India needs a Left—as, perhaps, do most Indians. A romantic may pin his hopes on the Naxalites, who seek to overthrow the bourgeois order by force of arms. The realist knows this dream is a (blood-soaked) fantasy. In that case, what kind of Left must an Indian democrat hope for? Shortly after coming overground, the Nepali Maoist leader Prachanda said that ‘multi-party democracy was the political system of the twenty-first century’. This admission, or acknowledgement, has not yet come from the Indian Maoists—nor even from the CPI(M), who fight parliamentary elections, but do still somewhere believe in a one-party state controlled by themselves. It is this dogma that stopped them from joining governments at the Centre, such as those led by the Janata Dal in 1996 and by the Congress in 2004.
From the point of view of the national interest, the Left’s decision to keep away from these coalitions is undoubtedly to be deplored. For, they would have provided a much-needed stiffening to the central government. The Communist ministers would have been among the most articulate and intelligent members of the Union Cabinet, and certainly the most honest. They would have shown a commitment to maintaining communal harmony. They would have acted as a stable counterpoint to the sectarian elements in the Janata Dal, and to the corrupt allies of the Congress.
Indeed, I believe that from their own point of view as well, the decision of the Communists to stay away from central governments has been a mistake. Here was a chance to put their own pet concerns—agrarian reform, political decentralization, labour-intensive industrialization—on the national agenda. Here was an opportunity to make their talented leaders known and admired outside their bases in Kerala and West Bengal. By participating actively and creatively in government, the Communists could have become, in both senses of the word, a properly national political formation.
A modern Left must also stop playing, or replaying, the battles of the Cold War. Consider our relationship with the United States of America. The view of the CPI(M) (expressed in People’s Democracy and in the editorial pages of The Hindu) is that one must always be suspicious of American intentions and always give the Chinese government the benefit of doubt. Neither position is tenable. We should examine our relationship with both countries on a disaggregated basis. With both China and the USA, India has interests that converge and interests that conflict. What we do, or which side we take, depends on the sector, policy, controversy, or case in question.
While Marx himself was a great champion of modern technology, Indian Marxists are technophobic. Their hostility to private enterprise is combined with a suspicion of innovation in general. In the 1980s and 1990s, they resisted the computerization of banks and railways. In protecting the interests of a relatively small constituency, the organized working class, they disregarded the tens of millions of ordinary consumers who benefited from computerization.
But a modern Left must also appeal to the middle class. This class will grow further in numbers and influence in the coming decades. Most middle-class people are revolted by the company kept by the leaders of the major parties, by their proximity to crooks and moneybags. Many are further disenchanted with the sycophantic tendencies of the Congress; many others detest the bigotry of the BJP. But they have nowhere else to go. Those disgusted by the First Family vote by default for the BJP; those who cannot abide Hindutva vote reluctantly for the Congress. If the Left can modernize, and present itself as a party of reform, a party that is inclusive and outward looking, a party committed to social welfare but not opposed to economic growth, and yet (or also) a party whose leaders are honest and hardworking, it could capture a vote bank that is far more numerous than represented by its own current special interest, the organized working class.
Finally, the CPI(M) must abandon the Leninist dogma that it alone understands and represents the interests of the poor and the excluded. This dogma has set them in opposition to activist groups that work outside the party’s framework. In the 1980s, the CPI(M) made the foolish (and possibly tragic) mistake of dismissing Indian environmentalists as reactionary and anti-progress. I remember a CPI(M) friend telling me that the Chipko movement had to be opposed since it was against the working class. The felling of the Himalayan forests was, in his view, objectively necessary to create the industrial proletariat that would lead the revolution. That deforestation economically ruined hill peasants, or that it caused floods which destroyed villages in the plains, was of no matter to him.
The environmentalism of Chipko and the Narmada Bachao Andolan is an environmentalism of the poor. It defends the rights to livelihood of peasants, artisans, pastoralists, fisherfolk and tribals. It has also outlined sustainable alternatives to development practices that deplete and destroy the basis of human life on earth. Yet the CPI(M) opposed this environmentalism of the poor; it also stood apart from groups such as the Self Employed Women’s Association, which have enhanced the dignity and economic security of women working in the informal sector.
In 1985, the current general secretary of the CPI(M) published an extraordinary attack on these civil society groups, calling them fronts for American imperialism. The polemic had its roots in an ideology whose twin, complementary, attributes are certitude and paranoia—only the Party knows the Truth, and anything undertaken outside the Party’s auspices must necessarily be False. Farcical in all situations, the attitude is especially so in India, a land so varied and diverse that no single ideology or doctrine can contain or explain it.
These dogmas have cost the party dearly, and inhibited its expansion into parts of India and among social groups whose predicament cannot be adequately understood through the lens of a philosophy developed in another continent in another century. And they have driven away the idealistic youth, who wish to work with and for the poor, but currently see greater possibility of realizing this hope in the company of Ela Bhatt and Medha Patkar, rather than under the leadership of Prakash Karat and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.
