Left's decline like a social revolution in reverse

AKG Bhawan, the headquarters of the CPI(M) in New Delhi, stood lonely and bereft one late monsoon afternoon in the Capital last week, a far cry from the pulsating action in 2004 when senior leaders Jyoti Basu and Harkishan Singh Surjeet played starring roles in propping up the first incarnation of the Congress-led UPA so as to keep the BJP firmly out of power.

What a difference a decade can make. The OB vans have mostly deserted the Bhawan, reporters who affected the role of pretentiously scruffy lounge lizards have relocated elsewhere, and yes, the story has more or less moved on. Both Basu and Surjeet have passed away. Since the loss of West Bengal, the jewel in its crown, in 2011, the party has won only two seats out of 42 in the 2014 parliamentary elections.

The Left Front itself has been reduced to 10 MPs in the Lok Sabha, down from 60 in 2004. It is now represented only by the CPI(M) and the CPI, as the lone Revolutionary Socialist Party member joined the Congress alliance in Kerala before the elections and the All India Forward Bloc failed to open its account. Its national vote share has come down to its lowest ever, 4.8 per cent.

A man holds the CPI(M) flag with the St. Pauls Cathedral and the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata in the background.

The humiliation doesn't end there. The percentage of the CPI(M) vote in Andhra Pradesh in the 2014 elections is down to 1 per cent-even in the elections held soon after the undivided CPI split in 1964, the CPI(M) got 4 per cent. In Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa at first agreed to ally with the CPI(M), then humiliatingly offered it only one seat; aghast, the party, turned her down. Only tiny Tripura continues to fly the flag with its two MPs, refusing to allow the national decline of the Left dampen its spirits.

Inside, AKG Bhawan is like a ghost building. The CPI(M)'s nine MPs are presumably in Parliament, hoping to make up by the loudness of their collective larynx their incredible loss of influence in this power-obsessed city. On the second floor, outside party General Secretary Prakash Karat's room, the shiny red upholstery keeps empty company with the aluminium ashtray. Inside his room, on the wall behind, the print of an old Soviet poster simply remarks, in Russian, 'Oktyabarskaya Revolutsiya! Most k svetlomu budushemu (The October Revolution is a bridge to a bright future)'.

CPI leader AB Bardhan flanked by CPI(M) leaders Prakash Karat(right) and Sitaram Yechury.

Karat knows the CPI(M) is facing an unprecedented crisis of sorts, both in terms of strategy and tactics. The interview is peppered with words like "decline" and "decimation" and "setback". Never in the history of the party, since it split from the undivided CPI in 1964 and went its own way, becoming bigger and stronger in the process, has the future looked so grey and dismal and uncertain. "The Left has declined, not only in terms of its electoral base but also its political influence all over the country," Karat admits, adding, "Our biggest setback, of course, has been in West Bengal, since we lost the Assembly elections in 2011, but also elsewhere, in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Now we have to regain, recover and make advances."

So, over the next nine months until the party holds its congress in April 2015, the party will hold a series of meetings from the ground upward, across villages and mohallas, districts and states, the same two questions ululating across the faithful: should the Congress and the BJP continue to be treated on par as the Congress's singleminded pursuit of wealth was not very different from the Right-wing policies of the latter? Moreover, in what way should the Left itself change, to once again connect with the aspirational rural and urban classes so besotted with the charms of globalisation and neo-liberal economics?

Having learnt at the feet of the Marxist historian Victor Kiernan at the University of Edinburgh in the late 1960s, Karat knows both his Marx and his history well. He believes that Manmohan Singh's reforms, over the last decade, have had the effect of transforming the bourgeoisie into an unknown creature. As for the national Left-leaning intelligentsia, which manifested itself both in study circles as well as winning student union elections, 'lal salaam' demonstrations as well as pro-subaltern studies, it seems to have moved on to, perhaps, not very kind comparisons with Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia.

"In a post-globalised world," Karat muses in his spartan office, surrounded by a Lenin portrait or two, "we have to ask ourselves why Left politics in India has not been able to attract young people? Moreover, the very nature of work has become far more atomised and fragmented, for example in the services sector. The unorganised sector is facing many more serious challenges? Once upon a time, the raising of a few paisa in the tram fares of Kolkata would bring that city to a halt, but now? How does the Left address all these issues?"

According to economist and political commentator Prabhat Patnaik, the Left's decline is like a social revolution in reverse, initiated by the upper-middle class which has benefited from the neo-liberal policies of the BJP-Congress. Besides, India's top educational institutions have failed to break caste barriers and caste consciousness among the educated and the empowered has actually become stronger. "They justify inequality to justify their own privilege. They feel threatened by the Left ideology," says Patnaik.

Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which was once the heart of the Left's student struggle, has been hit by caste polarisation since OBC reservations were introduced in 2006. The CPI(M)'s student wing, Students' Federation of India, has lost ground to either the pro-BJP Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad or the ultra-Left and pro-Naxal All India Students' Association (AISA). "Organisations such as AISA realised the futility of Marxism as the basis of political mobilisation of the children of economic reforms. Why put so much hard work in explaining a discredited ideology when votes can be ensured through other easier means?" says Abhinav Prakash Singh, a doctoral scholar in economics at JNU.

Shorn of spin, fact is that Karat's nine-year tenure as head of the CPI(M) has coincided with the party's greatest decline and fall. In 2004, Basu and Surjeet had actively engaged with the Congress and other UPA allies to create a common minimum programme to run the first UPA government. In 2008, when Manmohan went ahead with the nuclear deal with the US, Karat, now general secretary, pressed the withdraw button, arguing it was far better for the CPI(M) to stand alone and not be contaminated by the Congress's 'proimperialist' decisions.

Parts of the party, especially in West Bengal, grumbled. But the leader stood firm. "Even though we only supported UPA 1 from outside from 2004-2008, we had access to power. Once we withdrew support, we lost that access. It cost us our bargaining levers and affected our electoral results subsequently. Much of our core constituency could not relate to the anti-Americanism projected by that step," says a Kerala CPI(M) leader. Asked, in retrospect, if the decision to withdraw support from UPA 1 over the India-US nuclear deal could be termed as a turning point in the party's decline, Karat says, "Perhaps we should have withdrawn earlier." CPI General Secretary A.B. Bardhan, Karat adds, had beseeched him to withdraw support several times on the issue of price rise. "The most important task at hand is to first reform and renew ourselves, in the CPI(M) and then in the Left Front."

Clearly, the road to revival passes through West Bengal, a state that gave the Left Front 35 seats out of the 60 it won in 2004, a number now shockingly down to two. But the Left's decline had been apparent since the Bengal panchayat elections in 2008, a trend confirmed by the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and the 2011 Assembly elections. In 2014, the party barely held on to Murshidabad and Raiganj; the Left Front's vote share declined by 13.7 per cent, of which the CPI(M)'s share was about 9 per cent.

Biman Bose, member of the CPI(M) politburo as well as the chief of the Left Front committee in West Bengal, points out that the loss of vote share was equivalent to the Trinamool Congress's (TMC) gain. "The TMC has embarked on terror tactics on a vast scale. They are indulging in targeted killings of key CPI(M) cadres, people who are the key links between the party and the people. Since we lost the elections in 2011, Trinamool has killed 159 CPI(M) cadres, 140,000 people have been driven out of their homes," says Bose.

But he also admits that the party, after 34 long years in power, had not been able to "gauge the distance" between decisions that emerged from Writers' Buildings or Alimuddin Street, the government and party headquarters in Kolkata respectively, and the masses at large. For example, there had been huge support for building the Haldia Petrochemicals plant, but when the CPI(M)-led government allowed an Indonesian company to build an industrial plant in Nandigram in 2007, the massive protests "took the party by surprise", says Bose.

Certainly, the decline of the Left has been commensurate with the ascendance of the TMC in West Bengal, while the BJP made an incredible showing in the state, winning only two seats but garnering an incredible 16.8 per cent of the vote. "The rise of caste- and religion-based politics has had a big impact," says Bose, "We have not been able to properly deal with that."

"The only way to renew ourselves," says another CPI(M) politburo member, "is for the Left to become much more Left than it has been in recent years." In other words, the Left has to give up its alliances with regional parties, be it the Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh or the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, and pull back from consorting with centrist parties like the Congress. "When caste-based parties like the SP and the AIADMK ally with us, we give them legitimacy, but all they give us in return is the retrogressive odour of caste. Over the years this has eaten into our core constituency. So much so that party workers are now asking, 'What does the Left stand for?'" says a senior CPI leader.

What this really means is that in the name of renewal and reinvigoration, the CPI(M) will withdraw even further into itself. The Congress will be opposed as strongly as the BJP, even if that means ceding even greater political space to the BJP.

In Kerala, the CPI(M) fares somewhat better, despite intra-party differences between Pinarayi Vijayan and V.S. Achuthanandan, the killing of CPI(M) rebels like T.P. Chandrasekharan in north Kerala and the slow dismantling of some of its showpiece achievements like the Kerala Dinesh Beedi Workers Central Co-op Society. So what's the road ahead? Should the Left become a new Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-type of party? Certainly, Prakash Karat and several CPI(M) leaders had been quite impressed with the AAP's showing in Delhi in the December 2013 elections. Several influential CPI sympathisers like JNU professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy and academic Aditya Nigam openly made the transition.

But others have, since, publicly disagreed with this line. Vaikom Vishwan, convenor of the Left Democratic Front in Kerala, says that AAP may have the potential to swing some votes and certainly has some traction among the post-liberalisation generation. "We are determined to adapt to the new situation." Certainly, for the Left, the future is now.

with Rajeev P.I. and Kaushik Deka

Follow the writer on Twitter @jomalhotra