By Jayant Muralidharan
With the Soviet empire and the East European regimes disintegrated, China turning Crony Capitalist, countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea throwing up individual rather than proletarian dictatorships, it is tempting to conclude that global communism is heading for the sunset. Only the Indian communists, though confined in three states, stood out as the last hope for a leftist revival. That perception was dashed when the Left Front governments in West Bengal and Kerala were voted out in the latest assembly polls. Particularly humiliating was the defeat in West Bengal where the Communists were in power for 34 years. The Indian communists are currently in a soul-searching exercise.
In the course of its turbulent march first from being an abstract philosophy to an egalitarian political and economic doctrine, and thence to an organized Faith, complete with a book, a prophet and many apostles, and finally to its meek surrender to the “magic” of the market forces, orthodox Marxism has gone through periodic bouts of candour, confession and even rare self-flagellation. That is when it’s not in a state of confusion, contradiction, and self-denial. And every time it happened, it experienced seismic convulsions across the Order, like when Nikita Khrushchev exposed, first through his speech at the 20th party conference and later through his memoirs, the innards of a system that, in reality, had remained brain-dead all along within the walls of the Kremlin, but externally kept propped up as a Grisly bear through the cold war and right up to the days of Glasnost.
The notable Indian parallel of such candid confessional outburst occurred in 1996 when Jyoti Basu, the party’s Bengal stalwart, spoke about the “historic blunder” he felt his comrades had committed by spurning an opportunity to lead a coalition national government, with himself as the prime minister. Whether Basu’s lament was driven by a tired communist’s autumnal ambition for a piece of temporal glory or an unflagging ideological commitment to seize power through parliamentary democracy may, forever, remain a matter of dialectical hair-splitting.
But his comrades who put paid to his plans were in no doubt that such a move – sharing power with the national bourgeoisie – would dilute the ideological fervour of a revolutionary party whose “historic commitment” to build a world of proletarian dictatorship must not be tainted by cohabitation, or even association, with “class enemies”.
Eight years down the road, however, the party felt no such prick of conscience while backing the same national bourgeoisie government. The specious reason given for this ‘tactical shift’ was that they were only providing “outside” support in their eagerness to keep the ‘communal forces’ at bay. The communists were telling us, in other words, that they were not sleeping with the enemy while supporting the first UPA government but only lying next to them, thereby suggesting that the party’s ideological virginity was not ruptured in any obvious way.
Here’s something to ponder, then. Starting from 1957, Kerala has had nine coalition governments led by either of the two Communist dispensations, the CPI (M) and the CPI. The point of interest is that in all of these governments, the communists had partners who were not just middle-of the- road socialists or those who fit into national bourgeoisie mould but also outright communalists like the Muslim League.
Communist history is riddled with such instances where praxis took precedence over principles, where yesterday’s class enemies could be accommodated as today’s fellow travellers, where yesterday’s comrades could be condemned as today’s renegades and brushed straight out of history, all in the name of expediency that could be explained, if need be, with a surfeit of stock-in-trade jargons and shibboleths.INAV