Kolkata, Apr 22 (PTI) Lenin still lives on in the heart of Kolkata, albeit in the northeast corner of Curzon Park, overlooking the Nakhoda Masjid on its left and the Oberoi Grand Hotel, one of the last bastions of the city’s fading mercantile capitalism, on its right.
At a time when the legacy of the Marxist idol and founder of Soviet Union, Vladimir Iliyich Ulyanov Lenin, is being wiped out of his motherland, this corner of Kolkata’s Esplanade still remains his home.
A towering statue of the man, who dragged Russia out of a feudal order into what he believed would be a socialist century, stands in solitary loneliness here.
A bunch of sexagenarian and septuagenarian leaders of Leftist parties and a handful of enthusiastic student activists, led by CPI(M)’s veteran parliamentarian and leader Mohd Salim, were the only ones to lay floral wreaths at Lenin’s statue on Friday and to give the iconic leader the ‘Lal salam’ (Red Salute) on his 153rd birth anniversary.
“Leninbadider eta ekta smaran korar din (It’s a remembrance day for all those who believe in Leninism),” Salim, charged with revitalising the CPI(M) in West Bengal as its state secretary, told PTI.
“We are here to preserve and protect his memory,” he added.
Lenin, born in 1870, became a communist revolutionary at the early age of 17 after his brother’s execution by the Tsarist regime. In 1917, a successful revolution by the Bolshevik faction of Russian communists which he led saw him coming back from exile in Europe to seize power in his country.
Indian communists were among the first to come under his spell. Though the Communist Party of India was formed in 1925, individuals from India had already travelled to the Soviet Union to learn from the “October revolution”. The first time communists won an election in India was in 1957, when the CPI catapulted to power in Kerala.
However, the communists’ real coming of age was when after an aborted Naxalite insurgency by ultra-Leftists died out in the 1970s, the CPI(M), a faction of the original CPI, won elections to the West Bengal assembly in 1977.
A Leftist alliance, led by the CPI(M), ruled the state for 34 long years till 2011, when the state rejecting the Left voted in favour of left of centre Trinamool Congress.
Since then, it has been a downhill journey for the Leninists. Not only had the combined Left parties drawn a blank in polls to West Bengal assembly held last year, their vote share dwindled to a mere 5.47 per cent in 2021, down from 30.1 per cent in 2011, when they lost the elections for the first time to the TMC.
Nonetheless, hard work by a dedicated band of young volunteers gave the CPI(M) hope in the last by-elections to the prestigious Ballygunge assembly seat in the city.
Its candidate, poetess Saira Shah Halim, managed to ratchet up the vote percentage for the CPI(M) from 5.6 per cent to over 30 per cent, while halving BJP’s vote share in the posh constituency.
“People are realising that BJP and TMC are not alternatives to each other,” CPI(M)’s politburo member Nilotpal Basu told PTI, adding that our “approach aims to get as many political forces who wish to join hands, move together … but we will not wait for anyone, our work will continue”.
The CPI(M)’s ‘Red volunteers’, a band of a young students and professionals who got together to help COVID-affected patients and their families during the height of the pandemic, which came just after last year’s assembly elections, is one of the “works” which the Leninists have managed to showcase while seeking votes in Bengal this time round.
The party hopes disillusion with the “communal politics” of the BJP and “lack of progress” under the TMC as well as hard work by its young adherents will bring back its lost glory. “He (Lenin) created history… all those who wish to learn from history need to study him,” added Salim. PTI JRC RMS RMS
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