A friend who went to St Xavier's College with me in
Kolkata thought, ‘good, bad or ugly’, India desperately needed a change. She wants to see
Narendra Modi’s ‘numerically emphatic victory’ as the causal effect of India’s
national aspiration for change. Now based in the US, I could see that she had
shed her sympathy for the Left, which was so common among college-going youths
of the 80s and 90s in Kolkata.
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| The Left no longer stokes public imagination as it used to for years after Indian independence |
A Bangalore-based techie, who spent over five years
in school with me, openly aspired and vehemently argued for a Modi government at
the Centre. Surprised by the intensity of his argument and strength of his conviction,
I was tempted to ask how his father - a veteran journalist, writer with strong
Left leaning – felt about this change in stance within the family! My
friend wasn’t apologetic, instead he underlined the fact that “these are two
generations representing different times in history”.
Narratives like these are helpful in understanding
popular discourses which shape socio-political landscapes. It becomes all the
more interesting when viewed from a distance so as not to be overwhelmed by
proximity to the very moment in time and the object of analysis.
The decline of the Left is a fact of life not only
within the geographical confines of India but across the globe. However, that doesn’t in anyway imply the decimation of the voices of protest and dissent which are so closely related to the politico-philosophical
ideology of the Left. A friend once told me, “The official Left makes way for the multi-headed
heterodox Left.”
His words sounded paradoxical then, but being a
bystander to the global upheavals at multiple levels of society one can easily
infer that socio-historic perspectives do make a difference. Not that people
necessarily analyse and act, but circumstances make them think in a definite way.
The demise of the ‘nation state’ as a dominant discourse and the rise of
‘neo-liberalism’ as an economic doctrine played catalysts to the so called socio-historic
transformation and India is no different.
The weakening of the ‘nation state’ as a fall out of
the decline in Keynesianism has withered those institutions – like the public
sector, bodies upholding public and social consumption etc. - which projected
the dominance of ideologies that for years have been the hallmark of the Left
and trademark of the essence of the Congress.
There is no denying the fact that economic
liberalisation was initiated by a Congress government in 1991 and the process in
fact, had started even before, probably during the later years of Indira Gandhi
government in the early 80s, but we had been witness to an ongoing ideological
and emotional tussle between the socialistically-inclined segment of the Congress
and its liberalising counterpart. Whenever the party was in trouble it took no
time to swing back to its ‘ex-reform’ agenda.
Similar was the case with the Left. Apart from the
crises emanating from the electoral arithmetic since 2008, the Left was
virtually hitting its head on the wall as politics as a manifestation of strong
ideological and moral compulsion took a backseat following the emergence of
‘neo-liberalism’ as a dominant doctrine.
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| Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress party decimated the Left in its bastion |
If globalisation contributed to expansive
capitalism, neo-liberalism as a doctrine single-handedly ensured that politics
was no longer string-tied to ideology and became a function of ‘service
provision and clientelism’. The symptoms were evident in West Bengal, once the
citadel of the Left. The old war horses and foot soldiers of an ideology,
many of whom spent their whole lives dreaming of and aspiring to bring about
social change were replaced by clients or beneficiaries of such a long Left
regime. These elements - heterogeneously composed of promoters, primary school
teachers, owners of rice mills and brick kilns, small traders etc. - backed
successive Left governments to ensure nothing but self-interests. That they are
not tied to any ideological or moral baggage is evident from the fact that some
of these elements quickly changed camps since the inauguration of a new Trinamool
Congress government.
The failure of the Left was not necessarily because
it allowed itself to be swamped by opportunists and hoodlums – which come with
any government, but for its failure to recognise that the lexicon of the
dominant political discourse had changed. Even when it recognised what was
lacking, the Left leadership failed to capitalise because of a short span of
time and they were not convinced whether their corrective course of action was
in right direction. Hence the party apparatus and the electorate were not
readied for a paradigm shift in policy and thinking.
The euphoria of being in power for such a long time
in Bengal, actually resulted in a sense of complacency, restraining an already
dogmatic Left leadership to peep out of the window and see for themselves how
the world had changed, even though it was palpable to those who moved out of
the geographical confines of Bengal.
The stimulants of change were in the air, as some
medical practitioner would refer to here in the West in case a patient was
suffering from flu (popularly known as Influenza in India), but the Left
leadership failed to acknowledge them. Instead, they continued to harp on ‘old
politics’ - characterised by stoking fear and insecurity, treating people as faceless numbers - as depicted
in their voter identity cards, denying the minimum dignity that a person is
entitled to, and sermonising the electorate rather than interacting with them
with due respect to their level of
knowledge and enlightenment.
In fact, during the just concluded parliamentary
elections, the strategy of the Left in West Bengal was confined to ‘negativism’
- based on their hope to encash on splitting of votes between the Trinamool
Congress, Congress and the BJP – and ‘hopeless campaign’ which relied more on
ridiculing political opponents rather than putting forward a ‘sense of hope’ - pre-dominant
in a neo-liberal set up as it empathised with individualism.
What then happens to the organic relationship that exists between
the Left and voices of dissent ?
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| Social movements now play a crucial role in airing voices of dissent |
No one expects the dissenting voices to subside with
the decline of the mainstream parties to the Left of India’s political
spectrum. More than anything else, the social movements and in some cases the
civil society organisations are playing the role of the Left. Not that there is
complete coherence in their policies and courses of actions, but some sort of
rhizomic (ginger-like, i.e. if one cuts a slice of ginger and plants it, the
slice grows like an independent rhizome but with all the traits of the mother
ginger plant) relationship exists between various social movements.
The Aam
Aadmi Party is a classic example as to how civil society organisations can
outgrow themselves from being the intermediaries between the state and the individual
to emerge as independent political formations, performing the role of the ‘social Left’. Moreover, some political figures like Mamata
Banerjee and Nitish Kumar will try to play the ‘moral Left’ leave aside the
various radical, non-state Left actors like the Maoists.
It's not the prerogative of an analyst or an observer to speculate the future, but all said and done, it seems that probably the institutional Left has exhausted its role in Indian polity.
A version of this article is published in the Financial Chronicle: "Left is dead, long live the Left"
A version of this article is published in the Financial Chronicle: "Left is dead, long live the Left"
Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant.
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com Twitter handle: @tirthankarb
All comments are personal.
