Defining Buddha moment

Shekhar Gupta
Indian Express, March 17

Behind the dust and the deaths, allegations and recriminations in the wake of the Nandigram development lies another strong political reality.

That India’s politics is changing dramatically after nearly three years of placidity that put pundits to sleep. If Punjab, last month, showed how the definition of what is communal or secular is changing, and how, in a politics stabilising around two broad coalitions, ideological untouchability was history, last week’s events underline another new and fascinating reality. That the Left, which has resisted change in its essential thinking and worldview, and which had actually used this fortuitous foothold in national power to even stop the winds of slow, evolutionary change blowing out of Buddhadeb’s Bengal, now cannot duck the new inevitability. It has to face up to what promises to be the most dramatic transformation. And this, in the history of a party that believes it is blessed with a permanent ideology which had a ready explanation for all that happened in the past, and all that may challenge them in the future.

While Nandigram has now grabbed the headlines and prime-time news time, it has to be understood for its significance, along with that incredible moment in Parliament when MPs of the DMK and the Left, allies at the Centre and in a state (Tamil Nadu), went for each other’s throats over an issue of such high principle as where the new maritime university should be located. Was the CPM now finally emerging as the Communist Party of Bengal, or the Communist Party of Bengal and Kerala? I remember sitting in the audience at a televised discussion that included prominent sportspersons and a CPM MP not long ago where our comrade got most impassioned when the question of Sourav Ganguly’s sack came up. Another Left leader sitting by my side had then remarked, “Even Karl Marx had no answer for Bengali chauvinism.” And that remark was more than some good-humoured self-deprecation unusual for the always so serious and grave Marxists. It was an admission of sorts of where Left politics was headed. Just the number of Parliament seats they had won in two states had given them the ability to swing — to use the language of corporate M&As they so detest — what can only be described as the most stunning leveraged buy-out of our political history.

Just 62 MPs hijacked a whole government in a Parliament of 542, just because they had the leverage of giving the UPA the power, and so many retired old Congressmen governorships, other sinecures and even the last cabinet jobs in political carriers they thought had ended in 1996.

But despite that sudden arrival on the national centre-stage and TV talk shows, the Left remained an essentially regional party, a kind of DMK of two states. Instead of using this God-given opportunity to bring the party closer to the national mainstream, the Left ideologues got so power-drunk as to pretend the revolution had already come about. It was one thing if they continued to treat the Congress with contempt — they fight them in both their pocket boroughs. They also used their remarkable 62/542 leverage to block issues that represented the will of nearly 80 per cent of the same Parliament. The most stunning example of this hubris is their blocking of the pension bill. Nineteen states of the Union have already accepted the new pension plan. But the Left, which represents just two and a quarter, is blocking it on grounds of ideology. It is amazing how a political grouping which boasts more grey matter, and more personal integrity, than any other in India, would make such a prestige issue out of a lost cause, for the new pension plan is already a reality and it is a matter of time before the will of the rest of the Union over-rides the objections of just two and a quarter states.

But why is this relevant now, when we should be addressing more immediate issues, the Left DMK clash in Parliament and Nandigram. It is because these are all inter-connected. My reading of communist literature is not comprehensive enough for me to pull out some nuggets to show how Marx made the same point somewhere, but since he was a wise man, chances are he also said somewhere that there are limits to how long, and how well, you can manage contradictions in any politics.

This would become even tougher in ideological politics where new formulae, ideas and solutions run headlong into old mantras, scriptures and mythology. That is why, the defence of Buddha’s reformist politics in West Bengal, that he had no choice but to work in a larger policy framework decided by the Centre, would come unstuck at some point.

Nandigram has become that point. It has taken the alibi away from the Left. It has also narrowed their political space for manoeuvre. Now they either back Buddha or denounce him. Either they accept his economy as theirs or discard it — along with him — as capitalist contamination. They can’t blame the Centre, they can’t hide behind Mamata Didi, they can’t curse Bush, they can’t find solace in Chavez. This is their moment of truth. Howsoever this ends now, it will change the Left forever.

If Buddha wins, it will change the CPM dramatically. It will then move in the direction of a more mainstream, left-of-centre social democratic formulation. It will no longer be an inward, backward looking party run by ideologues and public sector trade unionists. And, knowing that danger, if the very same forces win and Buddha loses and is purged along with his “toxified” political economic policy, the Left will be reduced to at best 30-40 seats in the next Parliament, and today’s leveraged buyout will be a thing of the past.

There will be no free, 24-hour access to 7 Race Course Road and 10 Janpath, no grandstanding on primetime TV. The most incredible veto on national politics, exercised through the NCMP, a document as one-sided and self-destructive as the Treaty of Versailles, will be in the past. And who knows, Mamata Didi may be ensconced in Writers’ Building, running a state government that might make V.S. Achutanandan look meek and reformist by comparison.

Where India’s once formidable Left wanted to head in the 21st century is a question that its leaders were able to defer because of the dramatic turnaround of May 2004. This sudden arrival in power created a sense of achievement and hubris. Nandigram has now shaken it.

Particularly because Buddhadeb is not about to retreat into the bunker of proletarian, agrarian politics. Even more than Manmohan Singh and Vajpayee, he is willing to defend his economics with conviction. He is no longer confused on the issues that still divide even the Congress: are reforms pro, or anti poor? Is industrialisation good, or bad for the farmer? Should India’s political leaders remain resigned to decades-old politico-economic equations even if they continue to keep us impoverished, or should they move out of the trenches, take a few risks?

Outside of Bengal and Kerala, there are no takers for the Left’s rigid economics. Its vote share is declining all over. In Punjab, 58 of the 59 Left candidates lost deposits. In the past, it had up to 15 MLAs there. In UP it’s finished, the two polls in Bihar last year saw it decline. And if it disowns Buddha now, it will be curtains in Bengal too. On the other hand, Buddha now gives them opportunity to redefine themselves as a modern, social democratic grouping, as their counterparts have done in Europe and some parts of South America.

The Left already has the space of social liberalism in India. More open economics may help them design an optimistic, modern agenda that may find more takers in mainstream India. This is the choice Nandigram and Buddha now confront them with. A slide into rigid, regional irrelevance or the prospect of a mainstream revival.