In the red

The picture PG drew had its share of warts. EMS, now a demi-god if not God to the cadre in Kerala, was weighed and found to be a leader with a lot of ‘‘intellectual limitations’’ and ‘‘Stalinist’’ in his handling of dissidents. Worse, he was rated ‘‘inferior’’ as an intellectual to many a CPI leader, lacking the vision to lead the party at the national level. Many of the present CPI(M) leaders including general secretary H.S. Surjeet were similarly targeted.

The party leadership was quick to play down the damaging references to EMS. But after deliberations, it let PG off with a public warning. The leadership seemed to have taken PG’s own words seriously, that the big thing happening in the communist movement the world over was a move towards democracy. Elsewhere in the controversial interview he had elaborated on what he meant by democracy: Essentially the right to dissent, right to oppose, right to put forward alternate policies and right to canvass.

The party leadership may have been bought over by the argument for politics that accommodates dissent, but not the cadre. PG is no Khrushchev. The disciplinary committees sat again to deliberate and this time expelled PG — who first became an MLA in 1954 — from all elected posts. For PG who has been disciplined by the party many times over the years — for providing sanctuary to a Naxalite leader during the Emergency, toeing the environmentalists’ line on the Silent Valley dam project and opposing the massacre in Tiananmen Square — the tune may have been familiar.

But for the party leadership, the decision to hang PG a second time for the interview is a setback. It was a confession that the CPI(M) had erred the first time in accommodating PG’s dissent. Did the leadership misjudge the cadre mood? Or was it the inability to articulate its decision convincingly to the cadre?

As with PG’s interview, the problem is EMS. Rather his absence. The present leadership neither has the dialectic skills of EMS nor the conviction to motivate its cadre towards change.

The result is a leadership unable to connect with its cadre. Instead, it follows the agenda often set by its opponents. Communist politics has never been so defensive in Kerala.

Long before A.K. Antony started talking about the need for Kerala to embrace the market, the CPM-led Left Democratic Front government had allowed private capital in professional education. Coca-Cola was invited to set up a factory.

The worst was to come when a little known literary critic accused the LDF government’s showpiece People’s Planning to be the handiwork of CIA and World Bank. It was amusing, and revealing, that the vitriolic piece that described party intellectual and MLA Thomas Isaac as a CIA spy appeared in a journal edited by the editor of Deshabhimani, the party weekly. The party secretary himself wrote a rebuttal. It is evident the ground beneath the party’s feet is slipping. The peasant-trade union segment is no longer the dominant section among the working class. A new affluent middle class that has emerged in the recent years is not willing to buy old slogans.

The CPI(M) will need a new language and politics to address the crisis. The immediate challenge will be the Ernakulam Lok Sabha election (scheduled for September) where the presence of former CPM minister V. Viswanatha Menon is certain to cut into party votes. Once the poster boy of the party in Ernakulam, Menon is being backed by a former CITU strongman V. B. Cheriyan — later expelled from the party — as well as the BJP.