Despite its many electoral losses, the left is still present in trade unions, peasant associations, student unions etc
Notwithstanding its poor electoral performances, the left is still a formidable component of India’s broader political spectrum. As a movement, it is still very much pervasive in the form of trade unions, peasant associations, women’s organisations, student unions, in State legislatures, municipal bodies and village councils.
Since Kerala and West Bengal have been the traditional strongholds of the left, it will be apt to engage with a discourse that focuses on the relevance of the left in the future of the Indian democracy and its own ideological adjustment.
It’s because of a shortage of analytical and in-depth literature on the mainstream left, that it becomes tough to see it in the context of changing times.
I read Madhu Ramnath’s book, Woodsmoke and leafcups: Autobiographical Footnotes to the Anthropology of the Durwa People, and felt an urge to read something that goes deep into the cause of alienation and armed rebellion, besides the limitation of the democratic left to engage with these sections living in different red clusters of India.
I encountered the paucity of reference materials, during my research on radical dissent, for my forthcoming book, India Now & Its Transition. While searching, I came across journalist and left thinker Praful Bidwai’s book, The Phoenix Moment: Challenges Confronting the Indian left, which is a seminal study to understand how the Indian communist movement being unique among the capitalist democracies met with its share of successes and failures. The book travels further and assesses the extent of accomplishments which the left attained while chasing its goals in independent India.
Bidwai, who is sadly no more, was a scholar of high repute on the Indian left movement. Hence, it matters when his queries get directed to know whether the left’s core agenda of progressive or socialist transformation can yet be reinvented and restored to relevance — either with its own agency or through other forces, formations and initiatives.
The points raised by Bidwai are absolutely relevant and his efforts bring in focus, the left’s persisting high-key affair with the centralism at party matters — and the tantamount of failures that keeps the left divided into many groups.
The left’s unity is an idea, rather than a guiding goal of emancipation. The democratic left parties’ are at war with their own interest in their inability to form a single party, based on a common ideological ground, carrying forward the core agenda with involving on hard-pressed issues as such economic reforms, reservation, labour laws etc. And this is anything but a new phenomenon.
In the recently completed State polls in West Bengal and Kerala, the left’s mystical flip-flops led to its understanding with the Congress in West Bengal and being at loggerhead with the same in Kerala. This was perfectly a show worth calling ‘comedy of errors’ where the irony had major say than the rest other political arrangements.
If the left parties had to align with the Congress, which is almost as radical as when it experimented with the civil nuclear deal when the United Progressive Alliance1 was in power, it should have fallen with the former or should not have walked away from the alliance of that time.
People have a weak memory, but it is not that the ‘memories march’ is an unknown phenomenon in India as well. The left should take its standing apropos a strategic alliance or with the key economic policies, in tandem with the plan it has for its immediate future.
In this disruptive phase of modernity that is directly an outcome of ‘late-stage capitalism’, it is important for any political force to relate its programme with the mass aspirations.
Technology is a great enabler, it also helps in big way to remove the fog from what is preached and practiced. Today, all Indian political parties which are fit to be called ‘major’ somehow, are working on the core ideas of socialism.
This is surprising but true, and proves why the original bearer of socialism is no longer confined to just one particular set of political gatherings.