In a minor replay of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the Indian media have been gloating at the defeat of the Left
Front in West Bengal especially and have repeatedly suggested that this
signals the ‘end of the left in India’. Even at the best of times our
news channels tend to avoid serious analyses of the underlying trends
within the country, since they have transformed the news itself into a
form of entertainment on models surpassed only by the US news networks.
For its part, the CPI(M) leadership has been at pains
to minimise the significance of the defeat (in Bengal especially) and
said that it would be wrong to write off the left. For them ‘the left’
means the Left Fronts in Bengal and Kerala and, of course, chiefly the
CPI(M) itself. They stress the fact that they still retain a
considerable vote share, just over 40 per cent in West Bengal for
example, and there is indeed some truth in this claim.
We the undersigned beg to differ sharply from both
the positions stated above. To begin with, the left in India is not
the left parties alone and therefore the defeat of the left parties does
not mean the defeat of the left. The left in India has never been
reducible to these large parliamentary fronts and party machines, much
less to the groups embattled in the forests of India, but has always
been a much wider spectrum of organisations, movements and forms of
struggle that range from the hundreds of left-wing trade unions that
exist in the country in all the major industrial centres, unions that
are essentially independent of party control and seeking today to form a
national federation, down to the dozens of popular campaigns and the
organisations connected with them.
These campaigns have fought consistently on issues
such as displacement at major sites like the Koel-Karo dam, the Baliapal
missile range, the Hirakud dam, the Sardar Sarovar project, etc and
there has been and continues to be mass opposition to the forced
acquisition of land by industrial capital (POSCO, Vedanta, the Jindals,
Tatas, Ambanis and so on) in different parts of the country. There have
also been militant resistance movements to SEZs, most notably in Bengal
itself (at Nandigram and Singur).
There have been grass-roots campaigns for the Right
to Information and for rural employment schemes. There have been
movements and campaigns against communal violence and for justice for
the victims of the violence that politicians have repeatedly instigated,
notably the horrific massacres in 1984 (Delhi), 2002 (Gujarat) and 2008
(Kandhamal in Orissa). There have been movements of resistance to the
hideous injustices and violence of the caste system; to the oppression
of women; to homophobia; and against the forcing of millions of children
into wage slavery. There has been a strong culture of human rights
organisations in India and fearless investigations into the atrocities
committed at all ends of the political spectrum. There are many
cultural and political groups that exist that have never identified or
associated with the politics and the peculiar left traditions of the
CPI(M) that are still largely moulded by the discredited legacies of
Stalinism.
We feel that the defeat of the parliamentary left
should mean space for a stronger left movement, a ‘new left’ if you
like, that reflects the aspirations of the mass of people more
creatively, with more imagination and greater integrity. There is too
much deprivation and misery in the country for the media or the middle
classes to seriously be able to delude themselves into thinking that
popular resistance will cease with the defeat of the Left Fronts. As
long as ordinary people are subjected to violence, to oppression and the
most appalling poverty, as long as they are denied homes, health
services, proper nourishment, decent jobs, denied land for survival, and
denied social, political and sexual equality, there will be
resistance and opposition. Indians will not settle down passively into
the dream images purveyed by TV advertisements, and with the massive
depletion of public policy in areas like health and employment they are
certainly not about to become one big smiling middle-class family.
The reality is that dispossession continues on a
large scale; the culture of communal hatred, violence and conspiracy
still thrives in the background, waiting to strike again; and large
parts of the country are under military occupation. Police brutality
continues unabated, lakhs of court cases lie unattended, thousands of
people remain in jail as under-trial prisoners and hundreds of victims
of caste and communal violence wait hopelessly for justice. Communal,
caste and sexual bias is still endemic at various places in the state
apparatus. And by all the social indicators, India remains one of the
worst performing countries in the world.
So it is premature to ‘write off’ the left but
not because the Left Front has retained substantial vote shares in
Kerala and Bengal. Votes have never been a real marker of the strength
of a political movement and its culture. Indeed the Left Front parties
now have a historic opportunity to transform themselves, starting with a
conscious effort to introduce more democracy in their ranks and a
culture of open debate. Whether their leaderships want such a radical
overhaul is doubtful, since even the elementary requirement of
accountability for the recent debacle is currently being evaded.
However, regardless of their evolution, it is clear
that as long as Indian democracy survives and survives in its broken
state as a system unable to nourish the mass of its population or live
without violence and the subjugation of whole communities, the left
outside Parliament, the left as a culture of democracy and resistance, a
network of movements and organisations, and a new, more vigorous set of
campaigns, will continue to flourish. A younger, more radical
generation will undoubtedly be attracted to it and to its values of
solidarity, equality, freedom and opposition to capitalism both in India
and worldwide.