“The important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]….Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
India is all set for yet another Lok Sabha election in three to four month with the tenure of current NDA government coming to an end by May 2019. Political Parties have already started oiling their campaign machinery to lock their horns in one of the most intense electoral battles to date. Even as various regional parties are trying to play a major role in the national spectrum with the proposed ‘Maha-Gathbandhan’ or simply Modi bashing, there still needs to be an investigation on the prospects of the ‘Left’ which is staring into an abyss of irrelevance in today’s Indian politics.
How to explain the free fall of left wing politics in India from a very dominant position post-Independence or rather the downsizing of its scale from Communist Party of India to Communist Party of ‘Kerala’ (the only state where the party still has any influence; same with CPI (M) also)? Perhaps the most relevant point to be noted is that communist party or its affiliates (students organisations, trade unions) never tried to include ‘Indian-ness’ in its agenda. It can be best explained with the example of a local office of the Communist party – where the portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Mao are placed in the ascending order of who killed the most number of people during their regime, which can perfectly explain the psyche of political murderers of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura.
Another aspect is that the leaders of the Communist party over a period of time metamorphosed to the very bourgeoisies they reviled (sarcastically presented by George Orwell in Animal Farm) – unable to sense the erosion of the soil under their feet, debating about everything under the sun and moon (with their intellectual arrogance) other than their own ideology.
Going through the electoral numbers, the Left Front had 43 seats in 2004 Lok Sabha elections which diminished to a mere 9 seats in 2014 (5 from Kerala, 2 from Bengal and 2 from Tripura). The Communist parties cannot even think of getting seats from Bengal and Tripura in their wildest dreams as they have since ceded the ground in these states to various other parties including the BJP and TMC. So the last oasis that they can rely on is Kerala, where the Left Front makes little sense by fighting The Congress at the state level and joining hands with the same party at the national level.
The prospects of re-emerging is bleak for the Left who are rejected by the middle class, workers and the youth since they have no alternative economic model to present and would rather just criticise the government of the day. Communism has managed to survive in India for all these decades banking on the Indian version of ‘Agit-prop’ which somehow managed to make people believe that communism can rain carrot and gold which neither happened in West Bengal nor Tripura even after the Left Front ruled for decades uninterruptedly. The Agit-prop* was an integral component of the Soviet state, which used it for spreading communist propagandas to the masses, duping them into believing that Lenin was the Messiah or the great liberator of the Proletariat. No wonder after the disintegration of Soviet Union almost all the statues of Lenin and Stalin were pulled down by common people of the newly formed republics, much like what happened in Tripura after The Communist Party lost the state assembly elections to The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
When a statue of Lenin is bulldozed by the public it is a symbol of the emancipation of civilians who have broken out of the chains that the communist regimes impose(d) on them wherever/whenever they are (were) in power.
This brings us to the larger question of ‘Communism’ and ‘Democracy’. How can communism, which is undemocratic by its very nature, function in a democratic framework? Agit-prop usually constructs a narrative which projects the Left as the solo custodian of Human Rights and Democracy. Again this claim can easily be falsified by citing the Soviet example along with China, Cuba and Cambodia. Stalinist Russia was the very embodiment of brutality, contemporary historians claim that Stalin’s regime killed more people than Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Even his own fellow party man Nikita Khrushchev, in his famous secret speech which was delivered in 1956 to the 20th congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union or what later came to be known as ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’, denounced Stalinist ideas.
Stalin was responsible for the institutional murder of millions of common people via various means, which ranged from the labour camps of Gulag to the man made famine in Ukraine which was called Holodomor (to kill by starvation). There is a vast body of evidences left behind from the systematic depopulation of Ukraine and other Soviet nations during the Stalinist regime. But the academicians who are vocal about Holocaust (barbaric killing of Jews by Nazi Germany) would never speak about Holodomor and that’s how the present day Agit-Prop works.
Coming back to the question of the relevance of the Left, it is evident that their entire structure has collapsed. They can do little in terms of creating a new vision for the nation with their handicapped ideology for which there are no more takers anywhere in the world. Aspirational India has already moved away from the left whose Naarebaazi and Dramebaazi have yielded very little in the history of the world except misery. The entire bluff of the communist party being pro-farmer and anti-capitalists can be demolished with the Nandigram and Singur incidents which were the last nails in the coffin of the Left front in Bengal. Apologists for the communist party accuse the right wing of hijacking universities and other free spaces, but remain silent on the issue of campuses in Kerala being dominated by Left wing students’ organisations and literally not allowing anyone with an alternative view to live.
There is a popular play written by Samuel Beckett titled ‘Waiting for Godot’. The story goes like this- two people are waiting for a man named Godot. In the due course of waiting they talk about various issues, the discussion continues but Godot never arrives. Replace Godot with the Communist revolution. Wake up from your slumber! No revolution is coming because utopia doesn’t exist.
* Agit-prop = Department of Agitation and Propaganda