Polls 2011: Left in the lurch

The rout of the CPI(M) in West Bengal brought to an end a period of Stalinism that brooked no dissent, hobnobbed with crony capitalists and enforced their agenda with armed cadres; the Left will now have to figure out how to reconnect.

 The rout of the Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), in the 15th West Bengal Assembly polls is stunning by any reckoning. Among those who lost their seats were two politburo members of the party — chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and commerce and industry minister Nirupam Sen — and a central committee member, Gautam Deb. Professor Aditya Nigam, senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, calls these three the “gatekeepers of the executive club of history”. They presided over a suspect mode of industrialisation that caused the pauperisation of peasants, and their defeat confirms the justification of the struggle against the Left Front (LF) government in Singur, Nandigram and Rajarhat.

But the most important of several ramifications — at least keeping in mind posterity — is the nail in the coffin of Stalinism, rather Beriaite terror. Like parrots, most fellow-travellers of the CPI(M), especially in the intelligentsia, doggedly defend Stalin. This obsession with Stalinism — a rather ahistorical mindset — reflects a strange philosophical mendicancy whose corollary is a stubborn insistence on dumping Nikita Sergeivich Khruschev’s historic 33,000-plus-word secret speech exposing the Georgian despot in February 1956 at the 20th Congress of the erstwhile Communist Party of Soviet Union. Incredible as it may seem, most of the Central Committee members of the CPI(M) have not even seen the document.

Intolerance at all levels
Little wonder that intolerance to dissent is a common trait among CPI(M) leaders at all levels inside the party, let alone outsiders and the Opposition. The endless arrogance in the entire hierarchy of the CPI(M) in West Bengal has thus dug the grave of a party with nearly 250,000 members and three million followers in mass fronts among workers, peasants, white-collar employees etc.
In the mid-1990s, a prominent activist of the CPI(M)-dominated Delhi Science Forum told a well-known geo-scientist that the activities of the LF government “cause incalculable harm to the Left movement in the rest of India”. This damage is a hydra-headed monster. Excessive ‘partyocracy’ that fostered nepotism, factionalism and corruption permeated menacingly into education, culture and every sphere of life.

The result was constant distancing of party apparatchik from the masses. That was the real face of Stalinism. Murzban Jal of the New Delhi-based Centre for Studies in Civilisations characterised this as a feature of counter-revolution, which was reflected in the atrocities let loose by the armed cadres of the CPI(M) in Nandigram on March 14, 2007, when at least 14 villagers were killed by the police abetted by the so-called ‘harmads’. The then governor of West Bengal, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, was so shocked that he described it as ‘cold horror’, but the CM defended the police action.

Faulty land acquisition
Saroj Giri, a social scientist, criticised the ‘capitalist henchmanship’ of the CPI(M). This was manifest in the disorderly haste of faulty and anti-peasant land acquisition at Singur to appease the Tatas, disregarding the fact that the land acquired was among “the few most fertile tracts the world over”, according to Subrata Sinha, ex-deputy director-general, Geological Survey of India. Then there was the red carpet welcome to the Salim group of Indonesia, deliberately forgetting the nefarious role the founder of the group played in the massacre of thousands of communists in a CIA-backed coup led by the pro-US General Suharto in 1965 and thereafter.

Responsibility for this rightward shift goes to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Nirupam Sen, but the party general secretary, Prakash Karat, too backed them to the hilt, after initial hesitation.

In 2002, the political organisation report at the state conference called for ending the Operation Barga (legal shield against eviction of Bargadars or share-croppers) by returning the land to owners. This alienated the local party leadership from landless labour whom Lenin defined as the “rural proletariat”. Gradually, a bonhomie developed between the party honchos and the nouveau riche, especially the real estate tycoons and variants of crony capitalists whose reserve army comprised the ‘harmads’. 

All these aberrant tendencies had a deleterious effect on the Left movement. Atrocities at Nandigram made a large number of intellectuals turn hostile toward the Left. The critics were instantly abused as ‘CIA agents’, ‘paid agents’, or ‘disillusioned communists in the service of the enemy’. The abusers do not appear to have read Rosa Luxemburg’s Testament where she defined freedom as “freedom for dissenters”.

No doubt, the ignominious defeat of the LF — whose strength came down from 235 to 62 in the 294-seat legislature — will affect the official Left. But to envisage a genuine self-criticism by the CPI(M), and its allies like the CPI, is wishful thinking. Nigam quotes an Urdu couplet — Ka’aba kis munh se jaoge ‘Ghalib’/ Sharm tumko magar nahin aati (Can we expect these Marxists who have reduced ‘self-criticism’ to a joke to begin to reflect at least now?).  

— Sankar Ray is a Kolkata-based senior journalist