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Flying
Here: the Red Flag, from Berlin to West Bengal
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Berlin.
Can there be a more vivid panorama of
the arc of the Communist movement than the view from the foundations
where once stood the Nazi SS headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse
8? Before one's eyes are photographs of men like the German Communist
leader, Ernst Thälmann. He was arrested on March 3, 1933,
a few weeks after Hitler came to power, taken to Albrecht-Strasse
8 and tortured. Never released, never formally tried, he was
murdered in Buchenwald on August 18, 1944.
Looking at the big photo of
Thälmann --one of scores posted along that block of German
Communists and Socialists one can honor courage but also remember
epic failures: the blunders of the Third Period, the defeat of
the Popular Front in Spain where the German volunteers in the
11th Brigade of the International Brigades, named their unit
for Thälmann when it was formed in 1936.
Raise your eyes from the line
of photos and glance north and there, a few yards to the north
is a stretch of the Berlin Wall, which ran a bit further west
past Martin Gropius-Bau, a museum, then swung north along Ebert-Strasse,
across Unter den Linden, leaving the Brandenberg Gate in East
Berlin and the Reichstag in the West. Here, at the end of the
1980s , the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR,
the East German government threw in the towel. Soon most of the
wall was rubble, along with --so it seemed --the movement that
grew from the writings of Marx and Engels who both studied at
Humboldt university, a few hundred yards eastward along Unter
den Linden from the Brandenberg Gate. The other side of the street
from the university, at a spot where the Nazis started burning
books, there's a big stone sculpture of volumes from the German
canon. They include the anti-Semite Luther as well as Hegel and
Goethe, but no Marx, no Engels.
Movements and political parties
wither away when they lose touch with the onward march of history,
barricade themselves behind dead ideas and policemen. Look now
at a braver prospect that continues to unfold --as it did through
the twilight and collapse of Communist Parties in the GDR and
the Soviet Union --thousands of miles east of the old Prince-Albrecht-Strasse.
In India, as in Latin America, the disastrous neoliberal years
elicited retribution and victories for the Left. Whether these
victories can launch a long-term counterattack is the great world
story of our time.
Early this month a Left front led by the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) swept West Bengal with a three-fourths majority, 233
seats out of 293 declared. It was the coalition's biggest win
since the heyday of the CPI (M)'s --hereinafter --land reforms
in 1987, the Left's seventh straight win in polling for West
Bengal's state legislature and the fifteenth straight victory
(if you take elections to the central parliament from West Bengal
into account) since the Left was voted into power in Bengal in
1977 and rammed through the most ambitious land reforms program
India has seen, the reward for the Left in West Bengal being
victory after victory in every election since. They have also
smashed the Congress in every one of eight polls to the central
parliament since 1977.
This time it was widely assumed
in most of the Indian press that the benefits of land reform
had run their course and the Left would be turned out. However,
the CPIM-led Left has also managed to break into the urban middle
classes and educated youth. So while keeping its rural base,
it has actually added new voters.
In a country where every other type of government mostly fades
after five years, the Left's repeated victories in Bengal have
surprised and irked the prfess, the vast bulk of which is of
course anti-Left. Hence the imputation this time that those
past victories at the polls were won by 'scientific rigging'.
This charge in the press was seized upon by the central Election
Commission as an opportunity to conduct the 2006 polls in Bengal
in five phases under unprecedented police control. All policemen
working the polls were brought in from outside Bengal. All government
officials manning the election posts were also brought in from
outside the state. This time around no one could level a ballot-rigging
against the Left which duly won with a much larger margin than
in the last election, adding 40-plus seats to their previous
tally.
There's no precedent for such
a triumph for the Left, in India or indeed anywhere for a state
with a population of close to 100 million. Around 40 million
people, close to 80 per cent of the electorate, voted in West
Bengal to give the CPIM-led Left front this kind of win.
The Left has also swept the
south-western state of Kerala, population of 32 million, with
a three-fourths majority, the biggest Left victory ever in Kerala's
history. The Left Democratic Front won two-thirds of the seats,
with the CPIM itself prevailing in 61 of the 98 seats secured
by the alliance.
