Transition in the Indian left

Sitaram Yechury’s election as the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is noteworthy not least because the CPM, with one million members, is the world’s second largest communist party, but also because it comes at a make-or-break moment in the nine decades-long history of the Indian communist movement.
Whether and how ably Yechury can stem the decline of his party and rejuvenate it will greatly influence the fate of the Left, itself connected to the health of India’s democracy.
Yechury (62), an articulate quick-witted leader, brilliant parliamentarian, and multilingual networker with acceptability across the political spectrum, was widely seen as the natural choice to succeed Prakash Karat, who has completed his quota of three terms as general secretary.
Yet, Yechury’s election became a battle of nerves with the relatively unknown S Ramachandran Pillai (77), who enjoyed majority support (albeit thin) in the polit-bureau thanks to Karat and the party’s Kerala unit, especially its just-retired long-serving state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan.
Yechury, strongly backed by the West Bengal unit, won by threatening a secret ballot in the new central committee which elects the general secretary. The ballot would probably have exposed divisions within the Kerala party, embarrassing Vijayan.
Eventually, Yechury was elected ‘unanimously’. But the episode showed the CPM’s internal differences and its leadership’s anxiety to appear united. The second characteristic is odd because the communist parties are far more democratic than most Indian parties.
Today, the CPM’s Lok Sabha strength (nine seats) is at its lowest since 1964. It was routed in West Bengal and lost in Kerala in 2011. It’s in power only in tiny Tripura.
The CPM’s draft political-organisational report admits: “The party has been unable to … expand its political influence, increase its organisational strength and develop its mass base, especially among the basic classes”. About 40,000 members have quit it in West Bengal. Membership is ageing too.
These problems are part of the multiple crises that beset the entire Left: ideological, strategic, programmatic and organisational. The Left must address these candidly, in a self-critical spirit, if it’s to regenerate itself as a force which stands for a clean, principled politics centred on the poor and underprivileged, who form a majority of India’s population, but whose interests are scarcely represented in the mainstream.
Indian democracy desperately needs a force with an agenda of economic equality, expanded civic and political rights, and comprehensive social emancipation. That agenda alone can lead to a modern, pluralist, enlightened, ecologically sound socialist order, which can ensure a life with human dignity for all – which capitalism can never do.
For long decades, the Left had an enlightened agenda which was way ahead of most other parties. This attracted the most talented, intelligent and dedicated of scholars, creative artists, writers, and film and theatre people. It allowed the Left to survive many crises, including some rooted in its own mistakes – its opposition to the Quit India movement, denunciation of Independence as “fake”, and plunge into armed struggle (1948-50).
The Left, especially the CPM, has a lot of homework to do. It must ask what went wrong with its original Left and Democratic Front strategy, and whether its policies were relevant and radical. A good beginning would be to ask why it lost power in West Bengal after an uninterrupted 34 years, itself a world record.
The answer doesn’t lie in Trinamool ‘terror’, loss of Muslim support, or Singur-Nandigram. The Left lost Bengal because it wasn’t radical enough. Its modest land reform stopped at registering/protecting tenants, and didn’t transfer titles to them. It failed to organise landless agricultural workers.
The CPM deradicalised trade unions and lost prime working-class cadres. It pioneered panchayati raj, but turned it into a patronage-based system. It politicised and degraded educational and cultural institutions. It created an urban nightmare in Kolkata. It was gender- and caste-insensitive. It often practised violence against political opponents. It tried to ‘beautify’ cities by evicting hawkers.
In the 1990s, the CPM began appeasing Big Business and inviting predatory multinationals like Wal-Mart in the naïve belief that this would advance the ‘productive forces’. It forcibly acquired land, deeply antagonising peasants.
The Singur-Nandigram fiascos weren’t causes but effects/symptoms of a deeper malaise: pursuit of neoliberalism, which the party’s central leadership assails. The CPM’s strongly upper-caste leadership failed to combat caste, gender and anti-Muslim discrimination. It became a party of careerists bereft of imagination, yet complacent and arrogant towards its smaller partners.
In Kerala, the Left parties were always more deeply entrenched among the poor than in Bengal. Their base, although depleted somewhat thanks to Vijayan’s conservatism and CPM factionalism, remains fairly solid. They adopted some imaginative programmes like the People’s Plan which allotted 40 percent of the state budget to grassroots-driven development, but didn’t continue them.
The Left recently suffered setbacks because of the CPM-instigated murder of political rival TP Chandrasekharan, neglect of social and gender issues, and outright opposition to Western Ghats conservation. It can still make a comeback in Kerala if it mobilises people on radical agendas – unlike in Bengal where it seems to have lost that capacity under the present state leadership.
The lesson? The Left has still to fashion and refine its strategic line of march. Nationally, it didn’t develop a sharp analysis of capitalism or bourgeois democracy “with Indian characteristics”. It didn’t prudently combine parliamentary and militant non-parliamentary activity. It continued to make Third Front-style alliances even after their bankruptcy became evident.
In 2004, the Left with 61 Lok Sabha seats had a huge advantage vis-à-vis the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. It could have formulated radical policies and driven a hard bargain with the UPA, but didn’t. It withdrew support to it on a narrow, esoteric issue (the US-India nuclear deal) which had no popular resonance.
The Left must revisit ideological issues and draw the right lessons from the Soviet Union’s collapse, which stemmed from a lack of democracy, extreme bureaucratisation, and poor economic planning. It must abandon the flawed Soviet/Chinese model of socialism, and develop one based on radical democracy and a new, transformed relationship between nature, production and consumption.
The Left must pay attention to affirmative action on caste, gender and ethnic-linguistic issues without succumbing to identity politics. It must abandon its self-perception as the ‘natural’ vanguard of the working class. The CPM should stop playing Big Brother to the other Left parties.
The Left must repudiate Democratic Centralism, the doctrine that says members can debate views at party congresses, but must strictly abide by collective decisions, expressing no differences in public. The Left should permit inner-party tendencies and free debate on strategy and tactics.
Above all, the Left must return to grassroots work on public welfare agendas, including healthcare, food and water security, employment, decent wages, common schools-based education, pro-poor housing, urban transport, police accountability, and so on. It must learn to work on equal terms with autonomous people’s movements on land, forest and water.
If the Aam Aadmi Party could occupy a part of the space that exists for unconventional politics in India, so can the Left – even more radically. One can only hope that Yechury, despite his proximity to the West Bengal CPM and parliamentary bias, rises to the challenge.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.
Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in