Almost exactly 20 years ago, around

the time of the fall of the Soviet

Union, I wrote a piece in this journal

titled “The Avoidable Tragedy of the Left in

India” (EPW, 19 October 1991). I wish I

could say that the Left has been wiser in

the intervening period. I used to think

that once the gerontocracy at the helm of

the Left parties moved on, the younger

leadership would be more innovative and

imaginative. Unfortunately, some of the

younger leaders who have since been at

the helm have turned out to be even more

unthinking, dogmatic, and dense. With

“democratic centralism”, which is mumbojumbo

for tyrannical control by the leadership,

the Left parties have also disabled

themselves from easy course correction.

Even though I am writing this after the Left

debacle in West Bengal, and the marginal

defeat in Kerala, in this article I will mostly

talk about the general issues afflicting the

Left, some of which, if paid serious attention

to, can yet restore the legitimacy of

what I believe to be a necessary role the

Left can and should play in India.

Self-deception

I am always struck by the amazing capacity

of the Left parties for self-deception in the

face of a crisis, avoidance of the hard realities

and resort to clichés and solace from

sacred texts. In the context of a fast-changing

world, their policy pronouncements

continue to be obsolete formulae-driven

and marked by chanting of catechisms :

Market bad, State good ; public sector

good, private bad ; leftist unions even when

they act in reactionary, anti-poor and highhanded

ways have to be defended ; in foreign

policy, America bad, China, Russia good

(even when the latter countries now display

rampant oligarchic, crony capitalism),

even the theocratic-authoritarian regime in

Iran has to be supported because it fights

the evil American empire, and so on.

In West Bengal the resounding defeat

of the Left Front, even with its history of

considerable achievements in organising

popular participation in meaningful land

reform and rural decentralisation, is not

just due to the peasant disaffection with

its recent efforts at land acquisition, but

more due to widely and intensely resented

all-pervasive and oppressive party control

of all aspects of local life. If you want a

public hospital bed for your seriously ill

family member, you have to be a supplicant

with the local party boss ; if you want to

start a small business or be a street vendor

you have to pay protection money to the

party dada ; if you want to ply a taxi or an

autorickshaw you have to pay a tribute to

the local party union ; if you want a schoolteacher’s

job you have to be approved by

the “local committee” and pay them an

appropriate amount ; your children are to go

to schools where the union activist teacher

is often absent, compelling you to pay

good money in sending them to his private

coaching classes ; if you want to build a

house you have to employ party-approved

construction workers and buy higherpriced

or inferior-quality building materials

from party-approved suppliers ; if you

want to buy land, you have to go through

the party-connected “promoter”, etc.

All-Powerful Party

In the name of Marxism the long-ruling

party essentially became the all-powerful

local mafia. Of course, in true godfatherstyle

they will often help you in emergencies,

if you show your loyalty. This way of

operating a party is not unique to West

Bengal, the Shiv Sena does it all the time,

but they do not add insult to injury by

spouting revolutionary or anti-imperialist

rhetoric, or chanting lal salam even as

they fleece or intimidate you, while the

police nearby show studied indifference.

The party leaders have a habitual way

of explaining electoral defeats by saying

that their cadres have “lost touch with the

people” ; the common people often wish

they did.

Leninist Legacy

The overriding principle of supremacy of

party control is a poisonous Leninist legacy,

and its degeneration into local tyranny is

a sad but inevitable consequence. The

Leninist principle is often invoked for the

sake of discipline. Apart from the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Communist

Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] used

to be the most disciplined political organisation

in the country. No more. While the

tightness of control over dissenting opinion

at the top continues, it has now become

flabby and unruly below, and in

many local areas run by extortionists over

whom the top leadership has very little

control. Hopefully, after the party’s defeat

in West Bengal and the subsequent end of

police protection, the thugs will now look

for greener pastures, and there is a chance

now for the CPI(M) to cleanse itself.

In the all-India context the Left is now

mainly effective as a lobby for public sector

employees, and it occasionally flexes its

muscles by calling bandhs (on a suitable

Monday or Friday), which paralyse city

life, give babus a long weekend, while

starving the poor informal workers who

depend for their daily livelihood on casual

wage work or street vending. The image of

the Left in the minds of the vast numbers

of the poor is that of the union organiser

for the corrupt or callous public employees

whom they have to face as the potential

recipients of the paltry delivery of basic

social and administrative services.