In Kerala, many of the top leaders of the Congress-led UDF (United
Democratic Front) were steamrollered in constituencies they had
dominated for decades. In the upland district of Wayanad, which
I visited last year and where farmers have been driven to suicide
amid the devastations of liberal "reforms", the Left
front won all three seats for the first time in the history
of Kerala.
Among the biggest losers in
Kerala was the reactionary Indian Union Muslim League (IUML),
with countless thousands of Muslims, especially young people
and women, going against them this time. The League lost seats
it's held for decades. The Muslim minority knew a few things
about the Left: in no state ruled by the Left, when the Left
was in power, has there ever been a communal riot and attendant
sectarian violence. They could compare that with the record of
the Hindu- fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the
Congress. Indian Muslims also protested in hundreds of thousands
when George Bush showed up here this year. Again, they found
the only political force doing the same was the Left. On Iran
and Iraq where they see a Congress government fawning on the
U.S.A., they find the Left restraining it. (In Kerala last year,
on platforms with my friend, the journalist, P.Sainath and also
member of parliament Veerendra Kumar I vividly remember addressing
a big left meeting on the war in Iraq, organized by the radical
bank clerks' union in Kozikhode, where there was a conspicuous
presence of prominent local Muslims in the front row.)
Besides, poor Muslims in Kerala have also being crushed by the
agrarian crisis that also hurt thousands of small traders, many
amongst them Muslims. All this reduced their normal suspicion
of the "Godless Communists".
In short, in two states with a combined population of close to
130 million, the Left laid the Congress-led opposition low. The
BJP was not even in the race.
In the south-eastern state
of Tamil Nadu, in adjustment with the Dravia Maunnetra Kazhagam
(DMK) and Congress, the Left took 16 seats in the assembly, its
best tally in memory. The party of Ms. Jayalalithaa, the former
actress who was the state's (appalling) chief minister was defeated.
In Assam, the Left opened its
account for the first time, winning two seats.
Meanwhile, the Hindu-fundamentalist BJP has taken a thrashing.
In four of these five states (or rather four states and one union
territory of Pondicherry), it drew a blank, even though it was
in alliance with the powerful Trinamool Congress in West Bengal.
In Assam, it had even postured as a contender for power in the
past five years. It went nowhere in the race there, now with
only a handful of legislators in single digits. In Kerala, its
vote share dropped dramatically as compared to the time of the
2004 parliamentary polls. In Tamil Nadu it has been wiped out.
The Congress has held on to Assam, with its seats and strength
much reduced, though it has now managed to form a government
by accepting as junior coalition partner the Bodo People's Progressive
Front (BPPF) -- previously the separatist Bodo Liberation Tigers
(BLT) --which won 11 seats in the elections.(The disbanded BLT,
which fought for a homeland for Assam's Bodo tribe was noted
for blowing up trains, including one in 1999 that killed 33 passengers.
But last year it signed a peace deal with New Delhi and joined
mainstream politics, forming the BPPF.)
All in all, this has been a
round of enormously significant polls in which the story has
been the Left victory, thus strengthening the Left at the center
as well, which means it can prod the Congress-led national government
a little harder on issues ranging from policies affecting the
poor, to Delhi's ridiculous Iran policy.
India has a central (or federal)
Parliament and legislatures or "Assemblies" in each
state. In 2004, the elections to the central parliament, or Lok
Sabha (House of the People), saw the unseating of the National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the BJP, the Hindu fundamentalist/chauvinist
force. It had been assumed in India and worldwide that the NDA,
which had furthered the "reforms" agenda initiated
by the Congress Party, would sweep the polls that year.
At the same time as the elections
to the central parliament, voting for several state legislatures
also took place. The most famous was the elections to the Andhra
Pradesh legislature, which witnessed the immensely gratifying
trouncing of "Reform" poster boy Chandrababu Naidu
(not part of the NDA formally but a key ally who contested those
polls in alliance with the BJP against a Congress Party,
It was widely assumed that Naidu, loved by Bill Gates, Bill Clinton,
the World Bank, et al, would sweep back. Instead, he was humiliated
and both in the Lok Sabha polls and in the state legislature,
his Telugu Desam Party was annihilated.
So in 2004, riding on the huge anger of poor people and suffering
farmers, the Congress came back into power --only to try and
resume neoliberal reforms where the BJP-led NDA had Left off.
