Twenty-four years after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced it in the Communist party of erstwhile Soviet Union of which he was the general secretary, the CPI(M) is feeling the need of relinquishing its iron-curtain policy and adopting glasnost (openness) in the context of the realisation that organisational rigidity has been one of the reasons for its steady decline.
The feeling for the need of adopting such a policy was aired by various top leaders at seminars held in Malappuram and Thrissur in Kerala last week but critics are already joking that the move could eventually lead to the party’s dissolution as it had happened with the Soviet Union two years after Gorbachev introduced glasnost, considering the condition of the CPI(M).
The first indications on the party’s readiness to have changes in its policy and to broadbase activities had come last week from none other than general secretary Prakash Karat who admitted that lapses in communicating with those within the party and outside had caused serious problems for the CPI(M) and the entire left in the last election.
According to Karat, the party should be prepared to correct itself by taking into account the changes happening among the people and the society. “The party should listen to the outlooks and criticisms of the people. Slogans should change in the context of changes in society. The left should be ready for self-criticism in the new circumstance,” he said.
Immediately after Karat announcing that the party would correct its path, Politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai and central committee member TM Thomas Isaac openly spoke about the need for openness in the party. According to Pillai, leftist forces cannot survive in India without making changes in all matters including the words and deeds of leaders.
The leaders in their confessions pointed out that it was absolutely vital for the party to identify its faults and the areas where those faults had been committed. The party may become irrelevant if there are no open discussions on such matters and unless proper steps are taken to correct the mistakes, according to them.
Calling for immediate implementation of some kind of openness in the party, Isaac, an economist and a neo-liberalist till recently, said that the policy of ‘one-way traffic’ in communication would do no good to the party. He said that the present system of one leader speaking and all others listening to him should undergo a total change.
Isaac launched sharp criticisms against the top leadership saying that the party was getting alienated from the very people it represented mainly because of the practice of following the unilateral ‘sermons’ issued from the top. It is rumoured that a new axis has come up within the party under the leadership of Isaac and Politburo member MA Baby.
Even when the party is feeling the need of adopting openness and bringing changes to its policies, it is not prepared to admit that the left had become irrelevant in the Indian political context. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Indian Marxists had taken the position that the development was not reflective of the failure of communism or Marxism.
Despite talks about an imminent glasnost in the CPI(M), its critics are not convinced that the party is ready to embrace such a huge change. “It will be foolish to think that such a revolution can happen within the CPI(M) when the people who lead it are the same ones who had taken it to the present pathetic condition,” said a former theoretician of the party based in Kochi.
PVS Warrier, senior journalist and a left expert, refused to attach any credibility to reports on the CPI(M)’s move for correction of path. “It is all right to speak of policy change. But does the party presently have any defined policy or programmeIJ” he asks, adding that its authoritarian leaders will never allow the party to take a path of openness.