NEW
DELHI - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's
government is now in place. The inevitable hiccups in
the appointment of a 68-member council of ministers
(cabinet) from as many as 12 alliance parties have been
sorted out. And above all, the Common Minimum Program
(CMP) has been finalized with the consent of the
left-wing parties who are extending crucial outside
support to the government.
The Communist Party
of India - Marxist (CPIM) leads the Left Front, which
includes parties such as the Communist Party of India
(CPI), the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the
Forward Bloc. The front has pledged to provide Singh's
government with support from its 64 seats.
The
CMP, hammered out by the partners in the United
Progressive Alliance, commits itself to economic reforms
"with a human face" that stimulate growth, investment
and employment. The 23-page document emphasizes the need
to establish a direct link between privatization and
social needs. It also promises to come up with a
roadmap, within 90 days, to eliminate the center's
revenue deficit by 2009, to release more resources for
investments in social and physical infrastructure.
The document assured that decisions on the
Employees' Provident Fund (EPF) would be made with the
approval of the EPF board. The leftist parties, on their
part, proposed setting up a "coordination committee"
between the Congress party and themselves to implement
the CMP.
After deciding on a "mechanism" that
will put the CMP on track, the Left Front also resolved
to support the CMP without being a signatory to it. The
CPIM, the leader of the Left Front, submitted its own
exhaustive note of recommendations it felt should be
included in the CMP. Among leftist concerns were
"infiltration and communalization" of the state and
education, the public distribution system and employment
generation. The front also suggested debt relief and
debt waivers for states and lowering of interest rates
on loans.
Surprisingly, the CMP on economic
reforms has not posed as many difficulties as was
feared. Instead, more problems have been caused by the
left's demand to downgrade "strategic" relations with
Israel and the United States evolved by the previous
government. The Left Front feels that Atal Bihari
Vajpayee's government made India subservient to US
strategic goals and thus violated the consensus that had
marked the conduct of Indian foreign policy since
independence in 1947.
The communists feel that
India should make its displeasure over US and Israeli
policies in the Middle East known to them, distance
itself from the US-centric view, and try to promote a
multipolar world. India's foreign-policy establishment,
however, seems to feel that there is no call for India
to express its view on contentious issues such as
Palestine and Iraq unless required to do so. "We are not
a member of the [United Nations] Security Council, for
instance, that we need to take a position on these
issues," commented a senior official in the Ministry of
External Affairs. New External Affairs Minister Natwar
Singh, a retired diplomat, has not opened his cards yet.
But the fact that he did not make any mention of his
favorite policy of non-alignment in his opening remarks
after assuming office may mean that he is going to be
more cautious in office than he was in opposition.
Divergent views on foreign policy thus may cause
some headaches for the Congress-led coalition government
in the days to come. But the real surprise is the easy
consensus over economic-reform policy. This is what was
supposed to cause sleepless nights for Manmohan Singh as
well as his finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram,
both of them architects of economic reforms as finance
ministers in previous regimes. Top industrialist Mukesh
Ambani's prediction seems to be holding thus far. The
Reliance Group chairman insisted last week that the
leftists would help and not hinder the pursuit of
economic reforms. He said the dependence on the left
will not be a handicap for the Congress-led government.
Indeed, he went a step further and compared Indian
communists with their Chinese counterparts and
commented: "I can assure you that the communists in
India will put them to shame [on reforms]."
This
is also the impression Asia Times Online received in a
series of discussions with various communist leaders
over the past few days. One telling phrase used commonly
by several of them while explaining their position on
various reform issues is: "We do not live in the
Jurassic Park, you know." Obviously, they have come to
realize the antediluvian nature of many of their
previous prejudices. Several Marxist leaders quote the
now-famous words of veteran communist leader Jyoti Basu,
chief minister of West Bengal for 23 years, to a
journalist at the time when Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail
Gorbachev were radically changing China and the Soviet
Union, respectively. "Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng
Xiaoping are doing what they must do for their
countries. You see, the world is changing. We communists
must change too."
On being asked why the leftist
parties were maintaining this pretense of being
communist parties when they had in practice become
social-democratic parties, like the then
"Euro-communists", Basu remarked: "It will take time to
educate the cadres. We are too rigid in our thinking. It
will take time."
The communists are indeed
taking their time changing and cadres are not being
educated fast enough. They did not allow Basu to accept
the post of prime minister offered by the United Front
in 1996. Basu later termed it a "historic blunder", as
it would have allowed the communists to extend their
influence to other parts of the country. The CPIM
politburo has again decreed that the Left Front led by
it will not actually join the Congress-led government.
