HVK Archives: Two steps backward?
Two steps backward? - The Hindustan Times
Sumanta Banerjee
()
11 September 1997
Title: Two steps backward?
Author: Sumanta Banerjee
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: September 11, 1997
After trudging through half a century of an Independent India, if the
Indian Communists make any honest stocktaking today, they may find very few
achievements to notch up - unless of course they take seriously the few
self-important CPI-M leaders who seem to think of themselves as king-makers
pulling strings behind the sordid politics of the present UF government.
Indeed, the very fact that the two Communist parties have now become
accomplices in the palace intrigues, double-talk and nepotism that rule
national politics, suggests that they have receded farther and farther away
from the goal that they set themselves in 1947. The most eloquent - and
pathetic - example of this regress is the performance of the veteran CPI
leader Indrajit Gupta as Home Minister in the UF government. In a sense,
his political career as a Communist during the last fifty years epitomizes
the tragic decline in Indian Communist politics.
Here is a Communist from the pre-Independence era - horn in an upper class
Bengali family, educated in Cambridge, who spurned offers of a lucrative
career and joined the Communist-led working class movement to emerge as a
popular trade union leader. His electoral triumph at every parliamentary
poll testified to his popularity among the working class voters of West
Bengal, and his performance in the Lok Sabha all these years earned him the
reputation of a brilliant parliamentarian. Yet, when his party chose to
join the UF government and nominated him for the Union Home Minister's
post, he turned out to be a total misfit - unable to take strong decisions
and resist pressures from both his political allies in the UF and
bureaucrats in his ministry, as a result of which he has to constantly
switch over from his earlier habit of plain speaking to the prevarication
of ministerial politics, thus almost reducing himself to the role of the
oafish minister in the British TV serial 'Yes Minister'.
It is becoming more and more evident that during the last fifty years,
instead of being able to change the thoroughly corrupt and inept Indian
political system - leave alone the original Communist goal of overthrowing
it and replacing it with a new system of economic equity and social justice
- the CPI and the CPI-M had themselves legitimised the system and
ultimately fallen victims to it. If we go back to history, we can discern
trends towards the legitimisation of this system in Communist policies
right from the early days of Independence - trends which grew stronger
later and accelerated the pace of retreat from the original Communist
strategies and tactics.
Contrary to the popular historical belief that Indian Communists rejected
Independence by giving the call "Ye Azadi Jhuta Hai" (This Independence is
a sham), in fact in 1947 the P. C. Joshi-led central committee of the then
united CPI initially hailed the announcement of Independence, and promised
to "fully cooperate" with the ruling Congress party "in the proud task of
building the Indian Republic on democratic foundations." It was only in
March 1948 that the Second Congress of the CPI in Calcutta, under the
leadership of B. T. Ranadive, rejected Independence as "jhuta", and
prepared for an armed insurrection to overthrow the government. But, even
this phase of an extra-constitutional endeavour did not last long. In
August 1951, the CPI declared its intention to participate in the first
general elections with a view to set up a new "People's Democratic
Government." Its ability to form the first Communist state government in
Kerala after the 1957 general elections further emboldened its hopes for a
change through parliamentary means.
If the 1950s witnessed the CPI's abandonment of the tactics of armed
struggle in favour of parliamentary tactics, the 1960s saw a certain degree
of attenuation of its original strategy of a "fundamental democratic
transformation of the country" (which was envisaged by the CPI's all-India
conference in 1951). The CPI split on this question in 1964. While the
party's Right-wing leadership proposed a "national democratic revolution"
for a non-capitalist path of development along with the "progressive"
sections of the Congress, those who left the parent body and formed CPI-M
planned to establish a "people's democracy" excluding the Congress and
headed by the working class. Both the parties, however, committed
themselves to adopting "peaceful means" in order to achieve their
respective goals.
Notwithstanding these subtle, differences in the objectives of the two
parties, their common agreement on peaceful means and acceptance of
parliamentary politics drew the two parties together into the next stage of
parliamentary participation - forming governments in states in which they
emerged as dominant partners in the coalitions that won a majority (e.g. in
Kerala and West Bengal in 1967). There was no looking back from then
onwards. Both the Communist parties have continued to fight every election
and form coalition governments wherever they can - the Left Front
government in West Bengal enjoying the longest innings. They initially
justified formation of these governments by promising to use them for
"revolutionising the masses" and to "give immediate relief to the people".
While the second promise has been carried out to some extent (through land
reforms, security of tenure for share-croppers, assurance of minimum wages
for agricultural labourers, etc. in the rural areas), the first promise has
been forgotten by the Communist ministers to whom any sound resembling the
word "revolution" is today not only embarrassing, but also threatening.
They perceived this threat for the first time when a section of their own
followers sought to translate into practice their promise to "revolutionise
the masses" in Naxalbari in West Bengal. Although the beleaguered
Communist ministers succeeded in crushing the uprising in Naxalbari, it
sparked off an armed movement in other parts of India, reviving the
original Communist aim of overthrowing the prevailing exploitative
political system. Operating in rural pockets of Bihar, and tribal areas of
Andhra Pradesh and bordering tribal-inhabited villages in Maharashtra,
Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, the armed guerillas of the CPI-ML, or Naxalites
as they are known in popular parlance, pose a rather embarrassing reminder
to the old veterans of both the CPI and CPI-M who on the eve of
Independence organised and participated in the armed peasant uprisings of
the Tebhaga movement in Bengal and the more successful and sustaining
Telengana liberation struggle. The Naxalite movement, in a sense, harks
back to that spirit of anti-feudal militancy in Indian Communist politics
of the 1940s. But notwithstanding their, intention to revive the old
Communist goals, the Naxalites remain confined to a few pockets, and are
split in several factions, sometimes fighting each other and dissipating
their limited resources.
Thus, neither the parliamentary Communists nor the anti-parliamentary armed
groups of Communists have yet been able to emerge as decisive forces in
national politics. As for the former, an analysis of the Lok Sabha polls
since 1952 reveals interesting fluctuations in the votes polled by the
Communists. From 1952 with a support of three per cent of the total
votes', the Communists expanded their constituency by capturing nine per
cent all through the 1960s and 1970s - till the 1977 elections when it fell
to seven per cent, and ever since then it had remained static at around
seven to eight per cent. This indicates that much of the enthusiasm
generated in other parts of India in the wake of the installation of Left
Front governments in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura some twenty years ago,
has evaporated. The alternative parliamentary model of change that the
Communists propounded appears to have degenerated into the same old mould
of a corrupt system dominated by cynical politicians, shrewd bureaucrats,
and get-rich-quick go-getters in the states where they are ruling. At the
Centre by being partners in an opportunist arrangement that depends on the
support of an unscrupulous Congress for the survival of the UF government,
the Communists ironically have gone back to square one - the early days of
Independence, when they promised to "fully cooperate" with the new Congress
rulers.
Back
Top
|
