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Business News/ Opinion / The relevance of the Left
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The relevance of the Left

The change in leadership is expected to give it the required momentum to re-emerge as a relevant political voice

Photo: K. Srinivas/MintPremium
Photo: K. Srinivas/Mint

Over the weekend, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, the largest surviving Left party, underwent a change in leadership. Out went Prakash Karat and in came Sitaram Yechury as the party’s fifth general secretary. This transition in power comes at a time when the organized political Left is desperately seeking to revive itself. The change in leadership is expected to give it the required momentum to re-emerge as a relevant political voice. But will it?

A good reality check is the upcoming International Labour Day on 1 May—the 130th anniversary of an agitation that originated in Chicago and put in place what is today the standard eight-hour work shift. Not sure how many, including among the new class of industrial workers, would recall the significance of this day in less than two weeks from now.

Ironic. The issues—like inequality—championed by the Left for so long have never been more relevant. And, yet, we find the Left in India at its lowest ebb.

A brilliant charticle that Mint ran on Friday aptly summed up its sorry state. In 1991, it had representatives in the Lok Sabha from nine states, and now it is restricted to West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. Worse, its vote share in West Bengal—where it has the best record ever having ruled the state for 34 years on a trot—has shrunk from a little over 50% in 2006 to less than 30% in the 16th general election; worse, it contested 93 seats nationally and managed only a 3.2% vote share, the lowest ever.

The thing is that the Left was never a dominant political force and, hence, the numbers may not be the right metric to measure its significance on the national stage. It was, however, till as recently as in 2004, a very influential political voice in determining the national agenda. It was most evident when Jyoti Basu, the then chief minister of West Bengal, was tossed up as a consensus candidate to head a coalition at the centre in the mid-1990s. Consequently, what it lacked in numbers, it made up with intellectual heft—punching way above its weight. Food for thought for Yechury is to figure how things have come to such a pass in the first place and whether the Left can climb out of the hole that it has dug for itself.

There are broadly three reasons as to why the Left is at a crossroads. One, very obviously, the Stalinist construct of the organization creates overweening power in the hands of a handful who have lost connect with reality. The resulting vertical structure views everything through a narrow prism. This stasis has only made the party more dysfunctional; it treats any criticism with a purge. The same charticle quoted earlier points out that less than 10% of the CPM are less than 25 years of age (contrast this with the fact that 50% of India is in the same demographic category). It further quotes the party’s 20th party congress documents to show that only two delegates out of 727 were below 30 years.

At the same time, mass-based organized industry (like jute and textile mills) in urban settings have ceased to exist. The traditional low-skilled, blue-collar workers have been replaced by highly skilled and fewer people on the assembly line of the new automated factories. The size of the organized workforce has shrunk even as that of casual labour—where the Left does not exist—has grown sharply in the last 10 years. Effectively, the traditional class struggle has been redefined.

Second, India has transformed since the new Millennium. It is materially much better off. A series published by Mint and based on Census 2011 revealed the people of India distinctly traded up in the first decade of the new Millennium. To put it simply, people who were walking are now cycling, those using two-wheelers have graduated to four wheelers; those drawing water from a pond now draw from a well, while those drawing water from one community tap get piped water now.

Third, flowing from the above, the number of the absolute poor has declined to a historical low of nearly 22% (some may dispute the numbers, but one can’t question the fact that it has fallen dramatically). What it has done alongside is to stoke aspirations and this sentiment has, to use social media nomenclature, gone viral.

In short, India changed, but the Left failed to keep apace. In the period under discussion, inequality has grown very sharply even as poverty declined. Interestingly, it is not an inequality based on lack of access to resources as much as it is an inequality of opportunity—created by your position in the social hierarchy, access to health care, education, skills and so on. Yet, we never find the Left in the forefront of this debate.

Worse, centrist parties such as the Congress have begun to appropriate the ideological space of the Left. Beginning in 2004, Sonia Gandhi moved the Congress fundamentally towards the Left with the push for an entitlement regime. Similarly, new political outfits, such as the Aam Aadmi Party have successfully positioned themselves as the vanguard of the poor. And now, even right-wing outfits, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party, have begun to include the poor in their political lexicon. This has only further squeezed the political space for the Left.

To sum up then, the organized Left may be facing a crisis of survival as an entity but, ironically, the idea that it represents is very much alive.

Anil Padmanabhan is deputy managing editor of Mint and writes every week on the intersection of politics and economics. Comments are welcome at capitalcalculus@livemint.com. His Twitter handle is @capitalcalculus

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Published: 20 Apr 2015, 12:09 AM IST
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