The communists have thus again denied themselves an
opportunity gradually to transform into a genuine
left-of-center democratic-socialist party and influence
national polity, rather than remaining confined to two
corners of this vast land.
It remains to be seen
if this is another historic blunder. For the moment, the
leftists are content in safeguarding their clout in West
Bengal, Tripura and Kerala. By aligning completely with
the Congress, the party against which they have to
contend in the states they rule, they do not want to
hand over the entire opposition space to the ousted
Hindu fundamentalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) or its
allies. They have won almost all their seats by
trouncing the Congress. They had to fight the BJP or its
ally, the Trinamool Congress, an offshoot of the
Congress, in very few seats.
This is a tactic not
very different from the previous ruling party, the BJP,
which allowed its mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamasewak
Sangh (RSS), and sister organizations such as the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP or World Hindu Forum) and others in
the larger fraternity of the Sangh Parivar to try to
capture the opposition space.
The case of the
Left Front is, however, very different. It seeks to
maintain equidistance between the feudal Congress and
the BJP, but supports parties in the national interest
of helping cobble together a government in New Delhi on
the basis of issues. In the process, it has even allied
itself indirectly with what it calls the "communal and
fascist" BJP. It, for instance, extended outside support
to Vishwanath Pratap Singh's Janata Dal government in
the early 1990s, a government that was also being
supported by the BJP. The big issue then was corruption,
prompted by the infamous Bofors gun scandal in which
Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi was supposed to be
involved, though posthumously he has now been absolved
of all charges by the Supreme Court.
Having
ruled West Bengal for 27 years at a stretch, the
communists do not seem to have become jaded, and they
have even increased their tally in the lower house of
parliament to 64 - now the third-largest grouping in the
country after the recent elections. The key to their
success lies in land reforms, actual distribution of
land to landless farmers, security of tenure for
share-croppers, assurance of minimum wages for
agricultural laborers in rural areas, and creation of
employment for the poor.
In a recent radio
broadcast, the West Bengal chief minister, Buddhadeb
Bhattacharya, made the following points: "The latest
state-wise data [reveal that] out of the total land
distributed in the entire country, 20.4 percent has been
distributed in West Bengal alone. The share of West
Bengal in the total land in our country is just about 3
percent. Seventy percent of the beneficiaries of this
distribution are poor peasants. One million acres [about
405,000 hectares] of land were distributed among the
poor peasants; most of them are Adivasis [tribals or
indigenous people] and Dalits [lower-caste people
considered untouchable by the upper castes]. Over 1.5
million sharecroppers were given legal permission to
cultivate their land. In the production of rice,
vegetables, potatoes and fish, West Bengal has secured
first position in the country. We have been able to
attract investment of Rs2,000 crores [US$400 million] on
average in the last three years. We have given special
attention to improve health, education, the housing
sector and extra effort has been initiated to carry
drinking water to every section of society."
While clinging to their past ideological
rhetoric, however, the communist parties have proved
their social-democratic credentials the hard way - by
waging a bloody battle against their erstwhile
revolutionary colleagues in the communist movement when
the latter raised the banner of revolt and sought to
promote a communist uprising in Naxalbari village in
West Bengal. As a result, the original Maoists, or
Naxalites as they were called after the Naxalbari
revolt, have moved to the adjoining states of Bihar,
Jharkhand and Orissa, extending their influence now even
to Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and
Maharashtra. Thus the state that has remained most
successful in dealing with Maoist militancy is
communist-ruled West Bengal.
Red
struggles Communist relations with India's party
of nationalist and anti-imperialist struggle, the Indian
National Congress now in power, have been full of twists
and turns. The rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe led
to the adoption of the United Front strategy, propounded
by Georgi Dimitrov, at the Comintern's Seventh Congress
in 1935. For Indian communists it meant adopting the
tactic of united-front-from-below with the Congress
under which it, while remaining independent, had to
"carry on active work inside the organizations which
take part in the Indian National Congress, facilitating
the process of crystallization of a national
revolutionary wing among them, for the purpose of
further developing the national democratic movement".
