Carrillo’s argument that other political parties should exist, indeed that these parties might even sometimes be correct in their views, was seen by Ranadive as ‘giving a permanent charter of existence to non-Marxist, anti-Marxist and unscientific ideologies’. In fact, it amounted to nothing less than a ‘liquidation of the Leninist concept of party’. Further, the encouragement of a diversity of thought outside the sphere of politics was ‘the final denigration of the Marxist-Leninist Party in the name of freedom for all its members to profess any opinion they like on any subject’. In contrast to the heterodox Spaniard, Ranadive insisted that ‘the Party’s outlook and the outlook of its members is determined by their firm allegiance to Marxism-Leninism and must be consistent with it’.
Ranadive’s own riposte to the renegade Carrillo rested heavily on quotes from Marx, Engels and Lenin, the Holy Trinity whose works and words he himself never questioned, emended, or—Heaven forbid—challenged. The Indian Communist complained that ‘Carrillo turns a blind eye to Lenin’s teachings’; worse, ‘a large part of his argument is lifted from bourgeois writers and baiters of Marxism’.
Carrillo’s views, in fact, sound very much akin to those who wrote the Indian Constitution, and who nurtured the infant republic in its early years of existence. Parliamentary democracy based on universal adult suffrage, the proliferation of political parties, a mixed economy with space for both public and private enterprise, a non-aligned and independent foreign policy, the freedom of creative expression—these were the ideals that animated the Constitution and Republic of India at its creation, and the ideals embraced by Santiago Carrillo some three decades later.
These ideals, however, remained anathema to a prominent Indian Communist. It is necessary to point out here that it was the selfsame B.T. Ranadive who, in 1948, led Communists in an insurrection against the infant Indian state. At Independence, the general secretary of the then undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) was P.C. Joshi, a cultured, sensitive man who understood that freedom had come through the struggle and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Indians. A statement issued by the CPI thus acknowledged that the Congress party, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, was ‘the main national democratic organization’. Under Joshi’s direction, the CPI said it would ‘fully co-operate with the national leadership in the proud task of building the Indian republic on democratic foundations …’
However, by the end of 1947, P.C. Joshi found his line challenged by the radical faction of the CPI. They claimed that the freedom that India had obtained was false—‘Ye Azaadi Jhooti Hai’, the slogan went—and asked that the party declare an all-out war against the Government of India. The radicals were led by B.T. Ranadive, who saw in the imminent victory of the Chinese Communists a model for himself and his comrades. A peasant struggle was already under way in Hyderabad, against the feudal regime of the Nizam—why not use that as a springboard for the Indian Revolution?
On the 28th of February 1948—four weeks after Gandhi’s murder—the CPI leadership met in Calcutta, and confirmed that the revolutionary line would prevail. Joshi was replaced as general secretary by Ranadive, who declared that the Indian government was a lackey of imperialism, and would be overthrown by armed struggle. Party members were ordered to foment strikes and protests to further the cause of the revolution-in-the-making. Bulletins and posters were issued urging the people to rise up and ‘set fire to the whole of Bengal’, to ‘destroy the Congress Government’, and move ‘forward to unprecedented mass struggles. Forward to storm the Congress Bastilles.’
The government, naturally, came down hard. Some 50,000 party members and sympathizers were arrested. These arrests forestalled Ranadive’s plans to crystallize strikes in the major industrial cities of Bombay and Calcutta. It took some more time to restore order in Hyderabad, where a recalcitrant Nizam was refusing to join the Indian Union, egged on by militant Islamists (known as ‘Razakars’) who were making common cause with the local Communists. But in September 1948 the Indian Army moved into Hyderabad; slowly, over a period of two years, the areas where the Communists were active were brought back under the control of the state.
In 1950, the Ranadive line was formally abandoned, and the Communists came overground to fight the General Elections of 1952. In 1957, the Communist Party of India came to power in Kerala, via the ballot box. Seven years later, the party split into two factions, the newer and more numerous group calling itself the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In 1967, the CPI(M) were part of winning coalitions in both West Bengal and Kerala. Later, in 1977 and 1980 respectively, they came to power in these states more or less on their own.
Since 1957, then, parties professing a creedal allegiance to ‘Marxism-Leninism’ have been in power for extended periods of time in several states of the Union. And yet, these successes could not succeed in reconciling leading Communists to ‘bourgeois’ democracy. For, B.T. Ranadive’s critique of Santiago Carrillo was really a warning to those among his comrades who might likewise think of revising the classical postulates of Marxism-Leninism. It is quite extraordinary, yet also quite in character, that Ranadive chose—so soon after his party had come to power by democratic means in the large and very populous state of West Bengal—to let loose this fusillade against parliamentary democracy, the mixed economy, freedom of expression, and non-alignment in foreign policy.
III
I have resurrected B.T. Ranadive’s views here not simply out of a historian’s interest in the strangeness of the past. For, the prejudices he held—and so vigorously articulated—are unfortunately still quite widespread in the CPI(M) today. In practice the party’s ideologues seem somewhat reconciled to parliamentary democracy, but they retain an aversion to private enterprise, are still hostile to intellectual debate and dialogue, and cling to a faith in their party’s infallibility.
