The Left
Needs Rethinking,
Not Abject Apologia
By Praful Bidwai
02 January,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Prabhat Patnaik has done what
no other intellectual allied to West Bengal's Left Front has even attempted
after Nandigram: namely, try to turn the tables on Left-leaning critics
of the CPM by gratuitously attacking them for their " messianic
moralism" and their presumed "disdain" for "the
messy world of politics".
His agenda
goes well beyond defending the CPM or apologising for one of the most
shameful episodes in the Indian Left's history, involving the killing
of peasants, devastation of thousands of livelihoods, sexual violence,
and gross abuse of state power. It is to declare all criticism of the
CPM's policies and actions illegitimate and misconceived, however sympathetic
or inspired by radical ideas it might be.
The impact
of Patnaik's article will be to prevent rethinking within the CPM, which
could produce course correction. Ironically for Patnaik, it will only
strengthen the party's neoliberal orientation and the "cult of
development" that neoliberalism spawns, which he rails against.
Worse, it
will harden the West Bengal CPM's readiness to brutalise peasants and
workers (in whose name it speaks) in the interests of the rich and powerful,
like the Tatas, Jindals, and the Salim group which is a front for Indonesia's
super-corrupt Suharto family.
Patnaik is
wrong on both facts and logic. His claim that "thousands"
of CPM supporters in Nandigram were forced to become refugees for months
is backed by no credible or independent source. Citizens' inquiries,
including by a People's Tribunal consisting of a retired High Court
Chief Justice, say that refugees from CPM-inspired violence outnumbered
"dislodged" CPM cadres by a factor of 10, if not 20.
BUPC-Trinamool
thugs too practised violence, but they couldn't have matched the state-assisted
clout or scale of the militant operations of the well-oiled party apparatus.
Leaks from the CBI report on the March violence, just submitted to the
Calcutta High Court, speak of extensive collusion between CPM cadres
and the police, which still continues.
As numerous
reports in Tehelka, Hard News and Outlook have established, "recapturing"
Nandigram wasn't an act of "desperation", which followed "the
failure of every other effort at restoring normalcy". It was a
planned punitive operation, premised on the abdication by the state
of its fundamental responsibility to protect the life and limb of all
citizens. The government allowed party thugs to wreak havoc through
hostage-taking, arson, illegal confinement, rape, and of course, outright
killing.
Equally important
was Nandigram's policy context: an indefensible neoliberal plan to impose
an SEZ on the people. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee indeed apologised for
his "mistakes" in Nandigram. But he hasn't even remotely changed
his neoliberal orientation, nor dropped the SEZ plan. He has merely
relocated the chemical hub to Nayachar, a geologically unstable island,
where no industrial activity, least of all hazardous chemicals production,
is permissible under the Coastal Zone Regulations.
For all the
apologies and confessions, Bhattacharjee's government appealed in the
Supreme Court even against the High Court order for the payment of compensation
to Nandigram's victims—a disgraceful thing for a Left-led regime
to do. For eight long months, the victims were offered, and got, nothing
from the government or the CPM.
At any rate,
Nandigram's people don't feel assured that the chemical hub story is
over. PWD Minister Kshiti Goswami, no less, has publicly said that the
CPM's real plan is to build the hub at Nandigram, and use sparsely populated
Nayachar to rehabilitate the displaced.
Patnaik doesn't
even pause to reflect on why the bulk of the progressive intelligentsia
in West Bengal, and perhaps much of it in the rest of India, has been
so critical of the CPMon Nandigram. He wishes away the enormity of what
happened on the blind presumption that "the Party" must be
right—as always, because by definition, it is with "the people".
It's not
"intellectuals" alone who have turned critical of the CPM.
Its own Front allies, including the CPI, Forward Bloc and RSP, have
publicly accused it of acting unilaterally and dissociated themselves
from its Nandigram actions. The Bloc has decided to contest next May's
panchayat elections independently. The RSP too will probably do that.
The CPI has publicly criticised the CPM's high-handed conduct and some
of its economic policies.
These cracks
in left unity have appeared for the first time in 30 years. If the Front
splits, the CPM will have to carry the blame.
If Patnaik
is seriously concerned with political praxis —as he says he is
in his attack on "moral messiahs"—, these cracks should
worry him far more than a few individuals' comments comparing (although
not equating) certain similarities in the violence in Bengal with patterns
in the pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat.
This writer
has always maintained that the two are not comparable in quality, scale,
intention or effect. Referring to Gujarat's communal carnage doesn't
help understand what happened in Singur and Nandigram under a secular
government blinded by its zeal for industrialisation-at-any-cost, and
led by a party whose 30 years in power have turned it conservative,
and encouraged it to develop arrogant intolerance towards people within
its own plebeian base.
Despite all
these qualifications and distinctions, it's impossible for Marxists,
socialists or progressives to condone either the overt violence of Nandigram,
or the covert violence inherent in the elitist, neoliberal developmentalism
pursued by the Left Front. Patnaik simply fails to make, indeed even
attempt, this discriminating judgment.
