India needs the Left

By all accounts, the ruling Left Front will come back to power in Tripura after the elections. It has been ruling the state for 20 years and continues to hold sway. This is good news for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the chief constituent of the Front.

The CPI(M) is also feeling buoyant in West Bengal and is bracing to take on the Trinamul Congress in the forthcoming panchayat elections. In Kerala, where parties alternate in forming the government, the Left Democratic Front can be confident of coming back in 2016, especially since the ruling dispensation is caught in a web of scandals. So are good times returning for the Left?
In 2004, the Left Front had 60 members in the Lok Sabha and was a key supporter of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). The government in West Bengal looked unshakeable and the Left’s — especially the CPI(M)’s — voice counted for a lot in the political arena. The CPI(M) made sure it spoke often and spoke loudly, not the least during the intense debates on the Indo-US nuclear deal, when it proved intractable on the issue, finally withdrawing support to the government. Just five years later, in the next election, the combined CPI(M)-CPI strength had been reduced to 20 and soon, the citadel in Kolkata had fallen. The Leftists now looked not only weakened but also almost irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.
They were caught in a bind. They could not go back to supporting the Congress and the UPA, which was now in a comfortable position and did not need support from the Left. In any case, Mamata Banerjee had joined the UPA, and in Bengal, she was going after the CPI(M) cadre with a vengeance. The loss in Kerala was another major blow.
The bigger threat to the CPI(M) was internal dissension. Not much that goes on inside the party gets out, and its members are not given to washing dirty linen in public. In 2008, some indications of dissatisfaction over the hard line on the UPA had surfaced and Jyoti Basu, too, had declared that he was all for joining the UPA government as a full-fledged partner in 2009, but nobody stepped outside the party line. However, the dramatic resignation of young Prasenjit Bose in June 2012 over the CPI(M)’s support to Pranab Mukherjee as President clearly showed that the party line was not enough to impose discipline. Mr Bose’s resignation letter dramatically said that the party had been making “one mistake after another” since 2007. The rumours about internal differences between the Kerala unit and the West Bengal unit have always persisted.
Yet, this turbulent recent history does not in any way indicate that the party and the Left in general are in terminal decline. Rahul Gandhi may have threatened to throw the Left out of the country, but put that down to the heat of election campaigning. The Left is not going anywhere and that is a good thing. This country’s politics could do with a strong Left presence.
In recent years, opposition to the UPA has come from the BJP, a few hostile coalition members and “civil society”. All three have their limitations. The Trinamul Congress, which was fighting with the Congress while in the UPA, is now out and its influence has correspondingly waned — see how it shot itself in the foot during the presidential election. The anti-corruption movement, now splintered, has lost steam. Its political avatar, the Aam Aadmi Party, will have to work really hard to make a dent and the Congress will not be spending sleepless nights over it. As for the BJP, in nine years since the UPA came to power, it has not been able to come up with a single campaign that has really shaken the establishment. The target for its outrage changes from day to day and by raising every issue at the same pitch — national shame, national insult, national scandal — it has dissipated its energy and credibility. On corruption, where it could have really got the government into a difficult position, it let go off the advantage when it failed to take decisive action, first in Karnataka and then on Nitin Gadkari. Its mealy-mouthed opposition to foreign direct investment, which it had once supported, shows that it is now little more than a party of knee-jerk reactions, rather than original ideas. Narendra Modi is the BJP’s only hope of staying relevant and frankly, it may well turn out to be an overhyped card.
The Left is needed to fill the breach. But it is also required for ideological reasons. Most of the discussions and debates at this time seem to be within an accepted economic and political framework. The middle-class and its concerns are centrestage and anything that does not interest this constituency gets relegated to the background. The media too talks to and about this class. We need to broaden and deepen the conversation and bring in other sections too. The Left is equipped to do that.
But this cannot be done in the old, outdated ways. Bandhs and general strikes are now passé. The white-collar workers can manage to work even from home; it is only the daily wage and blue-collar workers, the Left’s mainstay, who suffer. As long as the Left parties remain ideologically hidebound and do not wake up to new realities, they will not be able to pull in new supporters and eventually wither away. The Left’s leading lights have to be seen making their stand clear on important issues, ranging from job security to foreign investment to even freedom of speech. What the CPI(M) has to say about Salman Rushdie not being allowed to speak at Jaipur or on the arrest of two young girls for posting on Facebook we have no idea, because no one spoke up. So far there is no indication that there is any new thinking going on in Left circles.
At this moment, more than any other time in the post-liberalisation period, the moment is ripe to influence young minds about liberal, progressive and yes, Leftist ideas. Young Indians are unhappy at the way things are going and they want answers; they want direction. None of the existing formations enthuse them. They are open to hearing about alternatives. But they want to hear it in a language they understand. The Left has an opportunity of spreading its message. Will it rise to the occasion?