Yechury must get real, shed hyperbolic language
Senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury has been on a verbal overdrive ever since his elevation as the general secretary of his party. He has given a clarion call to finish off the “trimurti” of “neo-liberal economic policies, communal polarisation and undermining of democratic institutions”, that the Bharatiya Janata Party has been allegedly following. Not content with the trimurti analogy, he has taken the comparison further into the religious domain, saying the trimurti must be nipped before it turns into a “trishul”. Mr Yechury is repeating ideological clichés that have served his party poorly in the last decade or so.
There is no worthwhile constituency that exists any longer in this country for such abstract views. And yet, he, his party and those others who share similar archaic views, continue to mouth them in the hope that they will somehow click with the sections of the people that are not well-disposed towards the BJP and the Government it leads at the Centre, while at the same time wean away at least some of those who can be misled by dated propaganda. Neo-liberal economic policy is an issue that the CPI(M) had earlier accused the Congress of, but the party had no problem extending support to a Congress-led Government for a full five years from 2004 to 2009. In any case, Mr Yechury's alternative model has been a colossal failure wherever it had the occasion to be implemented.
The CPI(M) rule of three decades left the economy of West Bengal in shambles, and the ruling Trinamool Congress in the State is still wondering how to overcome the problem. The CPI(M)'s performance in Kerala was no better. It is little wonder that people showed Mr Yechury's party the door in both these States and reduced it to virtually nothing in the 2014 general election. The communal polarisation bogey is something that the CPI(M) can always be trusted to fall back upon when nothing else works — and nothing else, including the communal angle, has worked. Stray incidents are being strung up to give an impression of a devious design by Hindutva elements to destroy communal peace in the country. What the likes of Yechury must realise is that, by inventing designs they are actually creating an environment of distrust among the people. The CPI(M), the Congress and others had done their best to set alarms among the people about the ‘communal' BJP, but the lok Sabha result showed up their failure.
The latest allegation Mr Yechury has latched on to is that the Narendra Modi Government has been bypassing democratic procedures to push its way through. But he fails to add that parties such as his have been adopting confrontationist means to torpedo key legislations the country needs. The environment of cooperation between the Government and the Opposition he talks of has been vitiated by such arm-twisting. Mr Yechury and his party need to introspect before they target the Government.