Failure in Basic Services

In the history of communist countries

while governments have miserably failed

in many aspects of the economy, at least in

basic health and educational services they

have often done a much better job than in

non-communist countries at the same

income level (China, Vietnam, Cuba are

obvious examples). But this does not apply

to West Bengal. The party organisation

was solidly based on unionised schoolteachers,

health workers, clerks and other

public employees — and they used their

union clout to default in the delivery of

public services. The coddled bureaucracy

was allowed to be lackadaisical, files

moved much slower than in secretariats of

many other states, and the culture of

union-

protected impunity for public employees

(including the police) thrived. The

appointments and promotions in colleges

and universities, directly orchestrated from

the party office in Alimuddin Street and

screened for party loyalty, decimated

Bengal’s long-enjoyed advantage in academic,

intellectual and professional pursuits.

Informal Sector Bypassed

A major failure of the Left in India is in not

being able to organise, except in localised

pockets, the overwhelming majority of

workers who are informal, often selfemployed.

The modes of organising these

workers would have to be quite different :

as home is often the workplace rather than

concentrated centres like factory or office,

wage or job security is not the main issue,

welfare benefits and general economic

security may be the more important ones,

citizen rights may be more salient than

worker rights, etc. Non-left non-government

organisations with a citizen rights-based

approach or Gandhian organisations (the

most well-known of which is SEWA, organising

a trade union of self-employed women)

have often been more successful in this

area. There needs to be a major reorientation

in Left thinking on labour issues in

this direction. In general Left thinking in

India slurs over the contradictions within

the labour movement (particularly between

formal and informal workers) and

the special organisational exigencies of

the latter.

On land issues also the Left parties, which

used to be at the forefront of movements,

have largely run out of steam. First of all,

on land distribution or tenurial security

rights, the Left parties in both Kerala and

West Bengal have found out in their bitter

experience that peasants once having received

those rights do not feel particularly

obliged to continue to vote for the parties

that originally won those rights for them.

In politics gratitude for past once-for-all

beneficial actions soon wears out. Second,

particularly in West Bengal, over time

small and middle farmer families have

come to capture the rural leadership in

the local party, and this has led to some

weakening of the cause of agitating for the

wage demands of landless workers ; it is no

coincidence that the wage rise of the latter

hurts those farmers who hire labour.

Third, in densely populated parts of India

the land-man ratio is declining fast, pushing

a large part of the land below the minimum

viable cultivable unit. So earlier radical

slogans like “land to the tiller” do not

resonate as much. The Left should be

active in organising some form of joint

management in cultivation of tiny plots,

particularly in matters of water, energy,

knowledge of new agronomic practices and

land nutrient inputs, and in marketing.

But it is hardly active in these matters. The

history of the cooperative movement in

agriculture is dismal in India. Cooperatives,

when they exist, more often than not

have degenerated into moribund bureaucratic

entities or front organisations for milking

state subsidies, or occasionally captured

by the rich and powerful (as in the case of

sugar cooperatives of Maharashtra). The

successful cases of cooperative organisations

like the Gujarat Cooperative Milk

Marketing Federation (Amul) have very

little to do with the Left. Yet the importance

of cooperative marketing will loom

larger as Indian agriculture shifts from

traditional grain to high-valued produce

(like fruits, vegetables, livestock and dairy

products). Lack of progress on this front

will only bring about the dominance of

large retail companies (with enough resources

to invest in cold storage and transportation)

and contract farming, which

the Left in India often reflexively opposes

(though the Chinese Party has gone for

them in a big way).

Fourth, as the productivity per person

declines in agriculture and as its share in

GDP gets very small, the overwhelming

proportion of even farmers’ children

(there is survey evidence for this) want to

get out of agriculture. Yet the transfer of

land to other more productive uses has

given rise to politically explosive protests

in different parts of India. In the case of

Nandigram and Singur the attempts at

land acquisition for industrial use has been

resented by the people, partly because

(a) the Left Front government (following

largely the obsolete colonial law) offered

inadequate compensation ; (b) unnecessarily

and clumsily used force ; (c) the battle (at

least in Nandigram) was less about land

acquisition (the state government announced

quite early in the process that no

land will be acquired there) and more about

turf warfare between CPI(M) and Trinamool

goons – the Left government did little to

control the gangland warfare ; and (d) the

long-term Left neglect of the backward

state of education made many peasants

concerned that their children will not be

qualified to get any jobs in the new factories.

