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It is deeply ironic that CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury’s desire for his party to align with the Congress in the next elections, has been nixed through Opposition from his predecessor, Prakash Karat.
The real irony lies in the fact that the CPI(M) might actually have made a difference then. It still had a formidable presence in national politics, although it had declined from being the main Opposition party in the first Lok Sabha elections (1952-1957), to being a sizeable but niche fourth largest in the tenth Lok Sabha elections (1991-1996).
Yechury’s formulation for the party’s political resolution is reported to have got the backing of only a third of the top leadership. The majority backed Karat’s draft, which explicitly banned any understanding with the Congress.
The thing to note is that reversing this formulation after the matter has become public, will embarrass the party hugely in Kerala, which is the only sizeable state in which it still rules.
If the party is losing ground, it is partly a result of such hardline positions. The writing was already on several walls back in the 1990s; indeed, dividing lines as well as lines of thinking were being redrawn—except in diehard doctrinaire minds.
Perhaps those changes only brought dark thoughts about such matters as ‘running dogs of imperialism’ to minds such as Karat’s.
Important changes had taken place within Indian politics too – community-based aspirations for social mobility were replacing ideology. Political parties projected caste, religion, and regional identity more openly than before.
The Telugu Desam had set the tone for resurgent regional politics in the early ‘80s, followed later by similar parties that came up in places like Bihar and Orissa out of the wreckage of the Janata Dal.
At least with this unsettling, caste-based mobilisation was renewed. The early 1990s witnessed furious counter-mobilisation of Dalit, backward caste, and upper caste groups in states like Uttar Pradesh. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and its preceding organisations (like BAMCEF) had gained ground since the 1970s; the party emerged with five seats in the ninth Lok Sabha in 1989, including that of Mayawati.
But ideological positioning seemed less important now, even as window dressing for caste-based mobilisation.
One result of all this was that the CPI and CPI(M) lost ground in states like UP and Bihar. They used to have pockets of strong support in places like Mau, Ghazipur, and the Faizabad district—in which Ayodhya is located—until the temple movement, the politics of reservations, and the rise of the BSP swept up in great waves.
All these changes might have been happening on another planet, as far as Karat and his acolytes were concerned. They seemed quite happy to align with parties of regional and (albeit unstated) caste mobilisation, while they focused on the capitalist evil that both the Congress and BJP represented in equal measure.
On the other hand, they negotiated for a few seats in their alliances with regional parties in states like Bihar, Andhra, and Orissa. That helped them ensure a couple of seats in those assemblies.
The tallest leaders of the CPI(M) in those days were party General Secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet, and Jyoti Basu, who served as West Bengal’s chief minister for 22 years. Both wanted to align tactically with the Congress against the BJP, against the rise of Hindutva politics. But Karat and Yechury together prevented it—just as Karat has prevented Yechury now.
Much water has flowed down the Hooghly—the Periyar too—since then. Karat is no ‘young Turk’ now.
It is striking that he and his followers robustly stick by doctrinaire positions at a time when ‘left politics’ at such universities as Hyderabad Central University and JNU have come to hinge on caste identity.
The future might bring interesting times.
(The writer is a geopolitical analyst and author of ‘The Generation of Rage in Kashmir’. He can be reached at @david_devadas. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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