Falling off the horse

There are two issues about Nandigram. The economic case for promoting industry, as this newspaper has consistently pointed out, is infallible. The political method employed in this case, as we argued after the tragedy, is unworkable. Private capital-led economic modernisation and Stalinist political praxis are not comfortable partners — this is a realisation the CPM in Bengal will have to come to. There is however a bigger, more immediate and a national political fallout for the CPM — the moral high horse the party habitually rides on in Delhi has taken fright after Nandigram.

Of course, it wasn’t much of a horse to begin with. But such as it was, it was in full gallop after incidents like the worker-police clash in the Honda factory in Gurgaon. The immorality of reforms, the nexus between big capital and ruling classes, the brutal logic of profit accumulation — we heard all this and more, in and outside a Parliament brought to standstill by communist MPs. Compare the Honda factory incident to Nandigram. No one denied that the police were attacked in the Gurgaon incident, just as no one denied the issue of police overreaction. No one said that the police was being aided by political activists or that the police was aiding political activists seeking to take the factory back from protesting workers. The Haryana Congress wasn’t a player. And many Congress leaders were beside themselves in post-incident anxiousness to express solidarity with workers caught up in the violence.

In a working democracy seeking growth acceleration other disputes may happen. If they do, the CPM is strongly advised to refrain from preaching political morality to others. The CPM, while it used to fight the Congress, used to boast of its democratic credentials. When it started fighting the BJP, the CPM advertised its own liberal instincts. Of course, the Congress can be undemocratic, and the BJP, illiberal, and vice versa. But in the Congress and the BJP, or in any other party, the gap between highfalutin philosophising and ground-level political reality isn’t as vast as in the CPM. The communists’ core political DNA is neither democratic nor liberal. Nandigram has virtually universalised that realisation. The next time the CPM wants to launch a political economic critique, it should, like other parties, walk on hard political ground — the moral high horse has bolted.