Why the Left fails — Prakash Karat’s late realisation

Ahead of its 24th party congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) was embroiled in a controversy over the characterisation of the current regime and the Indian State in terms of fascism. Interim leader Prakash Karat attempted to provide answers to a series of issues plaguing the party in an interview that flagged the important issues of mobilisation and religion, which deserves a close examination.

There is no doubt that the CPI(M) has been reduced countrywide to electoral insignificance. It is still arguable what the larger political location of the party is and what kind of contribution it can make to shaping public discussions on various issues, and, therefore, build the basis for popular mobilisation and political action. The Left has backed itself into a corner and rendered itself irrelevant.

Before we get to what Karat said, let us distinguish between three levels of politics: ideology, movement, and elections. Karat admitted in the interview, a little too late in the day, that neither his CPI(M)’s mass base nor electoral strength had increased. Its ‘independent strength’, a curious formulation, had not grown. But the causes of this decline that Karat identified begs several questions, because it is sorely disingenuous.

The CPI(M), he said, did not build support ‘through elections’, meaning, one supposes, electoral mobilisation, ‘but by working among the people…launching struggles and conducting movements’. The party and trade unions ‘successfully bring them into the struggle but fail to consolidate this into political influence’. He said the party was failing to politicise the people ‘coming to us’.

If this is the analysis of Karat, one of the foremost strategists and ‘ideologues’ of the CPI(M), one not only starts to understand why the party has suffered a tremendous decline — electorally, politically, and ideologically — but also why the portent for the Left is calamitous.

The CPI(M) came to power in West Bengal because of sustained work among the people in the 1960s and 1970s, often in the face of severe repression. It was a time when the Left could genuinely call itself a major force nationally, with pockets of influence in Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh’s industrial belt, and elsewhere. These remained through the 1980s, but started slipping out of its grasp in the 1990s.

The key reason for this was that the CPI(M), as the flag-bearer of the mainstream Left, gradually transformed itself into an election-focused machine. The laboratory for this was West Bengal, where various strategies were adopted to make the state electorally impregnable. These strategies had very little to do with what Karat has described in his interview. The only point on which he is spot on is the failure of the CPI(M) to politicise the people, but this was because of a lack of volition rather than inadvertence.

We must understand the last four decades of the CPI(M)’s history in the context of its precipitous decline, especially in West Bengal. It was a period of stasis in terms of mobilisation, undergirded by a narrow kind of institutional focus, as was evidenced by the decline in the importance of the peasant and worker fronts in the party’s scheme of things.

Equally, as was evidenced by Karat’s late admission in the interview, was the inability of the CPI(M) to reconcile the realities of Indian society with its mechanistic ideological positions. This was based on an intellectually lazy engagement with what the party saw as ‘theory’.

In the interview, Karat says that his party must work among believers to convince them that it is not ‘fighting their religious beliefs’ but is ‘against those using the religious beliefs for politics’. He referenced the increased religiosity in society, saying it could not be ignored now.

There may be some ‘increased religiosity’, but Indian society has always been a deeply religious one, and the Left failed to engage with it on its own terms, relying too often on shibboleths and dogma instead of deep and sustained analysis.

Karat’s shift in stance comes too late in the day, even though the issue of religion has been flagged in the party in the past, as by the late Subhas Chakraborty in 2006. The CPI(M)’s late engagement with the role of caste in Indian society has also proved costly.

It might be too late, but it is a good sign that Karat has recognised the CPI(M)’s failure to mobilise effectively. What the last 15 years show is that unlike the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the CPI(M) has fallen prey to the malaise of becoming quiescent when out of power.

Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.