Over the top

by Nandini Ramachandran

The recent demolition of the West Bengal CPI (M) in Calcutta’s municipality elections brokered many fates. It has broken the left party’s stranglehold on political life within the state, a potentially fatal blow to a weakening force. In a country where some form of election is a daily occurrence, municipal elections inevitably get the short shrift. Not so here. Newspapers and pundits portend that it marks a turned tide, that 2011 assembly elections shall see the party in the bay rather than in Bengal. Writers’ Building (in Calcutta, even administration must have a booksy air) might finally see new occupation: Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress.

The party in present form is evidently just the Lady, a few trusted deputies, and her unwavering agenda of uprooting the CPI (M). One wonders how this party will cope with the delegation of government, should it be handed the spotlight. To the facile observer, Banerjee’s Didi might echo that other formidable and self-reliant Lady CM: Mayawati’s Behenji (even their honorifics collide). An important difference remains. Mayawati has had spells of power to considerably enrich herself, while Mamata is that rare mystery: an impecunious politico. She is currently Union Railway Minister, a post she has held previously, an easy route to padded bank accounts. Perhaps her restraint was just prudence: what is a ministry compared to the treasury of an entire state?  Will she stay uncorrupted by power once her crusade is accomplished? It is a wager Bengal appears willing to take.

Foreshadowing of the immanent change has been gathering for a while: the brutalities at Nandigram and Lalgarh; the clumsy break between the left alliance and the Congress in 2008 over the nuclear deal, which destroyed the former’s pretensions at national importance; the rebellion and public spat in the Kerala chapter last year; the death of the hypnotic Jyoti Basu earlier this year. Both Kerala and West Bengal, India’s two communist bastions, elect new state assemblies next year, a year that looks poised to hammer home some very unpleasant realities for the new decade.

The official left in India has been hamstrung, time and again, by the tensions involved in reconciling all-embracing revolution with too much revolution, and it has rarely emerged the stronger for it. In the ‘60s they squabbled about Maoism, in the ‘70s about Naxalism, in the ‘90s they conflated the two categories conveniently. The only coherent policy attributable to the current CPI (M) is a not-so-subtle game of playing both sides against the middle, and it has served them terribly this past five years. They are the socialist government that sold out farmers to Big Industry, paradoxically arguing against privatisation of public assets at the same time, while allied to the previous UPA regime. “Confused” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

I live with a Bengali forsworn to Mamata Banerjee, and arguably I am partisan.  Yet, at this point, even the most dyed-in-the-wool red must recognise that the government in Calcutta does little to bolster either Marxist philosophy or praxis, let alone popularity. Thirty-five years of denied democracy is a hard pill to swallow however ardently one desires social transformation; coupled with the sceptres of murdered farmers, I find it impossible to resist the conviction that our socialist experiment, like so many globally, has failed. Marx has proven over the last century to be as fallible to twisted dogma as the next dead man. That said, Indian socialism has not failed the same way, or for the same reasons, that European communism did: our “communism” has forged independently tortured paths right from its official founding in Tashkent in 1933. No rhetoric can paint Mamata Banerjee into Lech Walesa.

Everything

Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded,
black death’s wing’s overhead.
Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?

By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.

And something miraculous will come
close to the darkness and ruin,
something no-one, no-one, has known,
though we’ve longed for it since we were children.

Anna Akhmatova.

Like all things that take root in India, communism has gone native. The way out of these woods is for us to discover as well, if we are not to go the way of rudderless Eastern Europe, and jeering at a flogged ideal rarely dispels it. The more marginalised and venal the parliamentary left gets, the stronger militant factions will grow. Hannah Arendt and her descendants might choose to interpret the tendency of socialist government to implode as proof of socialism’s natural totalitarianism. I believe that it is usually institutions that rightly bear the charge of tyranny, not ideas or individuals. We stand agreed that bureaucracy and socialism are not well-mixed. The dispute lies in which part of the equation we would emphasise and which we would purge.

We shall have to recover the shreds of our integrity if we are not to give up on the project sustainable, equitable futures. As we struggle to do so, the disillusioned Indian left might be revitalised by finding more projects like this one to occupy our variegated energies.