with an unsuccessful coup. He proselytised his variation of socio-communism, using oil money to woo client states.

At the time of his death, Hugo Chavez was, along with Baburam Bhattarai, a member of a very small exclusive club of democratically elected Marx-bhakts. Populist and eccentric, he provided much entertainment to those of us who weren't directly affected by his caprices.

Democratic Marxists have never been thick on the ground, but one would hardly describe the late "EMS", or Jyoti Babu, or Manik Sarkar, or Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, as entertaining. We are also running short of that once-ample commodity, the dictator professing ideological affinity with the splendidly bearded 19th-century ideologue buried in Highgate Cemetery.
 

There's no shortage of dictators. But most 21st-century strongmen don't dress up their human rights abuses in Marxist camouflage. It's down to the Castro brothers and the Kim dynasty to keep the red flag flying - and there's Robert Mugabe, of course. The Chinese have long ceased to apply communist doctrine. Former luminaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who are in power (never mind how!) in the USSR's successor states are all unabashedly crony capitalist.

The Non-Aligned Meets used to be packed with unelected heads of state from "friendly, peace-loving, socialist nations". Many of those countries, like India, were clients of the USSR. Some Non-Aligned leaders such as Marshal Tito, Julius Nyerere and Fidel Castro were even held in affection in their own countries. But the ranks of the self-identified socialists and Marxists also included bloodthirsty strongmen such as Siad Barre and Haile Mariam Mengistu. Not to mention Pol Pot. Sometimes these specimens showed up as honoured guests at Republic Day.

India remains a socialist nation, of course. This is yet another legacy from Indira Gandhi's era. In 1976, during Emergency she pushed the 42nd Amendment through with a ramrod. For ineffable reasons, this turned India into a socialist, secular republic. Much of the 42nd Amendment made cynical political sense. It indemnified the prime minister from judicial review of election violations. It weakened the judiciary in general and it enlarged the Centre's powers to dismiss state governments. The "secular" bit has been ignored by all and sundry, but one understands the reasons for its insertion.

But why did Mrs G Senior chuck in the "socialist" tag? There are a few possible answers. Maybe she thought it would win her some popularity, even though she was ruling by fiat after the Allahabad High Court had decreed her guilty of electoral malpractice. A second possibility: she thought it would make the Soviets happy, though they loved her anyway. A third: it would put a semantic roadblock in the path of right-wingers such as the Swatantra Party, whose members couldn't swear to abide by a socialist constitution without the blatant hypocrisy of contradicting their manifesto.

Was the 42nd Amendment legal? The Congress had a parliamentary majority in 1976. But the leader's election had been set aside. The Janata government amended some of the 42nd Amendment's provisions. But "socialist" and "secular" were not expunged from the Preamble, and it's unlikely they will ever be.

As a result, India now seems anachronistic in claiming to be a socialist state. This implicitly equates Manmohan Singh with Robert Mugabe and even Dr Singh's most vociferous critics would consider that ludicrous. But, more seriously, the semantics also retard the articulation of a fiscally conservative, libertarian, "small-government" manifesto, regardless of whether that was an intended effect.

Right-wing equates to communal in India's political lexicon rather than having any economic connotations. This is a great pity. A fiscally conservative, socially liberal agenda might find a significant constituency in the growing middle class. It could counter-balance the excesses routinely committed by big government. Funny how much difference one word can make.