MDraft Political Resolution for the CPI(M)’s 20th Congress : Living in Denial
Political Observer
The CPI(M) Central Committee has released the draft political resolution for the party’s forthcoming 20th Congress scheduled to be held in Kozhikode, Kerala in April 2012. The previous Congress of the party was held in Tamil Nadu four years ago (Coimbatore, March 29-April 3, 2008). The four years from Coimbatore to Kozhikode have been a period of unprecedented electoral reverses for the CPI(M) with the party’s tally in the Lok Sabha dropping to an all time low and the party losing power simultaneously in both West Bengal and Kerala. The electoral reverses however did not come suddenly without any prior warning – in West Bengal, the party’s exit from power merely confirmed the mass isolation and rejection the party had begun to experience in the wake of the Singur-Nandigram events.
How does the CPI(M) explain the Bengal debacle? What lessons does the party propose to learn from this debacle? The CPI(M) ranks and the entire Left camp in the country would expect the CPI(M)’s forthcoming Kozhikode Congress to provide an answer. But any reader looking for a serious analysis or answer in the draft resolution would get sorely disappointed.
The draft political resolution seeks to bypass the entire issue and present the party’s debacle in West Bengal as just a statement of facts. The only ‘analysis’ cited is a reference to the alarm raised by the party’s 19th Congress that “the role played by the CPI(M) in fighting the neo-liberal policies and the strategic alliance with the US had resulted in the Party becoming a target for the ruling classes and imperialist circles and that West Bengal, the strongest base of the Party, was already under attack.”
In other words, the CPI(M) would like us to believe that the ruling classes and imperialist circles choreographed the entire developments in West Bengal and the party has just become a victim of this controversy! How does such a fanciful explanation square up to the real trajectory of historical events?
The years 2004-2008 are still too recent to fade away from public memory. The UPA-I was sustained in power on the basis of continuous cooperation and coordination between the Congress and the CPI(M) and its Left Front allies till the latter eventually withdrew support in the wake of the Indo-US nuclear deal. In West Bengal, propelled by a roaring ‘Brand Buddha’ euphoria in the corporate media, the CPI(M) did win a massive victory in the 2006 Assembly elections. The majority of the CPI(M) was so overwhelming and the support of the corporate media so vocal, that the party thought it could easily dismiss the protests triggered by the developments in Singur and Nandigram.
True, the ruling classes, imperialist circles and corporate media all eventually turned against the CPI(M), but that only followed and not preceded Singur and Nandigram. It is only after the intensity of peasant opposition to the land acquisition in Singur became unmistakably evident to all but the politically blind, that the media started taking a critical position. And then in the wake of Nandigram, the CPI(M) became still more discredited and isolated for antagonizing the overwhelming democratic opinion in the state.
The arrogance of power with which the CPI(M) had sought to crush the resistance inspired by Singur and Nandigram continues to inform the CPI(M)’s post-debacle analysis. The draft resolution mentions the names of many states in the context of struggles against land acquisition. The name of West Bengal is conspicuously omitted from this list.
The reason becomes evident if we read the draft resolution together with various post-debacle write-ups by senior CPI(M) leaders. Let us take a look, for example, at what Prakash Karat says about Singur in his rejoinder to historian Ramchandra Guha in The Caravan. Responding to Ramchandra Guha’s article “After the Fall” (The Caravan, June 2011), Prakash Karat made this categorical comment on Singur: “If any mistake was committed, it was in the selection of the site of the land—in an area that had a Trinamool Congress MLA and where a majority of the gram panchayats were under the control of the Trinamool Congress. The 20 percent who opposed the land acquisition would not have accepted any enhanced package in any case.” (The Caravan, November 2011).
So Singur is reduced to a TMC-instigated political conspiracy against the CPI(M), and the mistake made by the Left Front government lay only in the wrong political choice of the site! This is yet another example of the CPI(M)’s ostrich-like attitude and cart-before-the-horse mode of analysis. The indignation of the peasantry against the very act of forcible acquisition of hundreds of acres of multi-cropped land, and the heroic resistance initiated first by a few local peasant women, which soon grew into a statewide democratic upsurge carries no meaning for Comrade Karat.
