The Indian Left's Yasser Arafat

WITH Jyoti Basu's death, India has lost the last leader who embodied a personal link between the many phases of national politics since the early 1940s.
Basu wasn't just a major Left leader in a country with the world's biggest Communist party outside China. He participated in numerous processes that shaped politics, including trade union and peasant movements, radicalisation of the intelligentsia, contestations between social-group identities, and crystallisation of the party system.
Unlike S.A. Dange or E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Basu was neither a theoretician nor a mass leader. Nor was he an organisation man such as Harkishan Singh Surjeet or Pramode Dasgupta. Basu was a managerial-style party pragmatist whose greatest strengths were electoral politics, administration and governance.
Basu worked on the public side of the CPM and built successful social coalitions. He was Chief Minister of West Bengal -- a state with 80 million people -- continuously for 23 years. This is a world record.
Basu was a maverick in many ways. When the undivided Communist Party split in 1964, he was the only individual from a group of privileged European-educated young Communists who went with the CPM. Most party intellectuals stayed with the CPI.
Basu unquestioningly accepted the CPM's organisational hegemony. An unbending party loyalist, he believed in orthodox forms of discipline and "democratic centralism" -- based on concentric circles of authority within the party, and the norm that party members must unquestioningly follow a decision taken after internal debate.
In 1996, Basu famously became "the best Prime Minister India never had." The United Front unanimously offered the position to him. But the CPM Central Committee rejected the offer.
The decision was driven by a narrow control-based consideration -- with its 51 MPs, the Left wouldn't be able to dominate the Front. This meant forfeiting great advantages, including prestige and mainstream acceptance for the Left. Basu's leadership might even have delayed or prevented the BJP's rise to national power in 1998.
Basu was a dedicated pragmatist. On any issue, he would choose the most practical and least radical option available. This would satisfy both privileged industrialists -- whom his party has been wooing for investment -- and poor people, among whom it had its roots.
The CPM-led Left Front implemented a diluted version of land reform in West Bengal in relation to Kerala. Operation Barga only registered tenants and gave them a 75% harvest share.
In his first term as Chief Minister, Basu said: "Let [the] capitalists understand us. We shall also try to understand their point of view." He even befriended industrial magnates, including Messrs Dhirubhai Ambani, Ratan Tata and RP Goenka. He even favoured multinational takeovers of some of Bengal's sick industrial units.
Basu's upper-class, upper-caste Bhadralok identity endeared him greatly to Bengal's elite. But Basu's politics largely excluded Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs -- and even Muslims, who form one-fourth of the state's population -- from governance and political representation.
In this respect, and in social development indicators, West Bengal lags behind many other states. The rate of decline in its rural poverty has halved since 1994. According to National Sample Survey, "the percentage of rural households not getting enough food every day in some months of the year" is highest in West Bengal (10.6%), worse than in Orissa (4.8%).
West Bengal has 9.61 lakh school dropouts in the 6-14 age group, higher than Bihar's 6.96 lakhs. Of India's 24 districts that has more than 50,000 out-of-school children, nine are in West Bengal.
The state's official Human Development Report (2004) admits that spending on and access to health services have stagnated. Some indicators -- immunisation, antenatal care, women's nutrition, and doctors and hospital beds per one-lakh people -- are below national average. West Bengal has not opened a single new primary health centre in a decade.
West Bengal only generates 14 person-days of work per poor family under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The national average is 43.
India's worst recent food riots have occurred in West Bengal -- especially in poor tribal districts like Purulia -- when starving people raided the godowns of dishonest ration-shop owners, all CPM members. In Purulia, 78% of the people live in poverty.
Over two-fifths of Bengal's poor don't have ration cards. Meanwhile, some of the gains of Operation Barga are eroding. Seventeen percent of registered tenants have lost their land and another 27% are in insecure possession.
Clearly, the Left Front has failed the poor in numerous ways during its 32 years in power. Basu bears a good share of responsibility for this.
Basu, then, is akin to Yasser Arafat, the tallest leader of the movement for an independent Palestinian state, who died in 2004. Arafat put Palestine on the world agenda -- a historic contribution. But he signed the hideously unjust Oslo peace accords.
Arafat's once-secular and -progressive Fatah has lost credibility. The Islamicist Hamas won plurality a free and fair election. The CPM might similarly lose West Bengal to the Trinamool Congress.
Basu leaves a mixed legacy. The Left Front's "industrialisation-at-any-cost" philosophy continues to cost it poor people's support. Neoliberal corporate-led industrialisation has proved extremely predatory and destructive of livelihoods.
If the Trinamool wins the 2011 West Bengal Assembly elections, it will unleash unspeakable violence on the CPM to settle old scores and capture new areas. In Kerala, the Left faces an uphill battle. It was routed in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
A nationally weakened Left could go into serious long-term decline. The Left has grown in India even while Communism went into a tailspin globally after the collapse of the USSR. This was a great achievement. Its reversal would be an equally great pity.
Luckily, Basu won't live to see the unravelling and humiliation of the Left. Finally, Jyoti Basu must be admired for standing by his atheist convictions and donating his body for medical research.
Not many show such courage at a time when it's most needed -- amidst the explosion of blind faith, superstition and worship of so-called godmen and every conceivable irrationality in India.
Praful Bidwai is a columnist.