Still stuck in the past

While Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalithaa celebrate their famous victories, of greater long-term importance is the future of the Communist movement in India. The relatively good showing of the CPI(M) in Kerala, despite its narrow defeat, is a peculiar local and regional phenomenon and the trumping of personality in the shape of V.S. Achuthanandan over ideology.

But the devastating defeat of the Marxists in West Bengal after 34 years of uninterrupted rule represents a landmark in Communism’s life in the country.
The CPI(M) in West Bengal has been living on its initial spate of land reforms in the countryside, the merging of party functionaries with administrative responsibilities and the thuggish power of its cadres. The party’s leadership has been living in a bubble, still worshipping the icons of a past Communist era and straddling the two worlds of the peasantry and bhadralok (an untranslatable world, connoting genteelness and upper-class attitude) culture.
It needed a street fighter in the person of Mamata to break this Communist formulation of success. But in ideological terms, the tragedy of the CPI(M) has been that it ceased growing up for decades. The last time ideology counted in the party was when the movement split after the Soviet Union and China went their separate ways in 1964, with the Marxists leaning towards China and the CPI remaining loyal to Moscow.
It is remarkable that for 47 years the world of the Indian Marxists is unchanged. Stalin remains in the pantheon of Communist gods. The vocabulary of the Marxists is touchingly familiar with its traditional panoply of Communist gods and demons although the pro-Chinese proclivities of the Marxists have abated somewhat. While the overwhelming segment of the old Communist world has undergone a sea change, Indian Marxists have remained wedded to a simple era of certainties.
It is as if the Berlin Wall had not fallen, the Soviet Union had not broken up and Marx still remained supreme in the Communists’ definition of world phenomena. Stalin remains an icon in the Indian Marxists’ vocabulary, and although the Chinese successfully stood Communist ideology on its head to take a capitalist path while mouthing old ideological formulations to maintain a one-party state, India’s Marxists, largely confined to one major state and a participant in a melange of parties in Kerala, have never felt the need to grow up.
Yet the Mamata hurricane now poses uncomfortable questions for the Indian Marxists if they wish to remain relevant to the country’s future. They cannot follow the Chinese model of marrying capitalism with a version of dictatorship because their ruling the whole country is a pipedream. And in an era in which old certainties have lost their meaning in a technological interconnected world, India’s Communists seem to have no clue on how to chart their future policies. The Indian Marxists’ pro-Chinese proclivities have taken them nowhere and while they are promising to introspect, the old leaders remain blinkered and a new generation of Communists is yet to wrest leadership positions.
The imitative streak is strong in the Indian psyche. Nothing caused the old generation of Indian Communists as much pain as the split in the world Communist movement. They chose either Moscow or Beijing and are now left behind as the rest of the world has changed. Living as I was in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, I discovered how most Soviets made their peace with Communist ideology by disregarding it while mouthing the clichés and taking a pragmatic view of life and the state. Having gained power only in two or three states in the best of times, India’s Marxists have never learned to think beyond familiar clichés. A telling reminder of the Marxists’ predicament was that the most striking recent people’s movement was launched not by a Communist leader or party but by a man in the Gandhian tradition — Anna Hazare.
The space once occupied by the Communists has been taken over by the Maoists and other extreme factions of tribals. The Indian Communists’ decision to fight for their vision within the confines of a democratic system paid dividends for a time in empowering them to rule one or more states, but in ideological terms they were at a dead-end. The Marxists, with their junior partner, the CPI, essentially became regional parties governed by the laws of regional fluctuations.
It has been aptly said that the last Englishman is to be found in India. Similarly, the last old-style Communist will be discovered here. There is little reason to hope that the introspection promised by the Marxists and the CPI will yield anything but clichés. The old Communists cannot change in the autumn of their lives. Stalin remains their deity as does the old pantheons of leaders who proverbially shook the world in 10 days. Concepts such as “dictatorship of the proletariat” are etched on their memory and secretive decision-making at the highest level is their norm.
What then can we expect from the Marxists’ rout in West Bengal? The alternative for the CPI and CPI(M) is stark. They will either reinvent themselves as one or more modern Left parties or face irrelevance. There is room for vigorous moderate Left parties in a country of great inequities and problems. Thus far, in the Indian Communists’ attempt at coexistence with bourgeois parties, they have ceded the opposition space to people’s movements led by Medha Patkar or other regional ad hoc groups. It is as if the old Communist formulations have taken over the CPI and CPI(M), dulling their capacity to break out of the mould.
It will take a bold new leader not on the horizon today to show Indian Communists the light, failing which the Left space will be occupied by other, more modern, leaders.