Rahul Gandhi should be CPI(M)’s next Secretary General. Left needs new thought leaders

CPI(M) is poised to make a comeback in West Bengal. First, retire the Karats and Yechurys

Representational Image | Congress leader Rahul Gandhi with Communist Party of India (Marxist) Secretary-general Sitaram Yechury during a press conference after an INDIA Alliance meeting | ANI

If you walk into a CPI(M) office anywhere in India, it will be hard to miss the portraits on the wall. They are the same, long-dead white men from the first world, with an Indian or two accommodated on the sides.

If you don’t have the time to visit CPI(M) offices, check out their social media posts from 19 May this year. There are glowing tributes to, er, Ho Chi Minh. It’s uncle Ho’s birthday. Yup, the Vietcong warrior from way, way back.

And that’s the problem with the Left in India, a blunt, dogmatic refusal to change with the times, find contemporary, relevant issues that matter—and the new, local heroes who champion them.

Which is a pity, really.

There has been no better time for the rights of the poor, the jobless, the disenfranchised, and the minorities to be defended. In India, and globally.

Around the world, the Left Progressive movement (to use a broad term) is afire. Students are progressive/Left by default. It’s like the 1960s are back. All you need is Tariq Ali and the Rolling Stones and you’re back in business.

A lot is going on. Student protests on Gaza, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, climate change and even protests against the gig economy.

The Indian Left is no doubt involved in some of the broader, bigger issues. I’ve seen them lend support to the farmers’ movement, agitations against the CAA/NRC, marches for labour rights and anti-privatisation rallies. And that’s a good thing. Somebody has to stand up and speak for the small guy.

But what you hear are mostly slogans from the 1980s and 1990s, even the 1970s ( “Lal, Lal, Lal Salam!” said a prominent national leader at a South Calcutta Lok Sabha rally to bemused college kids).

And it’s hygiene stuff: Say yes to workers’ rights, human rights and farmers; say no to communalism, fascism and corruption. Tick, tick, tick.

And yes, Che Guevara t-shirts.

Perhaps, issues that resonate with youth a wee bit more are the lack of jobs in manufacturing, the farming sector, the decline in education especially primary education, the exploitation of gig workers, the unbreathable air, the reality behind the start-up hype, and the lack of public spaces. These are just some of the issues I come across young people discussing online.

I would also throw in the global debate on AI—what is the Indian Left’s take on this? Will ChatGPT take away creative jobs? (The CPI(M) recently released an AI-generated propaganda video of former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, drenched in nostalgia). What about its thoughts on the Green New Deal framework, which is supposed to generate high-paying jobs in the environment sector, by promoting social and economic justice?

But the Left’s not there, it is not leading these conversations with meaningful discourse, with thought leadership. On CPI(M) handles and in political rallies, it’s sloganeering as usual, interspersed with abusing the Right. And a newfound love for the Congress. And Instagram Reels, with Bollywood soundtracks.

Where are the Indian Bernie Sanders and Greta Thunbergs, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs and Sanna Marins? Where is the leadership, the ownership of issues, the contemporary causes?

Closer to home, there is one question comrades have asked themselves in private: Why couldn’t the CPI(M) manage an Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi, in the last five decades?

And this: Why shouldn’t Rahul Gandhi be the next Secretary General of the CPIM? He’s saying exactly what the party has been saying lately.

I am not a political expert. These are just the views of someone who grew up under Left Front rule.

Coming of age in Kolkata

I came of age in the Calcutta of the 1980s and 1990s, playing a lot of football, cycling and walking all over the city. And participating in SFI rallies. This was when being a Leftist meant something. We read György Lukács, Althusser, and Gramsci, saw movies by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak. We trudged to boring seminars, debates, and discussions on socio-political issues. We marched to Shahid Minar to protest against the World Bank’s policies.

Many of us wore a red lapel pin or small CPI(M) flag on our khadi kurtas with much pride. It meant we were informed, we cared, and we would act—to make the world a better place. Yes, a bit vague, I admit, but we believed in something.

A lot of our interest was in whatever was trending, no doubt. I didn’t exactly become a Marxist theoretician after all the heavy reading. In fact, I’m not sure we actually read everything, probably skimmed over the pages. But yes, I had a Che Guevara t-shirt.