The Left now should not draw the

wrong lessons from their electoral defeat,

as some in the CPI(M) are already urging.

Even after the bitter experience of the recent

past, farmers may give up land voluntarily

if they are offered a substantial

share in the surplus that will be generated

from the alternative use of land (say in the

form of a steady annuity income, rather

than cash that tends to get frittered away),

if local participatory and deliberative

processes are used to inform and involve

them, if the annuity flow is administered

by a credibly independent and efficient

organisation, and if enough arrangements

for skill formation and vocational training

for farmers’ children are made.

Dispossession and Displacement

Some within the CPI(M), and many to the left

of the CPI(M) are understandably preoccupied

with the general issue of dispossession

and displacement effects of industrial

and commercial development, particularly

on the lives of the poor. Many of the abuses

they point out are indeed egregious. There

are difficult issues and trade-offs involved

here. I can only make a plea for some

balance between the need for economic

development that creates productive jobs

and enhances social surplus (which can

potentially be redistributed) on the one

hand, and on the other the need for minimising

(and adequately compensating for)

the dislocation by means of a process in

which the local stakeholders can be full

participants. The use of land and minerals by

profit-seeking companies for non-traditional

higher-productivity activities is in some

ways historically indispensable (as Marx

would have recognised) if we want any

change in the miserable way of life that

the peasants and adivasis have endured

for centuries – as the Marxist economist

Emmanuel once wrote, the horrors of

capitalism fade in comparison with the

horrors of pre-capitalism. There is too much

romanticising of the traditional life among

some otherwise well-intentioned activists

(both of the Gandhian and far-left persuasion)

and too little interest in assessing the

complex trade-offs involved. On the other

hand, in the current dispensation

the surplus

generated in the process of development

in these areas is grossly inequitably distributed,

much of it grabbed by the corporate

oligarchy, real estate tycoons, the

mining mafia, and their political patrons

and collaborators. We have to find a balanced,

equitable, and sustainable way of

dividing the surplus and minimising the

loss (both private and social, including

environmental). In this the democratic

Left (as opposed to the misguided and violent

extreme Left) can play a valuable role

in espousing the cause of the deprived, increasing

their awareness and information,

catalysing their organisations and

acting as watchdogs against the abuses of

state violence and corporate power.

Associational Life

One important difference between Kerala

and West Bengal is the much richer associational

life in Kerala’s society, with a

long history of literacy and solidarity movements

for low caste emancipation, people’s

science movements, civic organisations

(including those related to churches) and,

of course, a strong set of Left-led organisations

of landless workers and small peasants.

Civil society is much weaker in West

Bengal, in spite of strong unions of clerks,

schoolteachers and peasants (industrial

unions are weak and demoralised in a string

of declining sunset industries). Associational

life has been largely hijacked by the party,

explicitly discouraging the growth of nonparty

civic

organisations in its shadow.

There are some lower caste associations

(like those of the “matua” group, which

the party in its desperation before the

elections tried to appease, too late), but

unlike in other states they have been marginal

to the bhadralok-led politics. While

bhadraloks presided in the upper echelons

of the party, the lower level operatives

used the party dominance to arm themselves

and create their little mafia fiefdoms,

which thrived with the neutered

police looking away. In the absence of robust

civic organisations, the local-level

politics quickly fell into a vortex of violence.

The Trinamool Congress fought an

uphill battle with its own squads of goons,

and finally won with the headwind of accumulated

popular disgust at the tyranny

of party control and peasant anxiety about

their land.

But decentralisation which is supposed

to have been a success in West Bengal

should have provided a local-democratic

arena for resolving conflicts and a check

to the violence. While panchayats in West

Bengal have not been captured by the

landed oligarchy (as in many other states)

largely on account of the prior land

reform, and some of the welfare benefit

programmes did reach sections of the poor, local governments are weak in terms

of finance which mostly comes from above

and local elections are fought not so much

on local issues but more on state-level

partisan issues. Benefits often went to

sections of the poor who were in a clientelistic

relationship with the ruling party.

So the panchayats became just one more

arena for bitter partisan battles, usually

around the allocation of the scanty doles

from above, from state-supported or centrally-

sponsored schemes. Kerala panchayats

have been given a lot more finance by

the state government, decentralised planning

is more participatory, and in some

districts there is even a record of municipal

governments running business enterprises

(in collaboration with local private

business and voluntary organisations) –

something practically non-existent in

West Bengal.

