A character in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Made in USA (1966) says somewhere: ‘The Right and the Left are both the same… the idea of Right and Left is an equation which is totally out of date…’ Watching the performances of Indian politicians today, some might be tempted to agree with the proposition. The BJP honchos, who as ministers in the NDA government in the recent past genuflected to Washington, are today borrowing the rhetoric of the left to bash the UPA government for bending to the US in signing the nuclear deal. The CPI(M) commissars in Delhi damn the UPA government for following World Bank-dictated neo-liberal economic policies, while their ministers in Kerala and West Bengal woo the same World Bank for loans and invite neo-liberal corporate sector chieftains to set up SEZs. While condemning the Congress regime in Andhra Pradesh and the BJP government in Rajasthan for suppressing farmers’ movements, the CPI(M) shows no qualms in using the same brutal methods to stifle such movements in Nandigram.

Are then the conventional lines that divide the right from the left – in other words, the followers of capitalism and their socialist opponents – getting blurred? Proponents of economic liberalism claim that socialism is no longer relevant in the era of globalization under a unipolar economic order. They cite as example, their triumph in co-opting erstwhile socialist societies into the market economy – China being their biggest trophy in the journey to a new world order where capitalism reigns supreme.

Let us, however, beware of accepting such simplistic generalizations that mandate a hegemonistic global order, induce its universal public acceptance, and seal permanently the prospects of alternative ideologies. Past historical experiences have shown how rightist obituaries for the left had quite often proved premature and self-deceptive. In fact, what we are observing today is not the end of the right-left divide, but a historically transitional phase which both the Indian right and the left are passing through, adjusting their positions now and then.

 

The right indeed is strategically the more powerful among the combatants in the present context. It has been able to draw in the so-called centrist forces into the orbit of its economic trajectory, where both the BJP and the Congress have moved towards sharing a common space of neo-liberal domestic economic policies and pro-US foreign policies. There is a twilight zone where they veer between collision and collusion – particularly in relation to the Hindu-Muslim issue.

Even here the Congress is tilting towards the Hindu right by dragging its heels over punishing the Sangh Parivar culprits indicted by the Srikrishna Commission in Mumbai, or by bending over backwards to placate Hindu orthodoxy on the Ram Setu controversy. The Muslim right is no less powerful, as evident from its clout in West Bengal, where some time ago it forced a pliant left government to shed its secular commitments and ban Taslima Nasreen’s book, and more recently to bundle her out of the state.

In the Indian metropolitan middle class milieu also, while the left has somehow acquired the image of an ossified force mired in outdated ideological debates on the national scene and inefficient administration in states run by it, the right has been able to throw up a new cosmopolitan generation of blustering movers and shakers, spawned by the decade-long economic reforms. They constitute the New Right in India.

They are a multicoloured noisy band made up of corporate bosses who build empires by promiscuously using people and shares in the stock market; upstart politicians, corrupt bureaucrats, mafia dons, and contractors profiting from the building boom in the enclaves of urban prosperity; well-heeled young CEOs, and market executives in advertising firms paid to promote crass consumerism, followed by a stream of squawking hirelings in the mainstream media who masquerade as journalists. It is the lifestyle of this malodorous cluster of men and women reeking of new money, which is held up as the shining model of India’s growth by the back-slapping IMF and its hucksters. The rest of the population, urged to aspire for this lifestyle, is being brainwashed into accepting a ‘me-first-screw-you’ ethos and joining a deadly rat race.

 

The trend described above is a classic demonstration of the continuing relevance of the Marxist concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, considered passé by today’s academic establishment. Stated simply, it implies that the capitalist rulers in a bourgeois democracy do not have to impose their ideology by military means, but can weave it into the social consciousness by fetishizing market economy, and make it appear as absolutely necessary to the citizens. Since the days of Marx, the media has become a powerful nonviolent tool in the hands of the new right in shaping the public psyche in this mould. ‘The advance of capitalist production,’ Marx wrote, ‘develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of this mode of production as self-evident natural laws.’

In India today, it is not only the rising middle classes, but also sections of the working class and agricultural farmers that are increasingly tending to accept it, either out of a conditioned reflex induced by the propaganda of future benefits, or from sheer despair and resignation. This spirit of acceptance that numbs their analytical powers is creating a strong base for the reproduction of capitalism.

It is being facilitated by an increasing depoliticization of the Indian people who, frustrated by the ineptitude and repelled by the venality of the candidates that they elect, end up in a state of confusion. It is the public mood of political ambivalence, individual passivity and moral lethargy, so painfully in evidence in India today, that suits the main adversary and the more powerful of the two in the right-left contest. The new right finds a ready audience for its message among them, the same old message to which it remains oath-bound, and which makes it axiomatic that every man is for himself and the devil takes the hindmost. It is being sold in the new right rhetoric, masquerading under jargon like ‘spirit of enterprise’, ‘robust competitiveness’, and unmistakably encouraging among young Indians a spirit of ruthless scramble for power and an unabashed display of opulence.

