Grassroots activists fill void left by mainstream Left

The CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat’s assertion that the Maoist doctrine of revolution through guns has led to “serious degeneration of revolutionary politics” is meant to be taken seriously only by the party’s faithful and the blind.
As India’s largest Communist party, the CPI(M), can hardly escape its share of responsibility for the collapse of the Left.

The clout of the mainstream Left, some argue, has been disproportionately high compared to their actual sphere of political and electoral influence. The CPI(M), the Left Front’s fulcrum, remains confined to just three states, West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. Even out of these three, it was really the lone West Bengal and its longest surviving Left Front government that was instrumental in catapulting the Left into Delhi’s high-powered durbari politics.

The Left’s entry into national politics also was tied to the changing electoral patterns and the breakdown in bi-polar politics. As electoral verdicts fractured, the Marxists, under the stewardship of Harkishen Singh Surjeet and Jyoti Basu, became important players in the tortuous process of making and unmaking coalition governments at the Centre. In fact, the delicate art of coalescing the disparate and frequently feuding regional parties with multiple prime ministerial hopefuls jostling for the prime slot, was mastered to near perfection by Surjeet.

The CPI(M) and the third front eventually came to be inexorably linked with each other, if only because of the critical role played by the veteran CPI(M) leader in the formation of an alternative anti-Congress, anti-BJP front.

Of late, talks of a re-enactment of the 1996 drama leading to the crystallisation of the short-lived United Front government seem to grow louder. The possibility of 2014 throwing up yet another splintered verdict, confounding straight numerical calculations, appears credible as the country moves towards the next general election. But what part would the CPI(M) play in the making of such a complex formation, if such a situation came to pass?

The party has lost its sheen, politically as well as ideologically. If the ideological attrition spanned decades, the loss of West Bengal felled the CPI(M) in one swoop. Besides being hobbled in its sole bastion and losing large numbers of MPs who gave the party its national heft, the CPI(M) today faces another daunting challenge: a leadership vacuum at the Centre.

The party’s present general secretary, Prakash Karat, isn’t known for his predecessor’s skills that earned Surjeet the reputation of an artful backroom politician. But that’s one part of the problem. The other void haunting the Left parties is far more serious — staying relevant in national politics, or for that matter even in Bengal, now under Mamata Banerjee.

That the need for Left intervention is more urgent than before, is not a matter of dispute. But the CPI(M)’s brand of conventional Left politics — in theory and praxis — is out of date. The mainstream Left today stands on the margins of hundreds of radical and peaceful interventions influencing policies.

The spaces of resistance vacated by the mainstream Left is now occupied by non-party Left actors. A trend peculiar not just to India but the world over — from the uprising at Tahrir Square and the Occupy Wall Street movement to the Kudankulam anti-nuclear protests and tribals’ stir against huge corporations like Posco and Vedanta. In a more complex sense, Left politics is, in fact, holding its own. Only the parties claiming vanguard leadership have lost their mooring. The CPI(M) is in the throes of an aimless drift even as hundreds of other grassroots activists have moved in with their politics of representing the poor and the disempowered.

The writer is Editor, dna of thought