When the protests first erupted at Singur, the CPI(M) was riding high on its emphatic triumph in the May 2006 election, Buddhadeb Bhattacherjee had just been loudly welcomed by several corporate bigwigs including Ratan Tata, and the TMC was lying low in an utterly demoralized state, its strength in Lok Sabha reduced to a solitary seat and its tally in the State Assembly failing to reach even the bare minimum of 10% seats (30 for West Bengal) needed for being formally recognized as the Opposition. It is the Singur agitation that energized the TMC and served as the launching pad to catapult Mamata Banerjee to the Chief Minister’s chair.
When Singur was followed by Nandigram, many people wondered why the CPI(M) failed to learn any lesson from Singur. Karat’s comment on Singur being a bad political choice gives us a clue. The lesson that the CPI(M) learnt from the Singur agitation was that the next site should be a CPI(M)/Left stronghold, so TMC could not come in the way. Nandigram was precisely such an area, where the CPI(M) and the Left Front reigned supreme in every electoral sphere, and the powerful grip of the CPI(M) was backed by a long local tradition of communist politics going back to the days of the historic Tebhaga movement in the 1940s.
Yet, alerted by the Singur episode, the CPI(M) base in Nandigram reacted to the very announcement of land acquisition plans (Comrade Karat is right in insisting that no land was actually acquired in Nandigram, but he cannot deny the fact that the government was headed in the direction of large-scale land acquisition) and Nandigram became an iconic name for anti-SEZ peasant resistance in the entire country. The massacres and muscle-flexing by the CPI(M), and the CPI(M) leaders’ shameless attempt to defend the indefensible, only made matters worse for the party, discrediting and isolating the party like no other event had ever done in the history of the party’s protracted uninterrupted rule in West Bengal.
The draft political resolution calls upon the CPI(M) and its peasant and agricultural labour organizations to “take the lead to fight for the rights of the peasants on land and to oppose any forcible land acquisition.” The fact is, the CPI(M)’s role in Singur and especially Nandigram was universally condemned by every struggle against land acquisition in the country, and CPI(M) representatives in many places had to withdraw themselves from these ongoing struggles when they tried to defend the CPI(M)’s position on Nandigram. Does not the CPI(M) first owe an answer to the peasant and Left movement in the country on Singur and Nandigram before it seeks to “take the lead” in anti-acquisition struggles?
Singur and Nandigram apart, the CPI(M)’s understanding of the whole issue of land acquisition is still now highly economistic and completely divorced from any assessment of what indiscriminate acquisition of agricultural land by corporate interests and real estate lobbies may mean for agriculture and the agricultural population and also for the overall question of food security and self-sufficiency in foodgrains production. All that the CPI(M) seems to be concerned about is ‘adequate compensation’ while peasants and adivasis do not usually want to part with their land at any cost.
In his reply to Ramchandra Guha, Prakash Karat has said his party ignored the environmental question till the last century because of its ‘faith’ in science and technology. On another occasion, asked about why his party failed to oppose the SEZ Act 2005 in Parliament, Karat told his audience of JNU students that it had not occurred to the CPI(M) to look at the issue from the point of view of the agricultural population, concerned as it was only with the prospect of industrialization. One wonders if the CPI(M) will ever learn to look at the issue of land and other natural resources from the point of view of the affected people.
Another crucial question in this context concerns the CPI(M)’s stand on “Operation Greenhunt”, the repressive campaign unleashed by the Indian state in the name of curbing the Maoists, who are dubbed as the biggest threat to India’s internal security. The draft resolution is conspicuously silent on this question even as it contains several paragraphs on Maoist violence. There can be no doubt that the anarchist activities of the Maoists, the Maoist-led killing of political activists of other parties, and the political bankruptcy displayed by the Maoists in supporting various bourgeois parties, the latest example being the Maoist backing of the TMC in West BengaI, deserve to be criticized and rejected by every serious trend in the Left and democratic movement in the country.