The local government led by the TS Eliot-loving Jyoti Basu had done a good job with land reforms, on the back of which his government had empowered panchayats, probably for the first time in Independent India.

And despite a hostile centre (eg. the foolish and possibly biased Freight Equalisation Policy, which hit Bengal and some other states badly), West Bengal did alright in the early years, powered by agriculture. Literacy and healthcare improved massively. But there were also day-long power cuts.

Thanks to an utter lack of vision and an insanely pro-labour (read pro-strike) policy, industrial growth almost halved and the fiscal deficit almost doubled. At some point, nobody wanted to touch Bengal with a bargepole.

The Trinamool Congress, not a great friend of the CPI(M), claims 58,000 big and small factories closed down during Left Front rule. From Dunlop to Shaw Wallace, Duckback to Metal Box, Eastern Paper Mill to Sulekha, Usha to many jute mills, all went belly up. As mentioned, this is TMC data, hence some exaggeration can be factored in. But even if half the number holds true, it’s massive.

Mass migrations

The 80s were a bit of a disaster, as far as jobs for the middle class were concerned. I think I aspired to a job as a clerk in the municipal corporation; my career worldview was so limited. It didn’t help that I was a below-average student, and all the bhadralok jobs were out of reach for me. Armed with a humble BA (I’d dropped out of a Masters) I jumped into a string of sales-type jobs, traveling all over Bengal. It didn’t last long, thankfully.

The educated middle class was leaving for Mumbai, Delhi and other metros, and the poor took unreserved coaches in trains and went to Maharashtra, Gujarat, and the South to work as skilled and unskilled labourers.

Debraj Bhattacharya, author of the book Exploring Marxist Bengal c. 1971-2011: Memory, History and Irony, wrote “The CPI(M) was not able to show any alternative path of economic growth and employment for the educated middle-class. Hence Bengalis trained in computer science and other related fields started migrating out of West Bengal and the state became a supplier of educated human resource for others.”

In the 1990s, things started picking up. There were some successes on the coattails of Manmohan Singh’s liberalisation efforts. The Haldia petrochemical complex, which was partly funded by entrepreneur Purnendu Chatterjee, was probably the biggest. There was also the expansion of the Durgapur steel belt. The foundation for the IT sector in West Bengal was laid with the development of Salt Lake Sector V, which in the early 2000s became a prominent IT hub in the state.

The Left won a lot of elections though, powered by their hold over major and minor institutions, their progressive social welfare programmes (which the TMC promptly copied), and education and healthcare policies. I remember the CPI(M) ‘Local Committees’, one in every neighbourhood; they were very visible.

Things were getting better, and toward the end of the 1990s, Jyoti Basu decided to call it a day to the collective relief of millions of ageing comrades. This was also the time that Anil Biswas, Biman Bose and Buddhadev Bhattacharya took over the reins of the party in West Bengal.

Anil Biswas was the Chanakya of the CPI(M), Biman Bose wanted to quit politics and become a monk, and Buddhadev, the new CM, was a great thinker but not much of a doer. He had great ideas, like Singur, which made his comrades very nervous.

Buddha babu is generally acknowledged to have hit the green button, opening up West Bengal to industry, and bringing in IT companies. Sadly, Biswas died early and hell broke loose. The culturally inclined Buddhadev, it is acknowledged, didn’t do a great job of managing the Mamata Banerjee-led movement.

At this point, I must also mention Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury, the two JNU elites who opposed allegedly Budhdhadev’s industrialisation from the shadows and are currently leading the fortunes of the CPI(M).

Many say Prakash Karat is the man singlehandedly responsible for breaking up the CPI(M). Karat has a long list of allegations against him, including the withdrawal of support to the UPA on the Nuclear Deal; promoting internal factionalism over his differences with Sitaram Yechury’s stand on electoral alliances; and expelling the Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee for reasons including him flaunting his Apple watch. Yes, the last one is crazy.

It must be added neither Karat nor Yechury had ever stood for an election and probably never will.

Between 2005 and 2015, his tenure as general secretary, it is claimed Karat stopped all forward movement with his rigid ideological stances. However, my take on the Left’s nemesis, Singur, was that Karat was tactically correct. Buddhadev Bhattacharya rushed in where angels feared to tread, and the Left party was over. Mamata took over the corner office with the same CPI(M) toolkit. Many cadres even abandoned the CPI(M) and moved to the TMC.