V
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the critic George Steiner wrote that this left a ‘black hole in the history of hope’. Steiner was by no means a Marxist, but he had some appreciation of what that ideology had meant to the best and brightest of his generation. I have myself been, for some thirty years now, an anthropologist among the Marxists. I arrived in Kolkata in 1980, shortly after the CPI(M) came to power. I stayed six years in that city, and still write a column for the Telegraph. I know the work of the Marxist activists of Kerala reasonably well, and know, probably too well, the work of the Marxist intellectuals of the Jawaharlal Nehru University.
I am an unaffiliated liberal by choice, and a student of Marxism by habit. How must I view the defeat of the CPI(M) in Kerala and, especially its rout in West Bengal? It is certainly a defeat for dogmatism and close-mindedness. I suppose that, as a critic of that dogmatism and close-mindedness, I should feel vindicated and even triumphant. I know that they had to go. Thirty-four years in power was too long. But one must not be tempted to write an epitaph. In Kerala, they will be back in five years. In West Bengal, the bhadralok intelligentsia were nostalgic about them after five months of Mamata Banerjee assuming office as chief minister.
Will their recent electoral defeats make the cadres and leaders of the CPI(M) vengeful and even more dogmatic? Or will it chasten them, such that they look inwardly, at the prejudices which have bound and damaged them for so long now? Can they become modern and, in all senses of the word, democratic?
Karl Marx himself welcomed and celebrated change, perhaps excessively and uncritically. For, under capitalism and even feudalism, human beings fashioned ideas and institutions whose value and relevance transcends those modes of production. To construct a more just social order it is not necessary that all that is solid must melt into air. But some things must change. For all their talk of transforming and shattering the system, however, Marxists—and more particularly Marxist-Leninists—are conservative in their attachment to past ideas and ideologies. To quote Alasdair MacIntyre again: ‘Originally a negative, sceptical, and subve
rsive doctrine in liberal society, Marxism acquired, as it became a positive doctrine, precisely that kind of attachment to its own categories which it had already diagnosed in liberal theory as one of the sources of liberalism’s inability to view society except through the distorting lens of its own categories.’
In terms of its attachment to its own categories, Communism worldwide, and in India too, has been deeply conservative. A modern, democratic, and even properly Indian Marxism, needs a strong dose of robust revisionism. Who or where will it come from? Who, now, will step up to be the Indian Eduardo Bernstein (who abandoned the dogma of one-party dominance in Germany), the Indian Deng Xiaoping (who embraced the market in China) or the Indian Santiago Carrillo (who spoke in favour of multi-party democracy, the mixed economy, an independent foreign policy, cultural pluralism, and the autonomy of intellectual work—all at once)?
In the past, Indian Marxists have been chastised for their dependence on foreigners. The party congresses of the CPI(M) still feature portraits of four men—Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, that is to say, two nineteenth-century German intellectuals with two twentieth-century Russian autocrats. No women, nor, more crucially, no Indians. In the 1960s, the Naxalites insisted that ‘China’s Chairman is our Chairman’. Their descendants, who now control a large swathe of hill and forest in central India, still call themselves the Communist Party of India (Maoist).
It may be too much to hope that the CPI(M) shall replace their foreign icons with (shall we say) Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar. Those thinkers have been appropriated by other parties anyway. What they can and should do, if they wish to renew their party and make it a force in Indian politics again, is to retain Marx (who was undoubtedly a thinker of genius), and find ways of incorporating the ideas, if not the images, of socialist thinkers who are far more relevant to India today than Lenin and Stalin.
The revisionism that is now called for would also mean, if not a formal burial, at least an unspoken disavowal, of the desi leaders who took them along those self-destructive paths in 1948, 1977, 1996, 2004, etc. I note that the Delhi headquarters of CITU, the party’s trade union, is named after B.T. Ranadive. I also note that the Communist head of the BSNL employees union writes that ‘Com. BTR was one of the brilliant theoreticians as well as a mass leader of the toiling masses who analysed each and every situation critically and stood like a rock against all attacks from the ruling classes.’
The word that sticks and stands out here is ‘critically’. Piety and ancestor worship may demand it, but plain English and the facts of history suggest that this allegedly brilliant man tended to analyse complex political situations mechanically. In 1948 he thought he would become the Indian Mao, and come to power via the barrel of a gun; in 1978 he fancied himself as the Indian Lenin, who would vanquish the renegades and heretics. The first time, he disregarded the social history of his own country; the second time, he disregarded the commitment of his compatriots to incremental reform under the conditions of multi-party democracy. Had the party the wisdom and the courage to support P.C. Joshi after Independence, instead of taking the adventurist line advocated by B.T. Ranadive, by now the Communists would not be known for their insularity, both geographical and intellectual, but for having a visible and largely beneficial presence in India as a whole. Had Ranadive himself accepted and endorsed the sagacious advice offered to Communists by Santiago Carrillo in the late 1970s, he would have been thirty years behind the Indian Constitution. But he might have saved his party from thirty mostly wasted years nevertheless.
