The Hindu Business Line : A brave new Left on the horizon?

Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee riding the crest of a popular tsunami is raring to go, even if it means breaking loose from the stalwarts of the Left living in the past. The chances of a schism within the CPI(M) are very real with Mr Bhattacharjee leading a Brave New Left.

Here is a multiple-choice question: Which is the political party that is in the most perturbed state of mind after the last State Assembly elections in India? (a) The Indian National Congress; (b) The AIADMK; (c) The BJP; and (d) The Trinamool Congress. All your answers are wrong. The right answer is the CPI(M).

Ever since the Election Commission declared the results on May 11, the commentariat (a new buzzword that represents the collectivity of commentators) has been barking up the wrong tree. It is obsessed with what impact the massive win of the Left Front in West Bengal and the wresting of power from the Congress-led UDF by the Left Democratic Front in Kerala will have on the equations between the UPA Government and the Left parties at the Centre.

Peaceful co-existence

Its near-unanimous conclusion is that the Left will now exploit its victory to further tighten the screws on the Centre, and for the rest of the Parliamentary term, both the UPA and the Government will have to be submitting to their mounting pressure for survival. The thought of the Left itself undergoing the trauma of a schism and ceasing to be UPA's nemesis has occurred to nobody. Yes, mark my words the Indian political scene is going to witness an upheaval the like of which it had not seen before.

After the split in 1964, and spinning off of the Marxist-Leninist fringe, the different shades of emphasis within the Communist movement in India had settled down to a sort of peaceful coexistence.

The hair-splitting over people's democracy and parliamentary democracy, the arguments over the roles of the state, government and political power, and the debate over the relative importance of elections on the one hand and mass movements and class struggles by peasants and workers on the other lost their relevance, especially after the entente cordiale of the US and China, and the latter's cosying up to the American capitalist conglomerates in building its "market socialism".

The demise of the Soviet Union put paid to any further ambitions by stragglers of the movement to stoke the dying ideological embers. The attention of both the CPI and the CPI(M) thereafter turned towards entering into alliances with a view to influencing mainstream politics in favour of their core tenets which could be summed up as: maintaining the status quo in the public sector; ruling out downsizing of work force and undertaking of labour reforms; raising wages and salaries periodically regardless of productivity or quality; keeping prices artificially depressed; retaining subsidies; and subjecting the entry of foreign capital to strict scrutiny.

The hawks had thereby chosen to fly in the face of the fierce tornado of five revolutions taking place simultaneously in the spheres of knowledge, communications, technology, business administration and global economic integration.

Familiar chants

Enter Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee: Hitherto, he took care to ensure that his initiatives did not look like veering too far away from the party line. Outwardly, he was reassuringly uttering the familiar chants of an earlier stage of economic evolution, but in his heart of hearts he was convinced that they did not apply to an era when transfers of zillions of dollars take place at the speed of light and the impact of anything said or done reverberates round the globe eight times a single second.

Mr Jyoti Basu, as soon as he took charge in 1977, realised that West Bengal was industrially a goner unless he put a stop to the adverse trends. But he went in for mere palliatives and papering the cracks by being approachable to industrialists and coming to their help whenever sought, toning down the belligerence of a trade union here, and facilitating a wage settlement there.

Mr Bhattacharjee was known to be a maverick within the party even when he was taken into Mr Basu's first Cabinet as Minister for Information and Public Relations. In the mid-1990s he had to suffer a few years of eclipse when he had to quit the Ministry for being outspokenly critical about certain crucial aspects of CPI(M) policies.

Unlike the ad hocism of Mr Basu, Mr Bhattacharjee had a well-thought-through alternative vision on what precisely was needed to reorient the Left to an era of change management. But he was also conscious that the first pre-requisite to any effort to turn the CPI(M) and West Bengal around was to unreservedly admit past mistakes, which, in his view, were very serious.

As he told Mr Karan Thapar in an interview, India's Communists had created a bad impression about Bengal not only throughout the country but also in the wider world. Things had come to such a pass that the word "gherao" was their gift to the Oxford Dictionary. The Communists, therefore, have to change their attitude to the economy, industry, education, services, governance, democracy and political parties. If the unions too do not change their mindset, and show "work dynamism", the companies will fail and they will be without jobs.

There was no longer any sense in bearing the burden of loss-making public sector units; 56 had been restructured and after the elections, he is going to tackle the most difficult of the lot — the State electricity board and the transport corporations. Even if the unions objected, "I will still go ahead. I have my duty as Chief Minister. That must come first."

If this was heresy, here is more from what he has been saying in various forums: "This is a very competitive world. Productivity and production quality are not the responsibility of managements alone, even workers have to share it. For me, it is perform or perish... Villagers need not be confined to agriculture alone throughout their lives. They should also think about graduating from agriculture to industry. They will have to sacrifice their land for the sake of industry which will generate more employment opportunities for our youths. But at the same time, those villagers affected in the process have to be protected and rehabilitated...

"Without capitalism, you cannot bring socialism in a feudal society... In a capitalist set up like India you cannot build socialism in one part of the country and you have to accept this... I have to attract more investment... it will always be a capitalist investment and I just cannot mislead the people."

The Left Front must face the fact that it is the charisma of Mr Bhattacharjee that accounts for the impressive increase in its share of votes from 46 per cent in 2001 to more than 50 per cent in 2006, evidencing a consolidation of its hold in the rural areas in addition to a broadening appeal in urban constituencies.

The elections were not only an endorsement of his leadership and strategy, but a go-ahead signal for him to act as per his vision.

Bold deals

His bold deal with Indonesia's Salim Group for a special economic zone, a high-tech health city and a four-lane 85-km expressway has already drawn flak.

Undaunted, his Government is going ahead with a move to amend the Land Ceiling Act to locate domestic and foreign enterprises, and earmark 40,000 acres belonging to industries that have closed all over West Bengal for new projects.

The hiatus between the present "revisionism" of the Left and Mr Bhattacharjee's energetic thrusts has become so wide that the Left Front Committee Chairman, Mr Biman Bose, of the CPI(M) had to demand of the Chief Minister that he apprise the Front allies of all the important decisions of the government.

The Chief Minister riding the crest of a popular tsunami is raring to go, even if it means breaking loose from the stalwarts of the Left living in the past. The chances of a schism within the CPI(M) are very real with Mr Bhattacharjee becoming the messiah of a Brave New Left.