Fresh faces, old lines

In recent times Bengal has seen a spate of fresh, young faces in a furious bid to repackage the image of the party in time for the Lok Sabha polls. It’s good news—on the surface.

I watched some interviews of the young candidates, they seem to be breaking away from the past. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll realise that barring a few, these 30-something youth leaders haven’t moved past sloganeering from their college canteen days. All they’re doing even now is what the party did in the 1980s—agitating. But agitating and creating an alternative narrative are two different things, as one Narendra Damodardas Modi will tell you.

To be fair, some new faces are giving the TMC a run for its money. In 2021, the CPI(M) candidate for the Ballygunge Bypoll, Saira Shah Halim, lifted the vote share of her party from 5 per cent to 30 per cent, and narrowly lost to the TMC. In the ongoing Lok Sabha polls, there is a strong chance a few of these young guns, if not many, will be the first past the post. Or come very close to.

Some of you might be asking, but what about Kerala? How come the Left is going strong in the southern state?

I think the only difference between Bengal and Kerala is the fatal tactical mistake on Singur. It’s like the BJP suddenly agitating about a temple built over an ancient church, Singur was so strategically reckless. Buddha babu mixed up long-term and short-term goals—something even an MBA student doesn’t miss.

He and Karat wrecked CPI(M) in 2011. In hindsight, historians will someday say it’s the best thing that could have happened to it.

And that’s the point of this entire article—the CPI(M) is perfectly placed to make a comeback.

The plan

Here’s my five-pointer comeback plan for the Left. Indulge me, if you can.

1. Update framework
   There is nothing wrong with the core, Marxism. But it has to keep up with the aspirations of modern-day society, or rather culture. You can care for the poor and still wear an Apple watch—someone needs to tell Karat this.
   Also, everyone has gone socialist these days—who says the Congress or BSP or AAP or BJP isn’t pro-poor? It’s a generic word. CPI(M) has to rediscover itself.
2. Stop seeing red
   The Left, like the Right, has a historical tendency to turn every small event into a flag-hoisting ceremony, metaphorically speaking. Need not be that way. I think there is far more value in starting policy discussions or even being part of ongoing discussions. For example, why can’t the Left lead a local/regional/national movement to get people to start using electric or non-motorised transport? Every morning, lakhs of low-income cyclists pour into Delhi. What stops the Left from taking up their cause for safer roads, more respect from car drivers, etc.?
3. Build a grassroots movement
   The CPI(M) needs to create movements at the baseline instead of leaning on civil society. AAP is a good case in point, the original AAP that is, not the current state. At one time, auto drivers in Delhi were huge AAP supporters, and so were the professional classes.
   The Left should stay away from electoral politics or deprioritise it for a few years. At least until it builds a grassroots movement.
4. Retire war-horses
   Retire the Karats and the Yechurys of the world. The Left needs margdarshaks, guides, who can advise from the sidelines and not exercise administrative power. At the same time, the new CPI(M) should not be so overconfident about youth. Packaging does not sell products, utility does. As I said earlier, the young guns have a long way to go. The college canteen chat is all too evident.   
5. Don’t be elitist
   The Left has always been in the grip of upper class, upper caste, wealthy elite men—break that grip, that stranglehold. There are too many Mukherjees and Banerjees, Karats and Yechurys. Where are the Sahas and Mondols, the Jatavs and Malhars? Where are the women? (No, not Brinda Karat, please) The BJP has already launched many drives to get them in, as the CPI(M) leadership sipped honey lemon tea.
6. Go digital
   It’s not that the CPI(M) isn’t online, it is, and it is fairly active. But it’s preaching to the converted, with the same old same old. There are no issues, no real engagement, no discussions/debates, just a series of self-congratulatory videos—often soundtracked with Bollywood tunes during election season. There’s a lack of a coherent content plan and no distribution plan. If you don’t have ideas, copy the BJP.

The revival of CPI(M) hinges on its ability to adapt and innovate from the ground up, not elite university canteens, all while maintaining its core values.

It needs to inspire a new generation of supporters and continue its legacy of advocating for the marginalised and working-class populations.

Sujit Dasgupta is a former ethnomycologist with a keen interest in popular culture. He grew up in Kolkata and Dhanbad, and lives in Pune. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)