Karat’s mea culpa

Communists like Catholics love to confess their sins —  moral in the case of Catholics, and ideological in the case of the communists. Self-criticism is an accepted part of the Left discourse, a form of penitence where the perpetrator admits to failures before making course corrections.

It can take extreme forms like in the Moscow trials of the 1930s which served as a prelude to the infamous Stalinist purges, and the Cultural Revolution recantations of Maoist China of the 1960s, where comrades were beaten and forced to blare out their heinous bourgeois sins. Things have not been ever so dire in India though insiders have tales of party tyranny in the 1940s and 1950s.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) general secretary Prakash Karat’s confession in the party mouthpiece People’s Democracy that the Left Front as a non-Congress, non-BJP alternative at the national level was a mistake, that it was “not a credible and viable alternative at the national level” is important. Of course, what forced him into the admission was the recent electoral defeat of the Third Front alliance, which he had so assiduously forged in the last
few months.

Karat does not, though, seem to admit to the inherent ideological contradiction in allying with the BJD, TDP and AIADMK. Naveen Patnaik’s BJD does not subscribe to ideology of any kind and he is inclined towards the free market economy which Karat opposes with a puritan’s zeal. Chandrababu Naidu has been a political chameleon — the TDP moved from the United Front in mid-1990s to the BJP-led NDA in two years. He espoused reforms when he was chief minister and now professes blatant populism to get back the post.

And Jayalalithaa did not hide her Hindutva sentiments when it suited her.

Perhaps Karat is aware of the glaring contradictions — he is much too intelligent not to be — but he feels it politically necessary to cooperate with ideological enemies to defeat the bigger menace — the Congress and the BJP. One would have expected him to say that what made the Third Front unviable was the fact that it was a gathering of inchoate forces. It is not enough to hate the Congress and the BJP. What is required is a coherent ideological alternative. A third alternative front may be a workable idea but only if there is some glue beyond opportunism. This is where the Left and especially Karat failed. This self-criticism needs to take note of that.