Left puts UPA in red
By Inder Malhotra

During the last 18 months since the United Progressive Alliance came to power in New Delhi with the Left Front supporting it “from outside” - Indians, in general, have woken up to a fact that was earlier known only to keen students of Indian politics. The rude reality that has hit most people is that the Left parties, with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the lead, are seldom, if ever, right. The positions that they take are resoundingly wrong and eventually they themselves admit this. Indeed, they change the “party line” that usually turns out to be equally wrong-headed. What has irked a very wide section of people in recent months is the consistently negative attitude of the Leftist crowd towards the policies that the Manmohan Singh government wants to follow in India’s interest, whether in the realm of economic reform or that of foreign and security policies.

Sadly, given the arithmetic of the current balance of political forces and the peculiarly Indian way in which coalitions here work, the Leftist friends have managed to get their pound of flesh. They have either forced the government to abandon its policy - as was the case about the sale of a small fraction of equity in public sector undertakings - or at least- to delay decisions on a range of issues, including foreign investment and interest rates on the Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF).

The Left’s posturing and theatrics over Mr. Natwar Singh’s resignation as Minister without Portfolio have been even more glaring. The Left Front went on maintaining emphatically that there was no need for the former Foreign Minister to quit the Cabinet. Ironically, within the Congress party, to which Natwar belongs, the mood was totally different. The party leadership wanted him to go but he had dug his heels in and declined to oblige. Then, the Congress president and UPA chairperson, Ms. Sonia Gandhi (who was at one time supposed to “shielding” Natwar) unceremoniously dropped him from the Congress Working Committee, at present called, for technical reasons, Congress Steering Committee. Thereafter, Natwar gave in.

Remarkably, even after he had tendered his resignation, some Left leaders continued to say that the resignation was unnecessary but they could do little as the deed had been done. At the same time, rather amusingly, opinion within the usually monolithic Leftist camp got divided. The Communist Party of India (CPI) first and then the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) demanded publicly that Natwar’s should quit.

There are two main points about the irrational or quixotic behaviour of the Left Front that must be underscored before discussing the details of the present goings-on. The first is that the ideologically driven Left’s penchant to take up positions that often border on the perverse is not all new. It is rooted firmly in the history of the Indian Communist movement from day one. To go back no farther than the late 1930’s, when the Second World War began in 1939, the undivided CPI immediately denounced it as an “Imperialist War”. The reason was obvious: the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact that both the cold-blooded practitioners of realpolitik had signed because of tactical expediency. On June 21, 1941, Hitler cynically tore the treaty to shreds and launched an all-out invasion of the Soviet Union. Communists in this country immediately screamed that the great conflict had become “People’s War”. They even changed the name of their weekly paper to “People’s War” and suddenly developed such love for the British “Imperialists” as to collaborate with the British Raj against those who were taking part in the Quit India movement.

For several years after August 15, 1947, the CPI refused to accept that India had become independent. It insisted that the country was still a part of the British Empire. This was their justification for armed insurrection such as that in Telengana in 1948.

As late as in November-December 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru personally complained to the visiting Soviet leaders, Bulganin and Khrushchev, that the Indian Communists were seeking and following Moscow’s advice, were receiving funds from “foreign sources” and acting in a manner which could affect adversely India’s friendly Indo-Soviet relations. Krushchev blandly denied Nehru’s charges but evidently got the message. For in 1956 the CPI changed its “revolutionary” line and opted for the parliamentary path.

Since the major Communist split in 1965, the CPI (M) had been deeply hostile to the Congress and Indira Gandhi while the CPI was supportive of her. It fully backed her minority government after the first Congress split in 1969, ruled Kerala in partnership with the Indira Congress, and demeaned itself by giving the Emergency fullest support.

This brings me the second crucial point. Never before has the Left, in which the CPI (M)’s position is overwhelmingly dominant, had so much clout at the Centre as it does now. Under the leadership of Mr. Harkishen Singh Surjit, the CPI (M) had wielded some influence on the governments of Gowda and Gujral. But that was nothing compared with power born of 65 votes in the Lok Sabha that the UPA, or rather the Congress, can alienate only at its peril. Mr. Prakash Karat’s emergence as the new general secretary has made the CPI (M) even more intransigent than earlier. He is also more of an ideologue than of Mr. Surjit or Mr. Jyoti Basu.

However, even Mr. Karat, for the present at least, does not want the present government to collapse lest the way might be cleared for a BJP-led coalition to regain power. At the same time, he has put the Congress on notice that the Left and Mr. Mulayam Sing Yadav (whom the Congress treats as a pariah) together have 100 votes. The CPI (M)’s long-term strategy would become discernable only after assembly elections take place in its two strongholds, West Bengal and Kerala, in February.

The writer is a leading columnist.
(Courtesy: Sahara Time weekly)