I plead guilty. For the handful of readers of this blog who look to kill time with inanities, my disappearance from these pages has been sudden and without warning. Many things have happened in the meantime. I read several interesting books. Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, Novels of Deborah Crombie’s Gemma James/ Duncan Kincaid series that I hadn’t read before and also Battle for Bittora by Anuja Chauhan. Yes, I am an unabashed admirer of women writers and woe befall V S Naipaul who thinks that women don’t cut ice as writers…..
Then there were agitations against corruption. I always thought that the general incompetence of Babus is a much bigger scourge than corruption. And there came Mumbai bomb blasts and the outcry over it. But the subject closer to my heart is the ouster of the left governments from two states. The final frontier of the Left has been breached in Bengal. In Kerala, we saw the Left making a serious attempt at comeback by practising old fashioned bourgeois methods of leader worship- An attempt that almost succeeded.
Should we rejoice? Now that the lumpen cadre will no more hold industrialization to ransom? Now those administrative changes will not emanate from all powerful local area committees of the party? Now that head load workers need not be paid for tucking up their lungis and desist from working? Now that organized sector Trade Unions might think twice (hopefully) about bringing life to a halt? Now that people like us (PLUs) have come to power?
I fear that the space that the Left had occupied will soon be cornered by Yoga gurus, environmentalists, NGOs, Maoist sympathizers and sundry writers. Many of them have no ear to the ground. The left frittered away its’ constituency by taking positions which are largely impractical and dictated by mass appeal. They did not foresee the need for change in a networked world. They got cornered into segments like organized sector trade unions which were a vested interest by themselves. They became oblivious to the changes wrought by free trade, internet and aspirations of the educated class. In the eighties, the Left had variously fought against computerization, private sector’s entry into professional education, introduction of Plus Two system in High Schools. On every one of these ideas, they had organized agitations, road blocks, Hartals and Dharnas, only to swallow their words much later. Left can outsmart any political party in the sloganeering department. In the early years, they had implemented game changers like Land reforms and education reforms. Years in power had made them sloganeers without a clear action plan for implementation. New world, experimental ideas like decentralisation and village level planning which are pursued by some of their leaders are met with protests from within their ranks. The traditional apparatchiks of the party have managed to run the show with grassroots support from a rapidly shrinking constituency. The last straw was a desperate attempt to run a campaign on the basis of an individual in typical US Presidential election style. With that, the slide from mass based politics to individualized bourgeois politics was complete.
The scourge of identity politics is gathering steam in our country and it soon threatens to snowball into unmanageable proportions. Gujjars block roads, Jats fight for reservation, Telengana and Gorkhaland ask for separate states. Kashmir asks for independence. The Left in India is an idea, a perspective to understand why these identities gather steam and convert their sense of deprivation into agitations that threaten to render our country into an ungovernable mess. And the vacation of the political space by the Left might restrict our understanding of these issues. The idea of Left is a potent force to fight communalism and identity politics, which is difficult to replicate under the umbrella of Yoga teachers- even if they count bearded Muslims among their followers. It still contains the seeds of an idea that helps us understand reality in a country with explosive diversity.
No, I don’t celebrate the demise of the Left. I wish the Left would transform into an idea in tune with our times. I wish they would play a key role in the evolution of a fourth world where local governments hold the key to development and amelioration of poverty. I wish they would fight the rapid commercialization of education. I wish they would resist the pillaging of our environment by construction and consumerism. I wish they would expand the shrinking space for informed debate on communalism, filled with hysterical TV anchors and internet vigilantes. I think it is not too late to dirty their hands yet again- to take up the cause of a large number of unorganized sector employees and to bring them the benefits of social security. I think it is not too late to bring the fruits of explosive development to those construction workers who find refuge under the flyovers. The Left can move on from being a party with legacy harking back to Soviet communes and Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao. The Indian Left can cultivate itself as a uniquely Indian movement that seeks to merge the multiple identities behind common deprivation and seek innovative solutions within our democratic polity- instead of perceiving imagined threats of a bygone era and organizing bandhs and hartals at the drop of a hat. Good Luck…
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