This time, though, there was a problem. The Left had over 60
members in the central parliament and the Congress-led United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) could not rule without their support.
The Left compelled the UPA to draw up a National Common Minimum
Program and declared that if the UPA stuck to this, there would
be no major crisis and they would support the UPA even though
this caused them problems in their home states and bases, where
the main rival to the Left is not the BJP but the Congress. However,
the Left takes a national view and realizes that the BJP's Hindu
Talibanism would wreck the country. So it swallowed its natural
antipathy and made it possible for the Congress to rule at the
center again, even though the UPA government would fall the day
the Left withdraws support on a major issue.
This put the Left between a rock and a hard place. To keep the
BJP's crazies out, they had to support their main rival whose
policies they abhorred. Realizing that the Left is trapped, the
Congress has repeatedly violated the Common Minimum Program (to
the extent it bothered itself with the program at all) and got
down to the more important business of privatizing everything
it could.
The major Indian national media, with the honorable exception
of The Hindu and a handful of other papers, are overwhelmingly
anti-Left. They made fools of themselves in 2004 when they predicted
popular approval at the polls for the neoliberal reforms and
were astounded when the opposite occurred. In 2006 they have
made asses of themselves again. In West Bengal, they now offer
the explanation that the latest CPIM victory is all due to the
splendid personality of Buddhadev Bhattacharya, chief minister
of West Bengal, a man the elite see a great 'reformer', using
the word to denote the imposition of the neoliberal agenda.
In fact the Left, in West Bengal
and elsewhere, has always been pro-reforms, in a decent use
of the word: land reform and labor reform. They believe these
are a prerequisite to other kinds of reforms. Their position
on foreign investment is not a regression to autarky. They favor
it if it leads to more employment, adds to India's technological
base, does not undermine public interest and employment and if
it's in productive sectors and not merely an injection of hot
money that will disappear at the drop of a hat.
The Left opposes privatization
that simply means theft of public resources of the sort that
Evo Morales has just reversed in the natural gas sector in Bolivia.
In short, it's against selling off the family silver, particularly
profit-making public sector enterprises and public sector enterprises
that may not immediately be making big bucks but which are capable
of revival with a little investment. The Communists do emphasize
trying to raise capital within India, do insist that loans from
overseas with all sorts of unpleasant conditions attached to
them, meekly rubber-stamped by the Congress Party are not okay
with them, and so on.
The Left has led major agitations
against privatization. On September 29, 2005, a Left-led strike
swept through industrial units, banks, airports, and enterprises
employing nearly 40 million workers. This was an explicit warning
to the UPA against rampant privatization.
Despite this, the media pigeonholes such activity as mere 'rhetoric',
blaring hopefully that 'Buddha' (Buddhadev, chief minister of
Bengal) is a 'reformer?' and that this is why the Left won the
elections this time around. This does not explain how the CPIM-led
Left has won for 24 of 29 years without Buddha leading them,
nor does it explain why the Great Reformer of Andhra Pradesh,
Chandrababu Naidu, bit the dust so badly in 2004. Buddhadev himself
showed exasperation when reporters credited him alone for the
victory of Bengal's giant political force. "Try giving some
credit to the people of Bengal," he said and added that
they didn't seem to understand how and why people support the
Left.
In Kerala the Left is led by
V.S. Achuthananda, a man dubbed as "anti-development' and
as a "Stalinist". So how come the same CPIM sweeps
Bengal with a reformer and Kerala with a "Stalinist"?
That's why CPIM Secretary Prakash Karat dismissed a question
on Bengal with "I don't what this word 'reforms' means.
Whose reforms? For whom?"
If an electorate as politically
conscious as Bengal's elects a communist party 30 years in a
row, the CPIM must have got some things right, which it has
--especially in the countryside.
Bengal has had a very different growth story from the rest of
India. It is the fastest growing state economy --but the composition
of its growth is very different from the other states . It is
not driven by IT or services but by small producers, which means
it has had greater equity in its growth. In fact, only Bengal
seems to have bucked the trend on agricultural growth --which
has been a horrifying disaster for all the so-called high growth
states. For 11 years, Bengal's agriculture growth has been
way ahead of the stagnant national rate. Bengal saw land reform
after the Left came to power in the late 1970s. When agricultural
growth surges, many ordinary people do well. Bengal is the biggest
producer of rice and vegetables in India and has been for a while.
