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LEFT FRONT Clutching the Hand By promising support to a secular government, Congress-only if necessary, the Left Front hopes again to wag the dog. By Sumit Mitra The relations between the Congress and the Indian communists over the years have flown like a soap opera -- love, betrayal, love again. In the '60s, a section of the communists led by the late S.A. Dange fawned on Jawaharlal Nehru and, later, Indira Gandhi, while the other section treated the Congress as an enemy. That contradiction, widened by divergent perceptions of the 1962 Sino-Indian war, led to the 1964 split in the communist party. The CPI(M), led by the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad, condemned Dange's CPI as the tail of the Congress. But Dangeites replied that "the tail will wag the dog". On the contrary, as later events showed, it is the "dog" that wagged the "tail". And that too so furiously that the CPI, after supporting the Congress during the Emergency, couldn't take it any more and accepted the CPI(M)'s leadership in the stridently anti-Congress Left Front, with two other junior partners, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP). In nearly two decades following the post-Emergency rout of the Congress in 1977, being anti-Congress earned the Left Front dividends in the three states where the leftists had traditional bases -- West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. The front has never lost power in West Bengal since then and has ruled Kerala for eight and Tripura for 17 years. But permanence in relations is not the hallmark of a soap opera. After the 1996 elections, when the Congress appeared to have lost the fulcrum of the Indian electorate and the BJP was poised to occupy the middle ground vacated by it, the CPI(M) began tilting towards the Congress. Other leftists followed suit, though with some hesitation. Even the CPI(M) had initial doubts. After the 1996 polls, Jyoti Basu made a bid for prime ministership with Congress support. He would have made it but for opposition within the party's powerful Central Committee. Basu later called it a "historic blunder". Now, at least for the CPI(M) and the CPI, the doubting phase is over. CPI(M) General Secretary H.S. Surjeet, a tireless campaigner for rallying all "secular" parties behind the Congress, says that though the Congress and the BJP are both "bourgeois-landlord parties", there is a "difference". Quoting from the communists' ideological bush-lore, he calls the BJP a party of "further right" and thus deserving to be opposed with the help of the Congress. So the Indian left has turned a full circle and reverted to the Dange philosophy. With little cost in its main catchment area of West Bengal where the Congress, having won just a single seat and polled only 15 per cent of the votes in the 1998 general elections, seems headed for extinction. By promising to support a secular government, Congress-only if necessary, the Left Front hopes again to wag the dog, especially since the beast has shrunk on the national scale to a waggable size. |
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