By Amulya Ganguli, IANS,
There are faint indications that the comrades are waking up to the cause of their decline. Although they have been on a downhill slope ever since their obdurate opposition to the nuclear deal, which made Amartya Sen say the Left lost its voice as a result, the latter had given no evidence that it was becoming aware of the reasons which slashed its parliamentary seats by a third in 2009.
Arguably, it is this refusal to read the writing on the wall which was responsible for the Left’s drubbing in its 34-year-old stronghold in West Bengal. Even today some of its thinkers believe a consolidation of the traditional support base of the Communists – the workers, peasants and agricultural labourers – would revive their fortune.
But there has also been an admission by Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), that there is “a disconnect between the Left and sections of the middle class”. What is more, this “disconnect” has been most pronounced in the case of the “young who have benefited post-reforms in terms of better opportunities, jobs, income”.
This observation, probably the first from a Communist which suggests that the economic reforms aren’t such a disaster after all echoes what Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, and an ardent votary of the reforms, has said about the “steady improvement in the living standards” of a “substantial” section of the population.
If there is no backtracking by the Communists from Karat’s position, especially to meet what he called the “big challenge” of reaching out to the well-off young people by updating the party programme, then there might at last be a pragmatic reorientation of the Communist parties, which have shied away from such an exercise despite the collapse of their doctrine in the former Soviet Union and its eastern European empire in 1989.
It isn’t only the CPI-M leader who has spoken of a relook at the party’s policies, Communist Party of India (CPI) leader A.B. Bardhan has also said the Left had “underestimated” the growth of the “great Indian middle class…in the last few decades”, whose importance lay in the fact that it “moulds public opinion”.
Unlike Karat, Bardhan was mildly critical of the new middle class because it was “more consumerist, more careerist”. As a result, it might not respond to “struggle, propaganda, agitation”, the familiar features of a communist movement, according to Bardhan. At the same time, this segment could not be ignored because “it is a very big mass of the people”.
What is evident from these statements is the Left’s realization that because of the huge size of the middle class, the
commissars can no longer deride it as lackeys of the bourgeoisie who deserve contempt rather than an attempt at assimilation. Besides, the modern means of communication via the mobile phones and the internet made these consumerists and careerists exert considerable influence on public opinion through radio, especially the private music stations with their amusing gigs, and television.
As such, the Communists have no option but to take cognizance of their presence on the social and political scene. Hence, there is a need to factor them into the Left’s “tactics and policies”, as Bardhan said. This is evidently where the “updating” of the party programmes will be necessary. For the comrades, however, such an enterprise will mean entering uncharted territory, for they will not be able to find any example in Russian and Chinese histories of the early and middle 20th century, when the communists had to deal with such a large, prosperous and influential middle class in these two countries.
Karat’s acknowledgement that the economic reforms have provided “better opportunities, jobs, income” to a large section is important in this context. An acceptance of this line will mean that the communists will no longer be able to deride either the market or its corollary, imperialism, as stridently as before. It also means a belated justification for Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s pro-private sector initiatives in West Bengal although these were subsequently criticized as a lowering of the party’s “ideological guard” by noted Leftist economist Prabhat Patnaik.
That the dogmatists in the CPI-M like Patnaik and former Kerala chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan will not be pleased with any further dropping of the ideological guard is obvious. Nor is it clear whether Karat’s and Bardhan’s comments are off-the-cuff remarks in media interviews or a serious articulation of a new party line.
It is possible that the doctrinaire group will resist any “updating” of the line by pointing to the 41 percent votes which the Left received in West Bengal and its narrow defeat in Kerala. But there is little doubt that a vigorous internal debate is on the cards.
(28-05-2011-Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at [email protected])