I have long held that the central paradox of Indian Communism is that its practice is vastly superior to its theory. Where other kinds of politicians have eagerly embraced the Page Three culture, many Communists still do mix and mingle with the working people. Communist leaders and activists are probably more intelligent than their counterparts in other parties, and—by and large—more honest. (To be sure, there have been allegations of corruption in recent years against some Kerala CPI(M) leaders, but the amounts they are said to have pilfered are pitiful in comparison with scams associated with politicians in other parties.)
It may be that of all the major parties in India, it is only the leaders of the CPI(M) who do not have Swiss bank accounts. (Some do not even have Indian bank accounts.) Their views may be out of date, and even bizarre, but in their conduct and demeanour most major leaders of the CPI(M) are—the word is inescapable—gentlemen. As a bourgeois friend of mine puts it, they are the kind of people in whose home she can safely permit her teenaged daughter to spend the night.
That Communist leaders are less greedy and corrupt, that they do not live or endorse luxurious lifestyles, is one very important reason why, despite their irrational and often antediluvian beliefs, they have enjoyed power for such long stretches in the states of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. In these three states they built their strength from the bottom up, by working with the poor and the excluded. They have organized landless labourers, poor peasants, slum dwellers, industrial workers, and the refugees of Partition, in fighting for better wages, greater access to land, better housing facilities, and the like.
Decades of patient and often selfless work with subaltern groups has resulted in success at the ballot box. In Kerala and Tripura this success has been episodic, with Communists alternating with Congress-led regimes. In West Bengal it has been continuous. Here, they held power uninterruptedly from 1977 to 2011. (In terms of size and influence, Tripura does not compare with West Bengal and Kerala. I shall therefore exclude it from the rest of this essay, only noting that its CPI(M) chief ministers—Nripen Chakraborty, Dasarath Deb and now Manik Sarkar—have exemplified the unostentatious lifestyl
es and personal integrity characteristic of the best Indian Communists.)
In thirty-four years in power, the Left Front in West Bengal had but two chief ministers—Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. So far as I know, neither was personally corrupt. As men of culture, both appealed to the bhadralok, or middle class. Yet their record as administrators is something else altogether. Under their leadership, West Bengal has performed poorly on conventional indicators of social and economic development. As the 2011 Annual Survey of Education Report showed, the quality of teaching in schools in West Bengal is worse than in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Meanwhile, in terms of per capita income, West Bengal ranks sixteenth among the twenty-eight states of the Indian Union. Development economists place it in the ‘backward’ rather than ‘forward’ group of states in India. This classification runs counter to the self-image of the Bengali bhadralok and of the Marxist, with the former claiming the legacy of India’s first modernizers, and the latter claiming to constitute the vanguard of humanity itself.
The vanity and self-regard of the bhadralok does, or did, have a concrete basis. Bengal was once ahead of the rest of India. India’s first modern social reformers, first modern entrepreneurs, first scientists of world class, first globally influential writers and film-makers, all came from Bengal. On the other hand, Marxism’s sense of its own superiority is less hard to accept. Our scepticism is mandated not so much by the fall of the Berlin Wall, or by the barbarism and brutality of Communist regimes before the Wall fell, but by domestic and provincial events. If, after all the advantages that West Bengal started with, it still lags behind the more advanced parts of India, surely the blame lies to a large extent with the party that ruled the state continuously for three-and-a-half decades?
The Left Front, dominated by the CPI(M), came to power in West Bengal in 1977. In the first decade of its rule, it launched Operation Barga, a programme to protect the rights of sharecroppers and tenants. This was mostly successful, and widely applauded. Yet it was not followed by reforms in other spheres. There was no effort to improve the school education system; in fact, by discouraging the teaching of English, the Communists gave the children of the state a grave handicap (from which they are yet to recover). The state of public health remained as shambolic as before. The building of rural roads and bridges was not a priority.
If, apart from Operation Barga, rural development was largely given the go-by, the urban and industrial sectors suffered even greater neglect. Fear of working-class militancy led to the flight of capital to other states of India. The hatred of the West, so much a part of Indian Communist discourse, turned off foreign investors. When the middle class reacted by voting against the Left Front, the latter responded spitefully, by relegating urban renewal further down their list of priorities.
One of the more unpleasant things about Communists in general (and Leninists in particular) is their desire to capture and control public institutions. It was a desire the Bengal Communists fully shared, and which they enacted on a large scale, in both city and countryside. The police came under the control of the party cadres, helping them fix local elections and capture the panchayats. The appointment of senior bureaucrats, and of vice chancellors, was in the hands of the party.
The control of the bottom from the top ensured control of the middle as well. The history department of Calcutta University, once India’s finest, was turned into a loyalty parade of the CPI(M). One had to be a member or sympathizer of the party to be appointed to a professorship. Thus scholars as fine and productive as Gautam Bhadra, Lakshmi Subramaniam, Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Rudrangshu Mukherjee were pushed out of a department they had studied and taught in. Ironically, these were all left-wing historians; but they were all independent-minded academics for whom scholarship always superseded party loyalty. Conditions were made so difficult for them that they had no option but to leave. This experience was entirely typical. What happened here, in a particular department of a particular university, occurred in dozens of other departments, universities, offices and corporations across the state.