 

While the right is indeed upbeat and the left on the defensive at the moment, the socialist critique of capitalism continues to hover in the background like Banquo’s ghost – threatening to materialize into a formidable opponent any moment. Every step in the Indian right’s forward march towards its entry into the neo-liberal global order renders its Achilles heel more vulnerable, leaving in its trail new enemies – the haunting spirit of 1.5 lakh farmers who were driven to suicide between 1997 and 2005 (the period flaunted as India’s semester for graduation in the university of the global order), villagers dispossessed of their lands by big dams and SEZs, tribals ousted from their forests by mega-development projects, workers retrenched from industries, and small traders marginalized by corporate sector business houses. Although not always and not everywhere identifying themselves with the left, these victims of the free market dominated model of growth are exploding into spontaneous and sporadic outbursts, as thorns in the flesh of the right’s agenda.

These chinks in the armour of the right offer openings to the left for a renewal of active intervention. But the intervention has to be grounded in a sophisticated approach that moves beyond the traditional simplistic argument which creates an impression that the socialist movement profits only by the anger of the poverty-driven masses (like the charitable cause of Mother Teresa’s followers thriving on their fatalistic submission to poverty).

 

The exploitation of human labour by capitalist forces cannot be fought by an equally self-interested exploitation of human anger and despair by its socialist opponents. Surely, the concept of socialism (as formulated by Marx, as well as his predecessors) was something that went beyond such an immediate goal of winning victory by capitalizing on mass disaffection. Their critique of capitalism was not merely directed against economic impoverishment, but the more fundamental problems of dehumanization of the individual, erosion of humanitarian values, and disintegration of the natural environment that were brought about by the capitalist system (as lucidly explained by Marx in his writings).

But, the one-sided stress on the elimination of economic poverty alone to the exclusion of these other equally important humanitarian concerns, had a disastrous impact on the course of the international Communist movement (as apparent from the atrocious record of sectarian politics and cruel suppression of dissent under the socialist regimes in Soviet Union and China, reaching its nadir in Pol Pot-ruled Kampuchea). Sadly, it is this infamous legacy that has been inherited by India’s foremost leftist party, the CPI(M). Propelled to a position of leadership of the Left Front, it was expected to display a sense of responsibility. But hidebound by the Stalinist tradition of centralization of power in its own hands and intolerance of dissent by others, it has reduced itself to a bankrupt party of bumptious leaders representing the worst of the old left, who are ill-equipped to face the challenge posed by the new right.

 

The CPI(M) response to the rightist challenge has been marked by a rather incongruous mix of infantile impudence and senile arrogance in its rhetoric, and by inept and corrupt administration and ham-handed treatment of popular protest in its functioning (in the states that it rules). Having taken the politically correct decision to back the UPA to keep out of power the more dangerous BJP, the CPI(M), however, followed it up by a pathetic display of bungling – both at the national and the regional (the left-ruled states) levels.

It has to be admitted that the left today is facing the difficult task of juggling with several roles – as a reluctant ally of a government at the centre, at another level in the role of regional ruling power (in three states) fraught with problems of governance, and yet at a different level as a militant opposition in mass movements in Congress and BJP-ruled states. We can also understand the left’s ideological discomfort with the Congress prime minister’s infatuation with the neo-liberal agenda in the economic sphere, and his doting on Bush, of all persons, in his foreign policy.

Despite these hurdles, the left has indeed succeeded in some measure in pressurizing the UPA government to take hesitant legal moves towards rural employment, rights for forest dwellers, and reservation for women. But in other areas it has miserably failed to evolve alternatives that would pose effective challenges to the new right. Instead, it has tended to slide back into the old left habit of rhetorical braggadocio of rash threats every now and then of withdrawing support from the UPA, only to bite the dust at the end by making insidious adjustments with it (as evident in its recent U-turn on the imbroglio over the nuclear deal). The performance of the CPI(M) over this issue in particular, brought out the intellectual bankruptcy and tactical errors of judgment of a brash leadership which is wise only in it’s own conceit.

 

To start with, although in principle the left is opposed to nuclear proliferation, the leaders were willy-nilly drawn into the trap of supporting it, when they got bogged down in convoluted arguments over the Hyde Act and 123 Agreement, landing themselves in the position of defending India’s right to carry out nuclear tests – all in the name of opposing US threat to national sovereignty! Further, they should have realized that the nuclear deal controversy was the least in the list of priorities of the Indian poor, who are more concerned about their daily tribulations. Besides, the CPI(M) did not have that widespread base to mobilize popular opinion against the deal.

