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Marxists are caught in a nutcracker on the question of an
alliance with the Congress, as the Kerala group opposes the West
Bengal prescription
In one of his last articles in Deshabhimani, the CPI(M) party
organ ,in Kerala, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the late Marxist
ideologue, described the Congress and the BJP as "two sides of a
counterfeit coin". The definitive statement notwithstanding, the
late EMS' legatees in the CPI(M) find themselves divided on
whether to align with the Congress to thwart the BJP, or to stay
equidistant and wage a lonely battle against both. The problem is
far from an abstruse Marxian dialectic. In the two left-ruled
states of Kerala and Tripura, the BJP is nowhere within range in
which it can aim for power; the Congress is still the main
challenger. In West Bengal, however, the BJP and its ally,
Trinamool Congress, have unleashed an electoral tornado,
uprooting the CPI(M) from some of its traditional bastions and
reducing the Congress to a distant third position. That puts the
avowed champions of the proletariat in a bind. While one section
seeks a tactical alliance with the Congress, the other half would
like to put both the Congress and the BJP in the rogues' gallery.
The issue was hotly debated at the meeting of the party's
Politburo, the apex 15-member body (two seats are vacant after
the death of EMS and Sunil Moitra), on April 11-12 and the 80
member Central Committee, which met later in the week. The debate
is inconclusive till now as, in a communist set-up, larger policy
issues can only be settled by delegates at the party congress,
held at' three-year intervals, The party congress that was
scheduled for February this year had to be postponed because of
the Lok Sabha polls. It has been rescheduled for the year-end.
The delegates are chosen during intra-party elections at the
state conferences, held weeks before the party congress, The
conference of the largest state unit, West Bengal, hasn't yet
been held, leaving a question mark on the mood ofthe party
However, those who can read the tea leaves of marxist politics
think that the "Bengal line" of wooing the Congress may get
rejected, though by a narrow margin.
Significantly, an ambivalence regarding relationship with the
Congress has dogged the party since May 1996, when there was a
keen contest within the Central Committee on the issue of whether
West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu should accept the United
Front offer of prime ministership with Congress support. The
resolution was finally defeated by a margin of just one vote. The
party had then ideologically padded up the debate, attempting to
pass it off as a conflict over the interpretation of Marxism. But
the real contradiction in 1996, and even today, is between the
divergent Marxist views of the Congress from Calcutta and
Thiruvananthapuram. In other words, it is a policy duel between
Basu and Kerala Chief Minister E.K. Nayanar, with party General
Secretary H.S. Surjeet clearly tilted in favour of an
understanding with the Congress.
At last week's Politburo meeting, Basu's opponents were unusually
blunt in warning him against a friendly strategy with regard to
the Congress. His plan for a ground-level understanding with the
Congress in the West Bengal panchayat elections in May was
reportedly dismissed, with the Politburo urging him to firm up
scat adjustments with the RSP, CPI and the Forward Bloc (FB).
The RSP and the FB have already expressed their strong
disapproval of an understanding with the Congress. According to
an informed source, the party's priority is to "unite the Left
Front". Basu, famous for his composure and measured expression,
reportedly lost his cool on several occasions and even stayed
away from the second half of the deliberations. The first session
was marked by bitter exchanges between the factions, with Basu
being accused of having overstressed-in the poll campaign-the
chances of his becoming the prime minister. Since that wasn't
possible without Congress support, argued his critics, it was as
good, or as bad, as making a prior declaration of alliance with
the Congress. The pro-Basu camp reportedly snapped back at
Nayanar, pointing at his "brazenly pro-communal remark of
calling the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram a "mini-
Pakistan". There were also acid remarks from the pro-Basu camp
aimed at V.S. Achutanandan, party's Kerala strongman and
Politburo member, for allegedly alienating the state's Latin
Catholic community. The Politburo meeting reportedly witnessed
bitter exchanges, even on the desirability of Marxist chief
ministers meeting Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee "without a
pressing need". While Basu has avoided meeting Vajpayee, Nayanar
promptly got an audience with him. Earlier, Manik Sarkar, the
newly elected Marxist chief minister of Tripura, had met the
prime minister.
In the Politburo, those opposed to a handshaking relationship
with the Congress seem to outnumber the pro-Congress leaders by
seven to four (see box), with two members, West Bengal party
chief Sailen Dasgupta and Tamil Nadu leader P. Ramachandran,
sitting on the fence. Interestingly, most members from Kerala
are united in their opposition to the Congress even though there
are fissures in the party unit, notably between Achutanandan and
leaders of the party's central trade union organisation, CITU. On
the issue of opposition to the Congress, both Achutanandan and
CITU President E. Balanandan are on the same side of the
barricade.
The unity of the Kerala group on its shared hostility to the
Congress is curious because despite dubbing the Congress and the
BJP as equal evils in his last article, EMS also wrote: "To
defeat the BJP ... the left parties will have to cooperate with
the Congress". The state's Marxist leaders swear by the late
party chief Nayanar sobbed inconsolably at EMS funeral meeting
last month. However, the state party has not quite accepted the
departed leader's prescription of a tactical alliance with the
Congress. On the other hand, it fears that the party's West
Bengal unit may harm the overall interest of the left forces by
leaning too close to the Congress. A party MP from Kerala says on
condition of anonymity that "in these days of quick dissemination
of information", the spectacle of a Congress-CPI(M) unity in
distant Bengal may take no time to "impact on voter- behaviour in
Kerala".
However, regardless of the differences over an alliance with the
Congress, the party is also at pains to explain to the cadres the
underlying reasons for its growing marginalisation in Indian
politics. Its vote-share in the general elections is on a
downward slope-from 6.16 per cent in 1991 to 6.12 per cent in
1996 and now 5.18 per cent. Its number of seats in the Lok Sabha
has stagnated at 32 in the past two elections. It hasn't won a
single scat in the state capitals of West Bengal and Kerala. Even
in the West Bengal countryside, where it had built a seemingly
impregnable fortress over the decades because of drastic land
reforms, its hold has started slipping. Even Surjeet admits that
the party was not quite able to cope with "the changing class
composition of the electorate, notably in the cities".
While Surjeet and Basu are both leaders of a fading erg of
Marxian strategy that plays one "bourgeois" camp ,against another
(read the BJP and the Congress), there are many new members who
demand that the party should recapture lost ground and plan
future alliances with other parties. In the party congress, the
leaders may have to answer a lot of questions, and the stridency
of the questions will depend on the number of new delegates who
are churned up through the party's internal democracy. In the
early days, the 'democratic centralism of the Marxists was a
mere facade to muffle uncomfortable questions. But the gentle
breeze of glasnost is rippling even through the conservative
bureaucracy of the CPI(M), making it obligatory for leaders to at
least explain their failures.
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