As a result, a large number of communists
infiltrated the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) formed by
Jayaprakash Narayan in 1934, as a separate bloc within
the Congress, to foster leftist unity. They dominated
the CSP in 1939 when they had a showdown with its
socialist leadership. By that year, they had also
established a significant presence within the Congress,
accounting for 20 members. As World War II started in
1939, the Communist Party of India (CPI) first called it
an "imperialist war" and opposed it. Then it called it a
"people's war" and supported it. But after Nazi
Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, it again
opposed it. The result was a total breach with the
Congress, particularly after the latter launched the
Quit India movement on August 9, 1942.
Though
the British had lifted a ban imposed on the CPI in 1934,
and it received new-found freedom to function openly, it
came to be regarded as a party of collaborators with the
British. This created in the communist mind a need for
proving its nationalist credentials. It is this need
that explains the communists' ultra-nationalist approach
on such issues as Pakistan, Kashmir and the northeast.
The communists were no doubt infused with a
spirit of anti-feudal militancy in the 1940s. They had
inherited the militancy of the two-century-old peasant
struggles waged in different parts of the country since
the terrible famine of 1770. It is generally believed
that they rejected independence from the British by
giving the call "Ye azadi jhuti hai" (This
independence is a sham). But in the year of independence
1947 itself, the P C Joshi-led central committee of the
then united CPI - formed in 1925 - initially hailed the
announcement of independence, and promised to "fully
cooperate" with the ruling Congress party "in the proud
task of building the Indian republic on democratic
foundations".
However, in March 1948 the second
congress of the CPI in Calcutta (now Kolkata), under the
leadership of B T Ranadive, rejected independence as
jhuti (false or sham), and prepared for an armed
insurrection to overthrow the government. But again n
August 1951, the CPI declared its intention to
participate in the first general elections with a view
to setting up a new "People's Democratic Government".
Being able to form the first elected communist state
government in the world in Kerala after the 1957 general
elections confirmed its belief that change was possible
through parliamentary means.
As the CPI tried to
align itself further with the "progressive" sections of
the Congress in its quest for change through
parliamentary means, it split in 1964. Those who left
formed the CPIM, planning to establish a "people's
democracy" headed by the working class rather than the
feudal Congress. However, like the CPI, the more
successful CPIM committed itself to adopting "peaceful
means" to achieve its goals. These differences have,
however, not come in the way of the two wings of the
mainstream communist movement joining hands with each
other in forming governments in West Bengal and Kerala
since 1967.
Nowadays, the CPIM is the dominant
communist group in the Left Front, which includes small
parties such as the Forward Block, which swears by the
revolutionary ideas of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose,
whose Indian National Army clashed with the British and
who invited the Japanese army to come to India and help
liberate it during World War II. Working on the
principle that the enemy's enemy is one's friend, he had
tried to befriend the Japanese and brought them to the
Andaman and Nicobar islands, though their liberation
turned into such a brutal occupation that Indians
actually fought them with the help of the British.
Red faces The CPIM is run by a
77-member central committee that makes crucial
decisions, such as whether or not to join the central
government, but the "brains trust" of the CPIM is the
politburo. The 17-member (now 16 after the recent death
of one member) politburo is headed by a general
secretary, decisions are made collectively and no single
leader can overrule others. That is why Jyoti Basu could
not become the prime minister in 1996, even though he
was backed by the energetic 88-year-old general
secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet.
A Sikh from
Punjab, Surjeet was a freedom fighter. He joined the
freedom struggle when he was just 15. He later joined
the CPI and was active in the Kisan (farmers) movement
in Punjab. He is one of the two surviving members of the
first nine-member politburo of the CPIM, after the
parent CPI split in 1964. He is best known nationally
for his negotiating abilities with sundry political
players and parties, particularly as a kingmaker par
excellence on the eve of every general election.
Another influential figure in the politburo is
Jyoti Basu, 90. He holds the record of being the
country's longest-serving chief minister. Like many
people of his generation, he turned to the left as a
student in England and returned to join the CPI in
Bengal. He was active in the trade-union movement and a
key opposition member of legislative assembly for years.
One of the nine top leaders who founded the CPIM, he was
chief minister of West Bengal from 1977-2000.
Among the younger set, perhaps the most
influential is Prakash Karat. He became attracted to the
left movement during college days in Madras in the
1960s; went for further studies to the University of
Edinburgh; and founded the Students' Federation of India
(SFI) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in the early
1970s. The leading member of the "Young Guard" that was
groomed to take over leadership by the founders of the
party, Karat, 56, has emerged as the key ideologue of
the CPIM today.