Patnaik's
principal explanation for a large number of Left-leaning intellectuals
turning critical of the CPM is twofold: " most" of them "are
in any case strongly anti-organised Left, especially anti-Communist";
and second, many who "till yesterday were with the Left in fighting
communal fascism" have changed their stance. "With the …
perceived weakening of the BJP … and …. the communal fascist
forces, a certain fracturing of the anti-communal coalition was inevitable
…"
The first proposition begs the question: "in any case" says
it all. Worse, it conflates disparate categories such as "erstwhile
'socialist' groups", NGOs, Naxalite sympathiers, and "Free
Thinkers" (a small, long-extinct student group in JNU). It fails
to ask why many intellectuals who have had a lifelong commitment to
the Left, and in particular the Communist Parties, feel disillusioned
after Nandigram.
The second
proposition assumes that the Left led the anti-communal struggle, which
became critically important with the BJP's ascendancy in the mid-1980s.
This is open to question—despite the contributions of groups like
Sahmat and Sanskriti.
Frankly,
the anti-communal fight was led by civil society organisations, public
intellectuals, and combative activists who dissected BJP-directed textbooks,
questioned Hindutva's claims, and valiantly took on Parivar goons. Even
journalists played a role, as did feminists. The Left, in particular
the CPM, certainly participated in the struggle. But leadership is another
matter.
The West
Bengal Left Front didn't stop LK Advani's rath yatra in 1990. Bihar's
Laloo Prasad Yadav did. After the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, the CPM and
its front organisations were marginal in exposing the culprits or providing
relief to the victims.
Immediately
after the 2002 Gujarat carnage, the Left Front allowed Praveen Togadia
to hold provocative meetings in Bengal, in which he justified the butchery
of Muslims.
Similarly,
the alliance between the organised Left and civil society groups and
the progressive intelligentsia is not coming apart mainly under the
impact of the BJP's decline. This perception of decline is neither widely
shared nor a driving force of the change in question.
That change
is primarily attributable to the CPM's increasing tilt towards neoliberalism,
especially in the states where it rules, its growing sectarianism towards
other Left currents, and its resort to strong-arm tactics against its
own former constituency. Patnaik is no stranger to these traits in Kerala,
where his attempt to combat pro-rich policies has met with stiff resistance
from the CPM's dominant pro-neoliberal faction.
If Patnaik's
basic premises are flawed, his charge that the Left's intellectual critics
wish to further the destruction of politics and withdrawal from political
praxis is patently tendentious. He doesn't cite a single instance to
show that these detractors want to establish their "intellectual
hegemony". Indeed, the second half of the article is a series of
peevish assertions without rationality or roots in reality.
Patnaik makes
a false dichotomy by counterposing politics to morality. He altogether
misses the point that Leftists are not amoral, but have different, indeed
superior and more refined, moral standards than Rightists. They should
be scrupulous in adhering to an ethics that makes fine distinctions
between constitutional and unconstitutional means, is strong on justice,
equity and gender equality, is genuinely inclusive, non-divisive and
anti-sectarian, and espouses peace and negotiated conflict resolution.
Particularly
objectionable is the charge that the "detractors" distrust
politics in the same way as does the "development cult" propagated
by Manmohan Singh, which segregates it from politics, considered dirty
by the middle class.
From here
on, Patnaik indulges in pure fantasising: "The revolt against the
CPI(M) is simultaneously a revolt against politics. The combination
of anti-communism with a rejection of politics in general gives this
revolt that added edge …"
Most of those
whom he targets are in fact intensely political and have dedicated great
energies to building a politics based on an abiding commitment to the
poor, to principle, and to collective dialogue and action within the
broad Left.
Perhaps the
most deplorable part of Patnaik's argument is the "two-camps"
theory—a formulation reminiscent of Stalin's crude dialectical
materialism. This can be used, and was used, to justify suppression
of freedoms and rights, fake trials, Gulags, invasions, brutalisation
of exploited people, indeed, mass murder.
You can't
define the "people's camp" by including certain parties regardless
of their ideologies, policies or practices, and condemn others as "the
enemy of the people" (a quaint-sounding phrase in the 21st century!)
Worthy partisanship
does not lie in mindlessly supporting "my party, wrong or right",
but in advancing a politics that places the poor, exploited and oppressed
at its core.
A final point.
One of the most encouraging and healthy developments of the past decade
has been the mutually empathetic dialogue and collaboration between
the organised Left, on the one hand, and people's movements, civil society
organisations and committed Left-leaning intellectuals. This spans a
range of issues, including neoliberal globalisation, the people's right
to food and employment, human rights, peace and nuclear disarmament,
opposition to Empire and hegemonism, and of course, secularism.
Patnaik's
article is written not in the spirit of promoting such a dialogue or
alliance. It will discourage, censor and delegitimise it—to the
detriment of all concerned. Nothing can be more unfortunate
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