In 2006, after decades of demonizing capitalism and capitalists, the Left Front in West Bengal decided to bring in the demons themselves to develop their state. The Salim Group of Indonesia was allotted 40,000 acres to create a ‘Special Economic Zone’. The major Indian industrial house, the Tatas, were invited to start a car factory. These projects, in Nandigram and Singur respectively, became controversial, since local peasants were not consulted about them, nor were they given any meaningful stake. Rather, their land was abruptly notified and taken over by the state; when the peasants protested, the police, aided by party cadres, attacked them, often brutally.
Forcible acquisition of agricultural land had been resisted in other parts of India. The Left Front in West Bengal could have forged a new model of industrialization, by paying a fair market price for land, or by not buying land outright but paying a substantial annual rental, or by training and educating peasants beforehand, so that they could get well-paying jobs in the factories built on their land. Instead, both projects were implemented in an authoritarian, top–down manner. The violence in Nandigram, in particular, deeply scarred the image of the CPI(M).
The one notable success of the CPI(M) in West Bengal has been the relative lack of communal violence. In 1984, when Sikhs were being butchered all across North India, the Sikhs of Kolkata—many of whom were turban-wearing taxi drivers, and hence very visible and vulnerable—were barely touched. The ripples of the Ayodhya movement never reached the state. Unlike in Orissa and Gujarat, missionaries in remote outposts have not been attacked. Sikhs, Muslims and Christians have felt safe in Communist-ruled West Bengal—and have been made to feel safe.
What then of Kerala? Unlike West Bengal, this is a state that has an outstanding record in social development. Its literacy rates are comparable to, and its health services better than, the world’s richest and most powerful country. What share of the credit for this must go to the Communists?
The short answer is a fair amount, but not as much as that commonly accorded them by party followers or fellow travellers. The definitive account of the Kerala miracle is Robin Jeffrey’s Politics, Women and Wellbeing. In this and other books, Jeffrey shows that the progress in education, health, gender and caste emancipation in Kerala is owed to a complex interplay of several factors, which include: (1) The fact that one very numerous caste, the Nairs, are matrilineal; (2) The fact that another very numerous caste, the Ezhavas, were organized by the remarkable Sree Narayana Guru (1855–1928) to fight against Brahminical orthodoxy and liberate themselves through education. Notably, Narayana Guru’s influence was not restricted to Ezhavas alone. He was emulated by upper-caste and Muslim reformers, who likewise urged their followers to engage with and adapt to the modern world; (3) The fact that Kerala had progressive maharajas who built schools and sent brilliant students of all castes (and both genders) on scholarships abroad; and(4) The fact that the state also had very active Christian institutions which emphasized the importance of education, including women’s education.
I do not want to apportion percentages, so will not say that for the admirable performance of the Malayalis in the social sector, the Communists should get exactly 20 per cent of the credit, the balance being equally distributed among the other contenders. So let me put it qualitatively: their contribution has been more than modest, but less than definitive. In the absence of caste reformers, missionaries, maharajahs, matriarchs, etc., the human development record of Kerala may have been closer to that of West Bengal’s. It must also be said that the Congress in Kerala has been more socially progressive, and less morally corrupt, than the Congress in other states. When they are in power, they have maintained the quality of schools and hospitals, for example.
Where the Kerala Communists perhaps deserve more credit (as in West Bengal) is in their energetic promotion of land reforms. On the other side, and like their Bengali comrades again, they have packed universities and other state institutio
ns with party loyalists, and promoted a culture of mindless militancy among organized workers, scaring off investors and entrepreneurs.
In economic terms, Kerala, unlike West Bengal, shall be placed with the forward rather than the backward states of the Union. The official state government website claims that the per capita income of Kerala is the highest in the country; more objective assessments place it at sixth or seventh. Unlike West Bengal, there is no desperate poverty in Kerala. A key reason for this is the mass migration of Malayalis to the Gulf. The economy of Kerala has for some decades now been kept afloat by remittances. This is not a sustainable model—what happens when the oil runs out? With the state’s very high literacy rates, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram, rather than Bangalore and Hyderabad, should really have been in the forefront of the software revolution. One reason why this has not happened is the anti-industrialism and anti-westernism of the CPI(M).
IV
In an essay published on the eve of the 2009 General Elections, I had hoped for the emergence of one or more of four alternatives to the identity politics of the present. These alternatives were: a Congress that was not beholden to the dynasty; a Bharatiya Janata Party that was not remote-controlled by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; a united and reform-oriented Left; and a new party altogether, this based on the aspirations of the expanding middle class.
Despite six decades of democracy and development, India remains a deeply inegalitarian country. Across cities and within states, there are large and perhaps growing inequalities of income, status, education, and access to health care. However, the concerns of the underprivileged are rarely reflected in the media and rarely acted upon by the major political parties.