My article in Statesman today. The print edition carries my byline but the online doesn't put my name. This is a critique of Draft Political Resolution for the CPI(M)'s 19th Congress, beginning on 29 March. 08
Irony of recent history 19 Mar 08 (http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=195840)
The CPI-M's draft political resolution (DPR) for its ensuing 19th Congress (Coimbatore, 29 March-3 April 2008) has hailed China's "rapid economic growth" as "unprecedented". "No other country after the Second World War has witnessed such sustained rapid economic development. The influence of China as a major power is felt not only in the Asia Pacific region, but also extends to Africa and Latin America," it asserted. The irony of history is that the same day the Washington Post carried a news item on how Chinese farmers' protests against the land acquisition policy are escalating. Over 50,000 farmers have, despite the curbs on any form of dissent, agitated in China during the last three years, according to official reports.
The DPR casually referred to the flip side of reform in China ~ "growing inequalities, income-wise, region-wise and between urban and rural areas" ~ but expressed satisfaction over the Communist Party of China's "suggested steps to tackle them" at its 17th Congress held in October. According to a commentary in the Post by Edward Cody, "seeds of revolt were sown at a meeting hall in Changchunling village on 19 December last near the frigid, snow-covered soybean fields clinging to the Russian border. Challenging the Communist state's neo-agrarian policy, farmers wanted an assertion of 'the key component of the Marxist-Leninist ideology to change: redistribution of land rights'." Little wonder then, that within a few weeks the message spread over to half a dozen other farming areas. Everywhere the aggrieved tillers raised "fundamental ideological questions for a government that still describes itself as Marxist-Leninist after 30 years of economic reforms," wrote Cody. Indeed, some 250,000 acres were taken over in the 1990s by local bureaucrats for sale to private agriculture companies.
What has been happening in India ~ Kalinganagar in Orissa, Raigad in Maharashtra, Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Singur and, abortively, Nandigram, in West Bengal — is largely similar. The roundabout way in which about 1000 acres of lands was transferred to Tata Motors via the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation Limited, a state government undertaking under a deceptive tag — acquisition for "public purpose" under the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 reflects the colonial hangover of CPI-M; or worse, its utilitarian use of colonial-era legislation to further its own ends.
"Communists" in power are expected to rewrite the statute in sync with a sovereign and pro-people tone. Instead, official Communists in West Bengal, have embarked on an anti-people path for the greater glory of the CPI-M's honeymoon with "capitalism". The DPR is silent about the Party's new-found bonhomie with big business against the interests of small, marginal and landless peasants. The 18,774-word document has no dearth of criticism of neo-liberal capitalism pursued by the UPA government and the Union government comes in for quite a bashing for submitting to an International Monetary Fund and World Bank prescription for globalisation. But the capitalist path today is bound to be of a neo-liberal variant. It is not that CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat or second-in-command Sitaram Yechury do not understand the plain truth. But their commitment to defending Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and others who carry on the late Anil Biswas' creative thesis ~ "(capitalist) development is a form of class struggle" ~ is complete!
Now, with a large chunk of intellectuals — fellow-travellers disillusioned with the CPI-M for this drift — uneasy with the Marxists' new formulation, card-flaunting economist Prabhat Patnaik has been entrusted with the task of defending the party's argument for capitalism. Forget the deceptive intent ~ that to defend capitalism is to suggest a disconnect between the party strategy (people's democratic revolution or socialist revolution) and tactics (supporting the Congress at the Centre by compromising on the capitalist path which according to the CPI-M party programme is the root cause of poverty, unemployment et al). The JNU academic, in parroting the nonagenarian Politburo member Jyoti Basu that a people's democratic revolution is on the "agenda" of the CPI-M is only adding to the confusion. Naturally, Patnaik discovers "malicious attempts" to confuse all about the CPI-M among younger journalists who focus on the party's surrender to capitalism asserting that this error is not committed by "senior" perhaps tamer scribes. Sumanta Banerjee, a Left ideologue among veteran journalists in India, wrote a scathing critique of the CPI-M in EPW (26 Jan-1 February 2008) headlined Goodbye Socialism. On the rightward shift in West Bengal, he wrote: "The one-point agenda of industrialisation by putting only the market in command took centre stage, reaffirming the self-righteous approach of the party leadership. In fact, its refusal to listen to suggestions of substitute options for development was evident much earlier when it set its goons on Medha Patkar and other social activists who opposed the Singur and Nandigram model." But Patnaik too ~ like other run-of-the-mill Marxist leaders ~ believes that to criticise the CPI-M is to hatch a conspiracy against the Left Front government!
There is a similarity in the pattern of revolt in West Bengal and China. Both are against questionable land acquisition. CPI-M's long-term commitment to a socialist order via people's democratic revolution is buried in a recycle bin. It may be pertinent to recall an essay on peasant protests in 19th century Bengal by history scholar Nandini Sen in which it is mentioned that an editorial in the journal Somprakash, a leading fortnightly carrying forward the message of the Bengal Renaissance, the "similarity between the Chartist Movement in England and peasant protests of Bengal" was highlighted: "Both were against injustice". Communist historian Narahari Kaviraj found in the Somprakash editorial an element of internationalism of the 19th century Bengal Renaissance.
The famous slogan of the Communist Manifesto — "workers of the world unite" (i.e. proletarian internationalism) was discarded by the CPC from its lexicon nearly three decades back. The Communist Party of the erstwhile Soviet Union is dead. Lenin's extended slogan, "workers and oppressed peoples unite" keeping in mind the large peasant masses in the colonies has met the same fate. And the red flags of official Marxists are now pathetically pink. Their hammer-and-sickle prints are "strangely decontextualised" as representative of forces of revolution. As Sumana Roy, who teaches humanities at Jalpaiguri Engineering College, put it, Nandigram witnessed "a subculture of coercion, perfected from a fledgling cottage industry to a fine craft over the 30 years of Communist rule in Bengal". And poverty is growing, relatively, in Kerala too, suggests MA Oommen in a paper on the "Kerala model" presented at the University of Saskatchewan in June 2007. Reduction in poverty between pre-reform and the on-going reform period was more impressive in Himachal Pradesh than in Kerala. Subalterns are sandwiched in both Kerala and West Bengal. These are the facts.
Yet, CPI-M big shots find their role model in Deng Xiaoping who said: "Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious." Five-star communists who call the shots at AKG Bhavan, the CPI-M's national headquarters in New Delhi, dish out "kitchen sink revolutions" on an alibi that "times change". And what was that about the more times change, the more they remain the same...
(The author is a freelance contributor)
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