But how can any section of the Left remain silent on Operation Greenhunt? Worse still, the CPI(M) while in power in West Bengal remained an active votary of Operation Greenhunt even as the CPI(M) central leadership tried to distance itself from this sinister campaign.
With their overriding operational emphasis on forest regions, the Maoists have acquired a degree of presence in many mineral-rich regions. These regions are also the hotbed of corporate land-grab and mining invasion, and naturally many such areas have also emerged as centres of peasant and tribal resistance to corporate plunder. One can have a critique of the mode of Maoist involvement or intervention in these resistance struggles and its consequent implications (Lalgarh in West Bengal provides a telling example), but there can be no ignoring the fact that Operation Greenhunt is aimed at crushing this resistance, and terrorizing and throttling every radical voice that supports this resistance.
The CPI(M) draft resolution is not only silent on the grave anti-democratic implications of Operation Greenhunt, but it exposes its superficial understanding of the whole issue of corporate plunder and tribal resistance, by accusing the Maoists of “pitting the tribal people against the State through armed actions by which they invite the full brunt of State repression on the tribal people.” The Indian state has remained pitted against the tribal people since much earlier periods than Maoists came into the scene, and the state offensive on tribal communities has increased manifold in the period of neo-liberal policies, when the tribal/indigenous people are seen as an obstacle to global capital’s drive to appropriate and control all natural resources of the country.
The draft resolution seeks to project a greater degree of sensitivity to the concerns of the peasantry and tribal communities, but given the CPI(M)’s arrogant and anti-peasant attitude to the issues of land acquisition in its own strongholds, and its ambiguous stand on state repression, one wonders how much of this sensitivity can ever be translated into tangible action and any credible movement. The vacillation of the CPI(M) on issues of state repression and human rights can also be seen in the section of the draft resolution dealing with the North-East and Jammu and Kashmir. The CPI(M) fails to demand scrapping of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act, all it demands is partial withdrawal of AFSPA from select areas.
The draft resolution reiterates the CPI(M)’s opposition to demands of new states like Telangana, Vidarbha or Gorkhaland. The party calls this opposition consistent with the principle of linguistic reorganization and democratization of state structure. One can understand the party’s opposition to an indiscriminate advocacy of small states as a panacea for the problems of regional backwardness or disparity, but it is not clear why the party must oppose such demands where these are rooted in historical identity aspirations of some communities or regions and backed by sustained popular mobilization. Why should one round of linguistic reorganization be treated as the last word and why should a new state be considered detrimental to the principle of federal and democratic restructuring? If Nepali language is incorporated in the Eighth Schedule of Constitution, how is the idea of a separate Gorkhaland state not consistent with the spirit of linguistic reorganization?
The draft resolution repeats the party’s traditional call for a Left and democratic platform, outlining a 17-point charter of policies and demands. Does this renewed emphasis on a Left and democratic platform mark a shift from the party’s recent experiments with a third front or secular front? A close reading of the resolution makes it abundantly clear that the CPI(M) is not contemplating anything of that sort. In real life, the notion of a Left and democratic alternative will continue to remain subordinated to the CPI(M)’s practical emphasis on forging electoral alliances and agreements with non-Congress non-BJP bourgeois parties wherever possible.
We have seen, only the other day, how all the bourgeois allies of the CPI(M) deserted it on the issue of Indo-US nuclear deal. It is also obvious that none of these allies, mostly ruling or leading opposition parties in different states, has any real interest in much of what is contained in the 17-point Left and democratic charter. The united front policy practised by the CPI(M) may have occasionally helped it win a larger number of seats, or poll some extra votes in states beyond West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, but has it helped the CPI(M) in any way in strengthening what it calls the independent role and projection of the Left or overcoming the much-lamented ‘lag’ in advancing the struggles of the basic classes? The draft political resolution for the CPI(M)’s 20th Congress does not even show the courage to acknowledge these questions.