April 27, 1998

Marxists are caught in a nutcracker on the question of alliance with the Congress, as the Kerala group opposes the West Bengal prescription.

By Javed M Ansari

In one of his last articles in Deshabhimani, the CPI(M) party organ in Kerala, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the late Marxist ideologue, described the Congress and the BJP as "two sides of a counterfeit coin". The definitive statement notwithstanding, the late EMS' legatees in the CPI(M) find themselves divided on whether to align with the Congress to thwart the BJP, or to stay equidistant and wage a lonely battle against both. The problem is far from an abstruse Marxian dialectic. In the two left-ruled states of Kerala and Tripura, the BJP is nowhere within range in which it can aim for power; the Congress is still the main challenger. In West Bengal, however, the BJP and its ally, Trinamool Congress, have unleashed an electoral tornado, uprooting the CPI(M) from some of its traditional bastions and reducing the Congress to a distant third position. That puts the avowed champions of the proletariat in a bind. While one section seeks a tactical alliance with the Congress, the other half would like to put both the Congress and the BJP in the rogues' gallery.

The issue was hotly debated at the meeting of the party's politburo, the apex 15-member body (two seats are vacant after the death of EMS and Sunil Moitra), on April 11-12 and the 80-member Central Committee, which met later in the week. The debate is inconclusive till now as, in a communist set-up, larger policy issues can only be settled by delegates at the party congress, held at three-year intervals. The party congress that was scheduled for February this year had to be postponed because of the Lok Sabha polls. It has been rescheduled for the year-end. The delegates are chosen during intra-party elections at the state conferences, held weeks before the party congress. The conference of the largest state unit, West Bengal, hasn't yet been held, leaving a question mark on the mood of the party. However, those who can read the tea leaves of Marxist politics think that the "Bengal line" of wooing the Congress may get rejected, though by a narrow margin.

Significantly, an ambivalence regarding relationship with the Congress has dogged the party since May 1996, when there was a keen contest within the Central Committee on the issue of whether West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu should accept the United Front offer of prime ministership with Congress support. The resolution was finally defeated by a margin of just one vote. The party had then ideologically padded up the debate, attempting to pass it off as a conflict over the interpretation of Marxism. But the real contradiction in 1996, and even today, is between the divergent Marxist views of the Congress from Calcutta and Thiruvananthapuram. In other words, it is a policy duel between Basu and Kerala Chief Minister E.K. Nayanar, with party general secretary H.S. Surjeet clearly tilted in favour of an understanding with the Congress.

At last week's politburo meeting, Basu's opponents were unusually blunt in warning him against a friendly strategy with regard to the Congress. His plan for a ground-level understanding with the Congress in the West Bengal panchayat elections in May was reportedly dismissed, with the politburo urging him to firm up seat adjustments with the RSP, CPI and the Forward Bloc (FB). The RSP and the FB have already expressed their strong disapproval of an understanding with the Congress. According to an informed source, the party's priority is to "unite the Left Front". Basu, famous for his composure and measured expression, reportedly lost his cool on several occasions and even stayed away from the second half of the deliberations. The first session was marked by bitter exchanges between the factions, with Basu being accused of having overstressed -- in the poll campaign -- the chances of his becoming the prime minister. Since that wasn't possible without Congress support, argued his critics, it was as good, or as bad, as making a prior declaration of alliance with the Congress. The pro-Basu camp reportedly snapped back at Nayanar, pointing at his "brazenly pro-communal" remark of calling the Muslim-majority district of Malappuram a "mini-Pakistan". There were also acid remarks from the pro-Basu camp aimed at V.S. Achutanandan, party's Kerala strongman and politburo member, for allegedly alienating the state's Latin Catholic community. The Politburo meeting reportedly witnessed bitter exchanges, even on the desirability of Marxist chief ministers meeting Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee "without a pressing need". While Basu has avoided meeting Vajpayee, Nayanar promptly got an audience with him. Earlier, Manik Sarkar, the newly elected Marxist chief minister of Tripura, had met the prime minister.

In the politburo, those opposed to a handshaking relationship with the Congress seem to outnumber the pro-Congress leaders by seven to four (see box), with two members, West Bengal party chief Sailen Dasgupta and Tamil Nadu leader P. Ramachandran, sitting on the fence. Interestingly, most members from Kerala are united in their opposition to the Congress even though there are fissures in the party unit, notably between Achutanandan and leaders of the party's central trade union organisation, CITU. On the issue of opposition to the Congress, both Achutanandan and CITU president E. Balanandan are on the same side of the barricade.

The unity of the Kerala group on its shared hostility to the Congress is curious because despite dubbing the Congress and the BJP as equal evils in his last article, EMS also wrote: "To defeat the BJP ... the left parties will have to cooperate with the Congress". The state's Marxist leaders swear by the late party chief. Nayanar sobbed inconsolably at EMS' funeral meeting last month. However, the state party has not quite accepted the departed leader's prescription of a tactical alliance with the Congress. On the other hand, it fears that the party's West Bengal unit may harm the overall interest of the left forces by leaning too close to the Congress. A party MP from Kerala says on condition of anonymity that "in these days of quick dissemination of information", the spectacle of a Congress-CPI(M) unity in distant Bengal may take no time to "impact on voter- behaviour in Kerala".

However, regardless of the differences over an alliance with the Congress, the party is also at pains to explain to the cadres the underlying reasons for its growing marginalisation in Indian politics. Its vote-share in the general elections is on a downward slope -- from 6.16 per cent in 1991 to 6.12 per cent in 1996 and now 5.18 per cent. Its number of seats in the Lok Sabha has stagnated at 32 in the past two elections. It hasn't won a single seat in the state capitals of West Bengal and Kerala. Even in the West Bengal countryside, where it had built a seemingly impregnable fortress over the decades because of drastic land reforms, its hold has started slipping. Even Surjeet admits that the party was not quite able to cope with "the changing class composition of the electorate, notably in the cities".

While Surjeet and Basu are both leaders of a fading era of Marxian strategy that plays one "bourgeois" camp against another (read the BJP and the Congress), there are many new members who demand that the party should recapture lost ground and plan future alliances with other parties. In the party congress, the leaders may have to answer a lot of questions, and the stridency of the questions will depend on the number of new delegates who are churned up through the party's internal democracy. In the early days, the 'democratic centralism' of the Marxists was a mere facade to muffle uncomfortable questions. But the gentle breeze of glasnost is rippling even through the conservative bureaucracy of the CPI(M), making it obligatory for leaders to at least explain their failures.

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