Even if its objection to the deal can be justified as a principled political opposition to the US plot to draw India into a strategic alliance, the CPI(M) should have realized its limitations before embarking on a vociferous adventure that threatened to bring about the collapse of the UPA government – which remains the best bet for it in the present circumstances. Finally, they had to concede to the UPA government’s request for approaching the IAEA for talks – which they had been stonewalling all these months. Were they living in a fool’s paradise, gambling on a mid-term poll that they hoped would increase their numbers in the next Lok Sabha?

 

Such a snap poll would have proved disastrous for the left, particularly in the backdrop of its iniquitous record in several areas in recent times. On the national economic agenda, the CPI(M) agitation against neo-liberal measures like privatization, disinvestment in public sector enterprises, SEZs and entry of MNCs in the retail sector, had lost much of its credibility due to the economic policies followed by the left governments in West Bengal and Kerala, where they are implementing the same measures in the name of economic growth. The tumult over a proposed SEZ (now abandoned in the face of popular resistance) in Nandigram in West Bengal, and the ugly internal feuds within the CPI(M) in Kerala over World Bank loans, have to a large extent eroded the party’s popularity in both the states.

Criminal cases against the West Bengal state unit’s leading cadres (in Singur and Nandigram) and allegations of corruption against important leaders of the party in Kerala (e.g. the latest case being that of a bribery charge against the deputy general manager of the CPI(M) mouthpiece Deshabhimani), have further stained the image of a party that was once perceived as a body of leaders and workers known for their honesty and exemplary behaviour. Over the last several years, the CPI(M) praxis has thus become identified with a politics that is rich and consummate in crime and corruption and barren of all humanitarian values.

 

At the root of the problems being faced by the CPI(M) rulers in West Bengal and Kerala are two main issues – the model of economic development and the question of human rights. The CPI(M) approach to both the issues is again shaped by a simplistic interpretation of Marxian socialism that stresses economism over other factors – a point made earlier in this article. It is this one-sided approach that has made the ruling CPI(M) leaders obsessed with economic growth at any cost – even at the risk of dispossessing the rural poor who had voted them to power having benefited from their earlier agrarian reforms like Operation Barga, higher wages for agricultural labourers, and decentralization of power through panchayats, among other measures.

To justify the new model of industrial development, the West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya argues that given the dominance of the market economy in the present circumstances, there is no option but to cater to the demands of multinational and corporate sector investors for the generation of employment. It is claimed that since the CPI(M)-led government has put an end to feudal land relations in the agrarian sector, it is now ready for full-fledged development of capitalism which alone can produce the mature proletariat that would be ready to launch the future socialist revolution at some uncertain date – as predicted by Marx!

Indian proponents of such a view can draw inspiration from the spirit of accommodation and adjustment with the prevailing neo-liberal order that is often displayed today by certain champions of the once influential European new left. Listen for instance to the following statement made by no less an important leftist theoretician than Perry Anderson: ‘The only starting point for a realistic Left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat… No collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon…’ He then goes on to conclude: ‘…if the human energies for a change of system are ever released again, it will be from within the metabolism of capitalism itself.’ (Editorial in New Left Review, 2000.)

 

This might appear to many like a present-day interpretative extension of Marx’s famous statement: ‘No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed… Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve… the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist…’ But it ignores the equally important component of Marxist theory and praxis (as propounded in the Communist Manifesto) which stresses the need of intervention by the socialist leadership to sensitize the people to the contradiction between the nature of production and that of consumption, and play an active role in the conflict between productive forces and the production relations.

By acquiescing in the extension of the neo-liberal model of growth in the left-ruled states, the CPI(M) is not only abdicating its responsibility of conscientizing the masses against the challenge of the right, but also violating the democratic rights of those among them who dare to oppose its unpopular policies – thus ultimately bleeding dry the humanitarian ideal of socialism, as demonstrated in Nandigram.

 

In the long list of shameful episodes in the history of the Communist movement (Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union and East Europe, the atrocities brought about by Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, Pol Pot’s murderous orgy in Kampuchea), Nandigram may be a tiny footnote. But while comparing them, it is not the number of deaths or rapes that we are concerned about here. We are perturbed about the common mindset that prompts the Communist rulers to resort to such acts of violation of human rights – whether in a vast nation state like China, or in a tiny provincial state like West Bengal.

Nandigram epitomizes the deep-rooted, all-pervasive crisis – economic, ideological and moral – on the brink of which the Indian old left, and the outrageously moronic leadership of the West Bengal CPI(M) in particular, are tottering today. It has been brought about by three decades of partisan politics, financial profligacy, and the corruption and criminalization in governance that invariably follow such proclivities.

