Intolerance — Kannur to Nannur

The immediate cause of their worry is not ideological but political survivalas a ruling party in West Bengal. Their defeat in the prestigious Punskura Lok Sabha byelection and the Trinamool victory in the municipal elections in Calcutta have proved a nightmare for them. These indicated the increasing erosion of their social base and a political swing in favour of the Trinamool-BJP alliance on the eve of the assembly elections. The Left Front’s crisis is compounded by the prospect of ailing Jyoti Basu’s retirement from politics. It is Basu who has sustained a dying ideology and sectarian organisation for so long by his own charisma at least in West Bengal.

The Left cadres, seemingly taught and trained in the classical Marxist mould, have yet to inherit or reconcile themselves to the norms and values ofparliamentary democracy. Thus, whenever they feel politically threatened, they respond with violence. In Kerala, RSS workers were mercilessly killed inKannur. The CPM cadres’ intolerance could be gauged by the mercilesskilling of RSS activist Jaykrishna, a school teacher, in the class-room in front of school children in February. This led the Indian media, otherwise unsympathetic to the Sangh ideology and Shakha activities, to ridicule the Communists. But the party justified its action against "RSS mafia culture". The People’s Democracy wrote: "The media should understand that Kannur became a source of news because of the violence indulged in by the RSS and they should be prepared to bring out truth as truth. To show instead the CPM activity and RSS terrorism as similar in character would be stark injustice to the people and the state." They are replaying the same trick in West Bengal. Now it is the turn of Ganashakti, another party organ, to enlighten the people about "Trinamool’s terror" in a state under their own rule.

The CPM faced a split on the question of use of violence in 1967, leading to the formation of the CPI(M-L). Nevertheless, it could not forget Telengana, the Andhra thesis and the romanticism of class struggle. While thePeople’s War Group has some basis for unleashing violence due to its avowed policy to end feudalism and liquidate landlords, the CPM has been torn between the Indian Fabians and the PWG. It is a party of political Naxalites.Even the cadres of the junior Left parties were not spared. Seven workers of the Socialist Unity Centre of India were killed in the feuds with the CPM workers in Krishnanagar (Nadia district) in West Bengal on December 16 last. In Kerala, both CPI and RSP workers have faced the Big Brother’s ire.

The temperamental intolerance of the CPM cadres is concomitant to the ideological sectarianism in its assessment of the Left-democratic movement onboth national and international planes. The CPM is one of the few communist parties of the world to still euologise Stalin as a saviour of mankind and communism. It also derided the pro-democracy movement of studentsand youth in China in June 1989 as a "counter-revolutionary rebellion".

The existence of the Left movement in a country like India is imperative. However, even the minimum task expected to be performed by the movement remains unfulfilled. Now it is not the CITU, a trade union organisation affiliated to the CPM, but the BMS, affiliated to the RSS, that is the largest trade union body in the country. Moreover, the Left seems less radical than the Swadeshi Jagran Manch-BMS even on the economic front.

Harkishan Singh Surjit, A. B. Bardhan, and Deepankar Bhattacharya cannot reject as `bourgeois’ the advice for a merger of their respective `real’ communist parties and a review of their ideology and programmes (not difficult now since there is no recognised centre of a world communist movement). For, the Communist Manifesto insists that the Communists do not form "a separate party opposed to other working class parties."

The writer teaches political science in Delhi University