#dnaEdit: CPI-M fudges line

For quite some time now, the political and personal rivalry between the Communist Party of India-Marxist’s (CPI-M) stalwarts Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury has been an open secret. Therefore the ‘alternative document’ reportedly circulated by Yechury challenging Karat’s tactical line at the ongoing four-day party session lacks the elements of a grand revelation. More interestingly, it is the subject matter of the discord that offers us yet another insight into the political bankruptcy of the party, now a mere blip on the national and regional political radar. 

At the heart of the tussle is the party’s political-tactical thesis adopted at the Jalandhar Congress in 1978. Yechury’s 5-page document rebuts the politburo line that the CPI-M’s “united front” tactics to forge alliances with various other “bourgeois-landlord parties” (drawn up in the aftermath of the Emergency in 1975) have proved to be essentially flawed. In other words, the idea of a non-Congress, non-BJP third front that the CPI-M — particularly its former general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet and then West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu — strenuously strived for has actually damaged the CPI-M’s political expansion outside of the three states of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura.

Defending the Jalandhar Congress’s tactical line, Yechury points to the organisational flaws that he believes were at the root of the CPI-M’s stunted growth, and eventually the withering away of its former bastion, West Bengal. Those familiar with the CPI-M’s organisational dynamic are aware that Yechury is known to be more in the ‘Surjeet-mould’, flexible in considering alliance options in contemporary coalition politics. Karat, on the other hand, is known for his stand-offish, bureaucratic approach, out of sync with Delhi’s volatile durbari politics. 

But the argument that the CPI-M has been pushed to the peripheries because of its tactical line is a clumsy deflection from the deeper rot that has systematically corroded the party. The rot had already seeped in sometime in the 1980s when, after winning two consecutive elections in West Bengal, the CPI-M simultaneously gained more and more clout at the Centre. The party was already hollowing out organisationally as well as ideologically. Piggybacking on dubious parties like the Samajwadi Party, propping up the Congress or a third-front led government at the Centre, were symptomatic of a more extensive sickness. In West Bengal, the CPI-M came to be known as a party of real estate racketeers and anti-social elements (most of them now flocking to the TMC); while in Delhi, the Communist leaders basked in a false sense of glory and self-importance by dictating terms to various governments from the outside.

Hubris came to be a defining marker of the party which was once a leading light of grass roots movements. In the space vacated by the CPI-M, non-party left and social movements grew, resisting unfair acquisition of land and the setting up of nuclear plants. Rather than join forces with these groups, the CPI-M kept a safe distance from them. We are familiar with the CPI-M’s violent interventions in Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh — which saw movements resisting land acquisition and police oppression. Interestingly both Karat and Yechury fully backed those violent methods of muzzling resistance.

Consider the present depressing state of affairs in the CPI-M after losing power to the Trinamool Congress following its uninterrupted 34-year hegemony over the state. The blunt truth the CPI-M needs to confront is that it has lost its organic links with the poor it once claimed to represent. The Jalandhar line can be endlessly debated. But will Karat or Yechury have the political integrity to look the problem in the face?