In old left bastion, comrades turn right

And the fiery Devne is not alone to make the switch. Satyajit Kadam, the Congress candidate in the neighbouring Kolhapur (North) Assembly segment, is the son of former PWP loyalist Shivajirao Kadam, who was a former Kolhapur Mayor.

The Radhanagari Assembly seat in the same district has socialist Prakash Abitkar as the Shiv Sena candidate. Abitkar’s father Anandrao was a devoted left-wing politician.

“I had to make the switch to remain relevant and serve people,” says Devne, who has previously also contested on a CPI ticket. “The conundrum of an old political movement is how to reinvent itself and remain relevant to the new reality. The left-winged parties failed to respond to relevance of people,” Devne said. “They are just too rigid,” he added while referring to leaders of left-winged parties.

But senior CPI leader Comrade Govind Pansare, who is among the few recognised faces to have retained the red flag, said that those who have switched sides were “never really driven by left ideology”.

“They came under the Left banner only because they were anti-establishment,” he says. Although Pansare admitted that the failure of parties with Left leanings to promote communist ideology had hit the Left movement in Maharashtra.

Nurtured under the social reformist agenda of Rajarshi Shahu Maharaj, Kolhapur was an ideal breeding ground for left-wing politics. Since independence the region sent several leaders with Left leanings and affiliation to the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha. “The PWP was the flag bearer of left movement here,” Pansare observes.

This continued till late eighties. It was then that the caste politics spun its web catching the left parties off guard. “To weaken hold of left parties, Maharashtra’s first chief minister Yeshwantrao Chavan appealed to Maratha leaders in the PWP fold to join him in the Congress. Most tool the bait,” Pansare rued.

Some like former legislator and Samyukta Maharashtra hero ND Patil stayed the course. While Left parties continued to have a say in local elections till mid-nineties, their hold on electoral politics faded away.

It is no wonder that business Madhukar Patil, 38, does not know about Raghunath Kamble, the CPI  candidate contesting from the Kolhapur (North) Assembly seat, where the race primarily is between Shiv Sena’s sitting legislator Rajesh Kshirsagar and Congress’s Kadam. The CPI has put up its own candidates for two other seats-the region has 10 seats in all-but none of them are being seen as serious contenders.

“Such was the firm hold of left politics in this belt once that people used to stone those donning Gandhi caps,” recollected veteran journalist Vasant Bhosale. It is only ironical then that former red caps are now in the election fray donning the white and saffron caps.

But Pansare sees hope for the revival of Left movement in the ‘rising inequality’ of right-winged politics. “Maharashtra has witnessed the highest number of farmer suicides over the past few years. There has also been an increase in attacks of backward classes. All this indicates the rising inequalities in development. We have drafted a plan for the rejuvenation too,” he said.

Following the split in the alliances of right-wing parties the CPI has put up candidates on 35 out of 288 seats in Maharashtra whereas the CPI (M) is contesting 20.