But the most visible face of the
communists after the general secretary Surjeet is
Sitaram Yechury. Nicknamed the "baby of the politburo",
he was under 40 when he became a member of the august
body in 1992. The all-India higher-secondary topper and
St Stephen's alumnus was the SFI's best-known face in
JNU through the 1970s and is now the CPIM's most
telegenic face. He is known for his knowledge of
economics, tireless traveling, and oratorical skills in
Hindi, English, Telugu and even Bengali.
Other
members of the CPIM politburo are trade-union leader E
Balanandan, theoretician P Ramachandran, R Umanath,
farmer-leader S Ramachandran Pillai, trade unionist M K
Pandhe, leader from the Northeast Manik Sarkar,
organization genius V S Achutha-nandan, editor and
teacher Anil Biswas, Andhra Pradesh veteran Koratala
Satyanarayana, Biman Basu, who has spent his entire life
in the party commune, Malabar leader Pinarayi Vijayan
and, last but not the least, present West Bengal Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya.
It couldn't
have been easy for Bhattacharya to survive the tough job
of stepping into the formidable Jyoti Basu's shoes. But
he has not only come out of the shadow of his
illustrious predecessor, but also prospered, carving out
a separate identity for himself. He is also praised for
his untiring effort in hauling moribund industry back on
the rails in Bengal. An alumnus of the Presidency
College of Kolkata, Bhattacharya has wedded Marxism with
literature since his days in the youth movement. He has
penned plays and poems, translated Vladimir Mayakovsky
and Franz Kafka, and is now engaged in the tougher task
of wedding economic reforms and leftist politics.
The poet chief minister of West Bengal is also
called "Buddha the lone ranger" and has been rated one
of the country's best-performing chief executives. He
has disarmed many of his critics simply by refusing to
take cognizance of the darts thrown at him from all
sides. He is largely credited with the recent
unprecedented victory of the party from West Bengal.
Under Bhattacharya's stewardship, Kolkata is
fast acquiring the reputation of an
information-technology (IT) center, next in importance
only to Bangalore and Hyderabad. Recently, Wipro's Azim
Premji asked the Left Front government for a plot twice
the size of the famous Eden Gardens cricket stadium at
the emerging New Town near Kolkata to set up a campus.
The 16-hectare campus, second only to Wipro's mother
facility at Bangalore, will mean a rapid roll-out in the
state for the IT major.
"It is Kolkata which has
the potential to become the second IT hub of India after
Bangalore," said Premji. Other than Wipro, companies
such as TCS, IBM, Cognizant and Lexmark have arrived.
About 30 IT companies set up base in the city last year.
Most of them are in the business process outsourcing
space, working for both the United States and the United
Kingdom. Observers are citing the state's huge talent
pool and low costs as reasons for attracting IT
investors.
Boosting the state government's
morale, the software professionals who had left the city
to look for jobs elsewhere were reportedly returning
home to take up jobs. According to a web-exclusive
report in the Economic Times, unlike in many parts of
India, including the capital city Delhi, the power
supply is actually reliable in Kolkata. Costs are even
lower than in Bangalore and Mumbai. And there's a huge
supply of talent from nearby engineering schools.
Above all, the Marxist government is going all
out to woo the IT industry. During a nationwide strike
in February, IT companies were given yellow stickers to
place on workers' cars identifying them as providing an
essential service, and were promised security. Software
exports from West Bengal, which hopes to capture 20
percent of the Indian export market by 2005, have
doubled in 2002-03. Software exports stood at $289
million during the period against $167 million in
2001-02, figures published by the state directorate of
industries said.
It is a safe bet, it would
appear, to assume that while communists will continue to
espouse a lot of Marxist rhetoric, they will not mind
the government at the center following the policies they
are themselves following in the states they rule. Apart
from disinvestment of loss-making public-sector
undertakings, some non-strategic profit-making units can
also be allowed to be sold on a case-to-case basis. As
no particular ministry undertakes this task in the
present government, the Finance Ministry itself will
take up the job.
The message of the election
verdict, as understood by both the Congress and the
left, is that reforms have to be pursued with a human
face. The Congress itself is going to be cautious in
taking up some aspect of the reforms with the same zeal
as the Vajpayee government. The situation will probably
be somewhat like the past two years of Manmohan Singh's
tenure as finance minister when, after a series of
defeats in state elections, then prime minister
Narasimha Rao asked him to go a bit slow.
The
Left Front will probably have no objection to much of
what the Singh-Chidambaram duo come up with, as long as
they do their job imaginatively and creatively. The real
battle is likely to be on foreign-policy formulations,
particularly vis-a-vis the US and Israel.
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