On Market Reform

Finally, the Left parties have to give up on

their blatant hypocrisy on market reform.

The reform policies pursued in Delhi are

routinely described as “neo-liberal”, supposedly

adopted under imperialist and

World Bank influence, while basically

similar policies are followed in Kolkata,

Agartala or Thiruvananthapuram. Just as

many decades back, after long and acrimonious

debates, the communist parties

in India reconciled to working under

“bourgeois democracy”, they have to reconcile

themselves to the market principle.

These are both about competition, one in

the polity, and the other in the economy.

Markets have a large number of wellrecognised

problems : market “failures” in

resource allocation on account of externalities

and imperfect information, inequalities

that markets tend to facilitate,

the instability, unemployment, and the

economic and cultural dislocation that they

often bring about, etc. But there are ways

of mitigating these negative effects. The

alternative to markets is often worse. The

history of socialist countries has shown us

repeatedly how without competition among

producers and a mechanism for exit of

chronically inefficient firms, no economy

can attain or retain its vigour and dynamism.

Political or bureaucratic allocation

of resources and control of prices often lead

to corruption, black markets and stagnation.

The inequality in wealth in socialist countries

is between the privileged members of

the party oligarchy (and their accomplices)

and the rest, and unemployment takes

the form of low-productivity “disguised

unemployment”. Barring utopian projects

on the drawing board of many wishful

thinkers, no one has yet shown us in practice

a consistently and durably viable and

technologically dynamic economy for a

large enough country that has been run

on traditional socialist lines of controls

and state monopoly. The socialist economies

of eastern Europe and Russia collapsed

largely on their own endogenous

systemic weakness. Common people in

capitalist South Korea are immeasurably

better off than in socialist near-starvation

North Korea (which started off with an

initial industrial advantage over the South).

For three decades now China has deliberately

attempted following a comprehensive

policy of state-guided capitalism (adapting

the models in South Korea, Taiwan,

Singapore, and earlier Japan for their

own circumstances) and has succeeded

famously. In many respects Chinese policy

has been much more “neo-liberal” than

Indian. Vietnam is following policies similar

to China.

Possible Priorities

I think the Left should concentrate on

leading popular struggles against capitalist

excesses and injustices (rampant inequality

and the consequent capture of political

processes, displacement of poor people,

macroeconomic instability – most recently

due to short-sighted recklessness of unregulated

financial markets abroad, and

environmental degradation). The required

systemic modifications and regulations will

not make the capitalists happy, but through

democratic pressures one can work out

a bargaining arrangement in which the

social justice objectives are vigorously

pursued, but the incentives for production

and surplus generation are not hurt too

much ; and state and community-level coordination

mechanisms are used to cope

with various kinds of coordination failures

in the economy without substantially

giving up on the important coordinating

and disciplining functions of the market.

Such a bargaining equilibrium may or may

not be called “social democracy”

– a term

which raises suspicion in many on the Left,

while many on the liberal side smell too

much socialism in it. Forgetting about the

well-known European examples, even

among developing countries, in Latin

America a small country, Costa Rica, has a

thriving democracy with a superb system

of welfare benefits for the masses ; in a

large country, Brazil, under the Workers’

Party the erstwhile high inequality is going

down (their index of income inequality is

now about the same as in China), and education

and health services have advanced

a great deal and they are aiming at a form

of social democracy, without giving up on

the capitalist features of production. The

Indian situation is, of course, different,

but there are many international examples

now to learn from (particularly in

regulations and in provision of social services)

and adapt to our circumstances.

Even within India, a non-Left state like

Tamil Nadu has advanced in the last three

decades much more than West Bengal

under the Left, both in industrialisation

and in delivery of social services. Kerala,

of course, has been on top in terms of

social services for many decades, both

under Left and non-Left rule, but its production

system has not been dynamic

enough, and it is more of a remittance

economy. In general, the Left has to think

hard why it is now only a regional party,

and why even in its regions of strength it is

getting weaker.

When Marx in his last years was learning

about Russian data and special conditions,

he was quite open to changing his

long-held ideas formed from his study of

west European history (as he explicitly indicated

to some of his correspondents),

much to the consternation of some of his

faithful followers. Sticking to old dogmas

in the face of changing reality and new

information is definitely un-Marxian.