Imagine a politician
proclaiming publicly: Our party is experienced in eliminating its
opponents. We make lists of our enemies and then kill them. Not long
ago, we killed one by shooting, one by stabbing, one by cutting him
to pieces. Everything is in our hands.
Words to
this effect were uttered, before TV cameras, by a senior CPM leader
in Kerala the other day. Only a few days earlier, a former CPM
leader who had deserted the party had been waylaid and murdered, his
face mutilated with some 50 machete blows. Most of the people
arrested in that case were associated with the CPM. Just when the
party's image had hit rock bottom, its own leader comes up with the
statement that murder is party policy.
The top
leadership of course rushed in with denials. But it made no impact on
public sentiment. Never was the CPM in Kerala in so discredited a
situation. In the other citadel of the party, Bengal, it had already
fallen. The party's central leadership in Delhi was no more than a
bystander in both cases. It had neither the imagination nor the guts
to check unpopular local activities.
Many will no
doubt rejoice at what are clearly desperate days for the CPM, a rebel
group that broke away from the Communist Party of India, grew
mightier than the parent, ruled West Bengal unchallenged – and
unchallengeable – for almost three and a half decades, and wielded
power in Kerala in electoral cycles. The CPM has no one to blame but
itself for its plight. It is a pity, nevertheless, that in the
seventh decade of practising democracy, we do not have a progressive
party that can challenge the two reactionary theses that have
monopolised the electoral space, namely, dynasticism and communalism.
Ironically,
the CPM was itself an obstacle to progressive politics. It could have
used its early popularity to identify itself with the people's
interests and fight for their causes, as P.C.Joshi did with the
Indian People's Theatre Association, for example. Instead, it grew
very rich in Kerala and Bengal, its top leaders developed a taste for
the good life, and its unions turned exploitative with strong-arm
measures to sustain a no-work-more-pay philosophy.
It could
have taken a leaf from communist parties in other countries and
adjusted its dogma to suit the changing times. But to do so, it had
to be attuned to the Indian reality as distinct from textbook
precepts. One of the more respected communist leaders, Mohit Sen,
said: “In India as elsewhere communists were patriots and champions
of the working people. But they were not nationalists. They did not
know India”.
Stalin was
actually a Russian nationalist. Mao Zedong was a nationalist out and
out. Even Lenin, although an internationalist, was pragmatic enough
to devise the supra-Marxist theory of a vanguard leading the
proletariat. Ho Chi Minh, an internationalist by training, was so
focussed on the conditions of the Vietnamese people that General
Giap's barefoot soldiers could defeat the world's mightiest military
machine
In the last
couple of decades, India's communist leaders not only did not know
India; they did not know they had missed the bus. In a labour centre
like Bombay, in the peasant country of Punjab and in the
revolutionary soil of Andhra, they did not gain a toehold. In Bengal
there were plenty of signs of popular disenchantment, but when defeat
finally came, the party chief said it was “totally unexpected”.
In Kerala the party chief still refuses to see what all others can
see.
India can do
without such a party. But it can also do without the sycophantic
mindset that sustains the concept of hereditary power. It can do
without the game of inciting communal emotions for political ends.
What a mature democracy needs is a choice of democratic platforms –
like Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism. If the decline and fall of
communism takes us a step closer to such a denoeument, even the
politics of murder would not be in vain.