The CPI(M)-led government dissipated its resources in a large measure in subsidizing a top-heavy administrative staff of officers and clerks, school and college teachers, panchayat heads and rural functionaries among others in the form of pay-rise, loans for housing estates, and various privileges, carving out thus an articulate supportive constituency, from within which its cadres and followers are recruited and a widespread power structure created. The CPI(M) ministers bring pressure on the administration to protect the party’s apparatchiks who domineer over the daily existence of the common man even in remote villages. The partisanship of this privileged and powerful elite has left vast sections of the general public seething with anger and helpless in frustration.

It was in such an atmosphere that Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, in his drive for industrialization, tried to force down the throats of the villagers of Nandigram his pet dream of a chemical hub. It appeared as the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. Having had enough of bullying by the CPI(M) apparatchiks, they decided to resist. When they refused to part with their land, true to its ugly habit of heavy-handedness, the CPI(M) employed its goons who, aided by a subservient police force, unleashed a reign of terror on the recalcitrant villagers on March 14.

 

It however backfired. Buddhadeb had to retreat in the face of the mass resistance that it provoked (in which even the disgruntled CPI(M) followers participated). What followed was a ferocious ding-dong battle over the last several months between a petulantly pugnacious CPI(M) determined to re-conquer its lost turf on the one side, and a mixed bag of opponents (a strange medley of the far-left Naxalites, the ultra-right BJP and the Islamic religious Jamait-ul-Ulema – each using the popular discontent to further its own agenda) headed by a truculent and unpersuadable leader of an ever opportunist Trinamul Congress on the other side.

Viscerally suffering from an anti-CPI(M) phobia, Mamata Banerjee stubbornly rejected repeated invitations for dialogue from the Left Front government to put an end to the continuing fracas that was threatening the daily existence of the poor people of Nandigram – even after a cornered Buddhadeb Bhattacharya had removed the main cause of the dispute by publicly announcing the withdrawal of the site for the proposed chemical hub from Nandigram. Bent on furthering their respective narrow political agendas, and devoid of any humanitarian concerns whatsoever, both the contesting parties ignored the terrible human cost that their battle entailed.

While in the first round of this avoidable bloody battle, the opponents scored a point after the March 14 incidents by driving out CPI(M) supporters from the villages and forcing them to remain in refugee camps outside all these months, in the second round on November 12 the CPI(M) won, when its armed cadres, riding on scooters and wearing their political convictions on their heads in the form of red caps, forced their way into those villages, and wrought vengeance on their opponents by killing the men folk, raping their women, and forcing others to flee. In Calcutta, a gleeful Buddhadeb Bhattacharya congratulated his cadres on ‘paying them back in their own coin.’

 

Nandigram typifies not only the depths of moral insensitivity to which the CPI(M) has descended, but also the cold-blooded hypocrisy that marks its pronouncements. After having allowed his cadres to invade Nandigram, terrorize their opponents, drive them from their homes, and destroy their belongings, Buddhadeb then made the magnanimous offer of security to those same victims asking them to return to their burnt down houses! Nandigram once again shows that when the left takes up the weapons of the right, it replicates the latter by breeding injustice, corruption, fear and hypocrisy. By abandoning the platform of democracy, it bids goodbye to the need for moral integrity without which the struggle for socialism can never be won.

To challenge the new right in India there is a need for a new left – a rather tall order for the present leaders of the CPI(M), given their intellectual bankruptcy, moral degeneration, and consummate efficiency in debauching the ideal of socialism. Since the CPI(M) cannot fill the bill, it should be naturally dislodged from the leadership of the Left Front. But then the other partners of the Front – CPI, Forward Bloc, RSP – are helpless, being numerically marginal in the Front, and unable to come up with a better alternative. Their occasional outbursts of protest (like the recent threat by an RSP minister to resign from the Left Front government in protest against the CPI(M) depredations in Nandigram), have led to the isolation of the CPI(M) even within the Left Front.

The CPI(M) is also losing allies and sympathizers from among the large Indian left and liberal intelligentsia, as apparent from their protest demonstrations in Calcutta and Delhi. This should stir up a self-questioning churning within the CPI(M), prompting its ideologically committed cadres (are there any?) to bring about a change in its present leadership, which is posing a threat to the Indian left movement by giving a bad name to the entire cause of socialism.

While the CPI(M) leaders and cadres can be left to their own devices, the Indian left has to move beyond their partisan politics to recover the dialectical link between the basic aims of socialism and the left movement, even though constrained by the limits of objective conditions under a hostile global order. Hopefully, a new generation will rescue the cause of socialism from the crumbling clutches of the old left, and reconstruct a new avenue from the various lanes and by-lanes of protest movements and mass agitations that are criss-crossing the Indian socio-political scene today.