Postscript: The above essay was published (under a different title) in the June 2011 issue of Caravan magazine. It prompted a long rejoinder by the general secretary of the CPI (M), Prakash Karat, which was published in the November issue of Caravan. It was gracious of Karat to respond to a writer he characterized (not inaccurately) as a ‘bourgeois liberal’. It was also gratifying to see that, unlike the overwhelming majority of Indian public figures, Karat acknowledged some of his party’s mistakes, as in the lack of women in top positions in the Communist movement, the excessively long time that Marxists took to understand that environmental degradation in India affects the poor, and the insensitive and arrogant manner in which land was acquired for industry in West Bengal.
On the other hand, Karat defended his party’s decision not to participate in coalition governments at the Centre. He claimed that his party does not have a doctrinal opposition to coalitions, adducing the ‘Left Fronts’ in Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal. However, in those fronts the CPI(M) was in a position of dominance, with the smaller parties in the alliance allotted minor ministries and having little say in government policy. The CPI(M) does not join coalitions where it is not Big Brother—which is why it stayed away from multi-party governments at the Centre in 1996 and 2004.
The decision, both times, cost the party, and perhaps cost the people of India too. Back in 1977, the socialist Madhu Dandavate, after decades in Opposition, decided to join the first non-Congress Government in New Delhi. Allotted the railway ministry, he added two inches of foam to the hard, wooden sleepers of third-class compartments. He also introduced the computerization of railway bookings. These two innovations made railway travel more bearable for the labouring poor as well as for the middle class. In 1979, Dandavate had to demit office; but in two years he had perhaps done more for the ordinary citizen of India than any other Union minister past or present. Who is to say that if some likewise intelligent, honest, and public-spirited leaders of the CPI(M) had joined the Union Cabinet in 1996 or 2004, they would not have brought about reforms that might have enhanced human dignity and diminished social suffering?
Another example of the good that leftists can do while collaborating with ‘bourgeois’ parties in government comes from Prakash Karat’s own state of Kerala. In his response to my essay, Karat claimed that ‘the land reforms [in Kerala] that Guha mentions would not have been possible without the first Communist ministry headed by the “Stalinist” EMS [Namboodiripad]’. In fact, these land reforms were taken further and deeper by a later government, which governed Kerala between 1969 and 1975, and which had as its constituents the Congress, the Communist Party of India, and some smaller parties. The government was led by the outstanding CPI leader C. Achutha Menon. This multi-party government (with a significant ‘bourgeois’ component) is widely acknowledged to be the best that Kerala has had.
In his response to my essay, Karat complained that I ‘idealize the bourgeois democratic system’. In fact, I am a sceptic and anti-utopian, who does not idealize anything or anyone (not even Sachin Tendulkar). However, my historical studies have made me keenly aware of the deficiencies, in theory and especially in practice, of left-wing as well as right-wing alternatives to liberalism. Hence my simultaneous aversion to Hindutva and to Maoism. To be sure, liberal regimes are subject to corrosion and corruption from within, as is certainly the case with the Congress-led central government today. What is needed is a renewal of liberalism, its infusion (or re-infusion) with democratic ideals, not its abandonment. I am a liberal who inclines (slightly) to the left, hence my admiration for democratic socialists like Madhu Dandavate and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and hence my desire, or hope, that the CPI(M) will finally follow a path laid down by the German Marxist Eduard Bernstein more than a century ago, when he rejected armed revolution in favour of incremental social change by using the instruments of constitutional democracy. Bernstein was vilified by Lenin, but he was admired by left-wing democrats in France, England, and Scandinavia, who, in the succeeding decades, built socialist movements and welfare states that helped moderate the inequalities created by unbridled capitalism without sacrificing personal freedoms and individual liberties.
Chapter Five
The Professor and the Protester
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I
The Republic of India has a billion (and more) citizens who, at any given time, are involved in a thousand (and more) controversies. Knowing which controversy is the most significant is a
lways hard, and often impossible, to judge. Even so, we can be fairly certain that 2011 will go down in Indian history as the year of the Great Lokpal Debate, just as 1962 was the year of the war with China, 1975 the year of the Emergency, 1991 the year the licence-permit-quota-raj was first undermined, and 1992 the year the Babri Masjid was demolished.
Vigorous arguments still rage on the causes and consequences of the China war, the Emergency, economic liberalization, and the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. How then does one judge the import of events as they are still unfolding? It may be decades before a proper historical judgement is passed on the characters and events in the Great Lokpal Debate. What follows is very much a provisional, interim assessment. It focuses on two principal actors: the Cambridge-and-Oxford-educated, former university professor, Manmohan Singh; and the high school dropout and one-time army jawan, Anna Hazare. Through what Dr Singh did and did not do, and Mr Hazare did and did not say, I explore the implications for Indian democracy of the debate over a new all-purpose ombudsman for the nation.
II
Soon after the General Elections of 2004, I heard a sociologist and an economist exchange stories about the new prime minister. Back in the early 1990s, the sociologist was asked to write a recommendation for one of Manmohan Singh’s daughters. Since he knew (and admired) her work, he agreed readily. When the young lady’s CV reached him, he found that she had gone to some considerable trouble to hide the fact that her father was finance minister of India. She was staying with her parents in their large Lutyens bungalow; yet had chosen to use as her mailing address a friend’s flat in East Delhi.