'What's left of the Left'

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. 

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.

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 ?

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"

Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 

He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
Twitter handle: @tirthankarb
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