More evidence needed to say CPI(M) is critically relevant in West Bengal

For over a decade now, we’ve been hearing about the CPI(M)’s great plans for revitalisation based on introspection and the induction of youth leaders. Youth empowerment is still window dressing.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) put up a weeks-long, statement show in West Bengal, culminating in a big event at Kolkata’s Brigade Parade ground on January 7. The ‘Insaf Samabesh’ demonstrated that the CPI(M) and the Left have not become completely moribund.

Bigger challenges await it, and more evidence is needed to say the CPI(M) is critically relevant in the state’s political life, and it will be able to scale the big peaks.

Groups of people trekked for weeks from various parts of the state to reach Kolkata for the meeting. Whatever the actual number, the attendance was impressive. The fact that it was held under the aegis of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the CPI(M)’s youth wing, may suggest that there are green shoots in the Left political space.

Let us put on file an old truism: the size of crowds at rallies says little about the political capital of their organisers. People attend them for any number of reasons that reveal little about organisational strength, electability, and ideological-political coherence.

Let’s take the last first. Ideological coherence has never been the mainstream Left’s strong suit since Independence — thus, a raft of social-democratic parties that insist on calling themselves communist or Marxist, or both, litter the Left space.

Nomenclature matters, with apologies to the bard. It is unfortunate that blinkers still prevent the mainstream Left from acknowledging it is a Left-of-Centre ‘bourgeois political’ formation. Had it done so, it might have contributed to working on attainable goals such as poverty alleviation, universal healthcare, education, social security, and job-oriented growth. For an evaluation, look at West Bengal during its 34 years in power.

On January 7, we were given another dose of interplanetary rhetoric. Many parties in the Indian National Developmental and Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) are struggling to reconcile positions taken nationally and regional political compulsions. So too the CPI(M), which wastes no opportunity to excoriate the Trinamool Congress (TMC), not just for its obvious feats of misgovernance, but for imagined conspiracies with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of which the CPI(M) can be charged as justly — remember its obvious assistance to the Hindutva peddlers during the 2019 elections, while ‘unofficially’ proclaiming puerile slogans like ‘aagey Ram, parey baam (first Ram, then Left)’.

The CPI(M) cannot stress the misgovernance part too much, because the TMC sedulously follows the Left Front dispensation’s stylesheet. Thus, the recourse to tired rhetoric and preposterous claims, including that the rural employment guarantee scheme was the ‘brainchild’ of the Left, though it never introduced a simulacrum of it while in power. These things corrode credibility. Less rhetoric, more realism, and some consonance between pronouncement and practice would help inestimably.

CPI(M) state secretary Mohammed Salim, an improvement on his predecessor, Surjya Kanta Mishra, who is credited with the first-Ram ‘thesis’, claimed at the Insaf Samabesh that his party’s showing in last year’s panchayat elections was a ‘trailer’, and it would show the full movie in the impending general elections. Right? He also claimed that though the support of the tribal people and minorities had started ‘receding’ in the last years of Left, their impressive participation in the Insaf Samabesh left only the task of re-converting them into a ‘dedicated vote bank’.

Pie in the sky? In the 2023 elections, the CPI(M) increased its vote share from 6 to 14 per cent, compared with the 2018 edition, while the BJP’s went up from 10 to 23 per cent. As for turnout, the previously stated conditions apply, especially given the abject state of the CPI(M)’s organisation.

We’ve been hearing about the party’s great plans for revitalisation based on introspection and the induction of youth leaders, for over a decade now. It doesn’t seem to have panned out. Youth empowerment is still window dressing. As for bringing back into the fold marginalised communities, couldn’t the CPI(M) send out a statement by making its state secretariat and committee more representative of working people by inducting grassroots workers from the Krishak Sabha and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU)? Given their domination by urban middle-class members who have taken the student and youth wing routes, figure it out.

As for tribal and Muslim members, the 15-member secretariat has one of each.

Not much has changed.

This point is not merely identitarian — the CPI(M), especially, must give labouring and marginalised people seats at its high table to show that the days of elitist vanguardism are over.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.