Unsurprisingly, the Left's astounding victories are causing
dismay in the media. The more you talk about the triumphs of
the Left, the more you have to talk about 'them", the Left.
And the media might even have to admit the Left's take on 'reforms'
strikes a mighty chord with vital sections of the public. They
might have to admit that it has been Left politicians and organizers
who have been talking about hunger, starvation, food security,
neoliberal reforms, the agrarian crisis, the public sector, and
against privatization. But then, getting into that highlights
'their' agenda for your audiences. So best say it was all due
to a charismatic chief minister.
The triumphant Left coalitions
now face appalling problems, starting with one pervasive all-India
problem --unemployed youth in large numbers. Hence the zeal to
industrialize and get them jobs. (Here, Bengal is different from
Kerala in that it has been an industrial base right from colonial
times.)
Two, in such zones as the tea gardens of Darjeeling or the pepper
groves in Kerala, prices have tanked thanks to volatility in
gobal marklets, as I saw in Wayanad, Kerala.
Three, many of the policy levers affecting the agrarian crisis
in Bengal and Kerala are not in the hands of the states. Import
duties, quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports, minimum
price supports --all these are in central hands, i.e., the congress-led
UPA government right now (earlier the BJP and before them, the
Congress!).
Four, central governments have discriminated very severely against
Bengal between 1977 and 2004; so central allocations for Bengal
have been dismal. The much richer state of Maharashtra has the
same population as Bengal, roughly, but always got much better
treatment.
This means that for Bengal to raise capital, it has to walk a
tightrope. Where can it go? On what conditions? How does it try
and get national capitalists to invest? What will be the trade-offs?
Thus far, they've walked that rope well. It will get more and
more difficult.
At the same time as the Left
coalitions clash with the center, they also have to keep the
governing coalition in New Delhi afloat, or risk the return of
the BJP , which would be a disaster . So not only neo-liberalism,
but foreign policy (Iran and Iraq) will spark trouble.
Kerala faces an even bigger problem. The agrarian crisis is deadly
in Wayanad and Iduuki, but quite a few people outside these regions
do not understand it or its intensity. Kerala's economy is even
more intertwined with global currents and is getting shafted
on coffee, pepper, tea, vanilla. As Sainath has described in
his reports in The Hindu, pepper prices have slumped by
over 70 per cent across the past few years. Vanilla has fared
far, far worse. The coffee economy is in a shambles in a district
where it occupies close to 70,000 hectares and has some 60,000
small growers. Reaching 130 rupees a kg a few years ago, the
coffee price is now around 24 rupees a kg and sliding. The better
grades of cardamom have seen prices dip by 75 per cent. Tea prices,
too, have slumped. As Sainath writes, many plantation owners
have simply walked away, deserting their workers. Hence the new
trends in this long-time UDF bastion.
Kerala, in Sainath's view,
cannot follow the Bengal route. It's a different state and economy.
Giant industrialization won't work and will prove damaging.
The Left can at least will start undoing some of the damage
that commercialization of education has done. We may see Kerala's
first communist education minister in many years.
In a nutshell, the problems are huge and complex. Where there
is comprfehension of what has to be done --the tools of policy
might not be in the Left's hands. The Left can turn its stunning
victories to long-term political advantage only if the proper
lesson is drawn from the different outcomes: even in periods
of fairly high economic growth, governments such as India's present
ruling coalition, kept in power by the Left, need to pay attention
to the reality of mass deprivation and do something about it.
In West Bengal Hidai Sheikh,
a fifty-year-old farmer, told a reporter from the bi-weekly
Frontline , "the CPIM is the only viable alternative
we have. After all, in times of need, they are always there beside
us." The red flags I saw last year in villages in Wyanad
are not antique emblems, like the bric-a-brac now on sale at
Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point in the old days between
the Soviet and U.S. sectors of Berlin.. In political terms they
are alive and vibrant.
Footnote: thanks to CounterPuncher
P. Sainath's indispensable inputs into this column, a much shorter
version of which ran in the print edition of The Nation that
went to press last Wednesday. See also Vijay Prashad's terrific
column, The Indian Road, on
this site on May 5.
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