Look beyond the vote : Pratap Bhanu Mehta

 July 18, 2008 , Indian Express 
 The arguments over the Left’s decision to oppose the UPA government have focused obsessively on short-term questions. The first is the future of Somnath Chatterjee as speaker of the House. The issue here is simple. It is incumbent on the Left to keep the speaker’s position above partisanship. It is also incumbent on Chatterjee not to have it both ways: try and influence his party as an inside party man and yet claim that he is above party. He should simply stop engaging with the CPM’s politics if he wants to act as speaker. If he wants to express his displeasure at his party, he should resign his office and his seat, and before the trust vote.

The second distracting argument is the worry about being seen to be voting with the BJP. This is a contrived worry. The fact that two parties vote against a particular government, for different reasons, does not mean that they are suddenly helping each other. By focusing on these peripheral questions, critics are missing the larger question about the space of the Left in Indian politics.

There is apparently some dissension within the Bengal unit of the party. But most of these worries are beside the point. The CPM is vulnerable in Kerala and Bengal, but not because of its stance on the nuclear deal. It is because the governments in those states are faltering badly for different reasons. The Bengal unit is touted as a model of pragmatism; there is a surface veneer of it in the top leadership. But the CPM’s larger challenge is not that it is dominated by dogmatic Karats at the centre. It is that it cannot emancipate itself from the now corrupt and violent party cadres in Bengal. Those in Bengal worrying about the central leadership are simply trying to find an alibi for the morass they have got West Bengal into.

The CPM has also for a long time hitched its stars to the so-called social justice agenda of Mulayam and Lalu. Only Mayawati, with all her problems, still carries the political mantle of that agenda. It makes sense for the CPM to quit harbouring illusions about OBC-dominated parties as carriers of a social justice agenda. With the weakening of Lohiaite parties, the CPM could, if it played its cards right, occupy some of that Left space. Its biggest mistake was to ideologically equate Dalits and OBCs, politically and in the reservation debate. What it needed to do was to carve out a more distinctive social justice plank with Dalit small farmers and landless labourers at its centre, rather than the false promise of OBC-defined caste-based politics as such. Leaving the UPA gives it that opportunity.

Over the last decade, it is the Left, more than the BJP and Congress, which has performed the role of an opposition party. Even if its electoral strength diminishes, it will have that role, simply because everyone else is ideologically moribund. This is a regrettable fact, but a fact nonetheless. There is going to be a space for a genuine Left party. It is difficult to imagine capitalism evolving without creating the social demand for holding capital accountable. There is no contradiction between wanting capitalist development in West Bengal and also positioning yourself as a significant force against the excesses of capital. Both the Congress and BJP are so besotted with big capital that they are underestimating the potential for a backlash. It is now that the Left can position itself to channel this potential constructively, in ways that don’t thwart growth.

There is also a space left for anti-imperialist politics. There is a significant number of serious people, who have opposed the Left tooth and nail, whose liberal credentials on the economy are impeccable, whose defence of India’s openness is second to none, whose sense of the generational shift in India as profound as anyone’s, and whose keen sense of world politics hardly makes them susceptible to being prisoners of old pieties.

But these people nevertheless take the weight of anti-imperial arguments seriously. They deeply admire American society, but are sceptical of America’s role in the world. They worry about the possibility of getting implicated in a view of the world that is not of our making, and have a keen sense that American administrations will not act sagely for reasons that do not emanate merely from the persona of George Bush. Many of these arguments are more about political judgments and will be resolved only by the course of events. But it will be something of a tragedy if liberal anti-imperialism is dismissed out of hand.

The Left has been destructive of many aspects of India’s economy, its intellectual life and political institutions. Its contorted hypocrisies are mind-numbing. But which political party is free of this vice? When everyone has discovered their sense of self-worth by trashing the Left, the oddly useful role the Left has played in recent times is worth keeping in mind. Left pressure has helped us stay out of wars that are being fought on ideological terms we should not subscribe to. Even if you disagree with its position on the nuclear deal, the opposition to it has arguably strengthened India’s negotiating hand and produced a better deal. Critics have dismissed the Left’s constant references to the Hyde Act as based on a misunderstanding of what we have committed to. But this misses the larger political point the Left has at least kept alive: What will be the ideological orientation of our foreign policy? These issues will become more rather than less important after the nuclear deal goes through. In the unlikely event that it sheds its China obsession the Left could inherit the Nehruvian legacy in India’s foreign policy, a legacy that, for all its critics, still has a space.

The Left has rightly been accused of blocking economic reforms in a number of sectors. But honestly ask the question. While the reforms the Left opposes are worth pursuing, reforms far more consequential for expanding opportunity have not taken place: serious administrative reform, agriculture investment and restructuring, creating a more conducive environment for small business, delivery of public services, restoring credibility to the sovereign functions of the state, genuine decentralisation, etc. It is difficult to argue that the Left has been the main culprit in obstructing these reforms. Even those of us who oppose the Left should acknowledge room for a sensible leftism in Indian politics. Whether the Left will be a reformed left-liberal party remains to be seen.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi

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