Over the last two weeks I have argued, first, that we should not confuse the Left message with the Leftists, many of whom can be very silly and obnoxious; and, secondly, that even though the Communists do not have a monopoly of the Left message, they have been allowed by the Congress to appropriate it.
This is truly astonishing, when you start counting how many genuine Leftists, of various shades and hues, the Congress actually has -- from Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh down.
I also wrote that the term Left was traditionally used for describing those who want change, which our Communists definitely do not.
Indeed, to the extent that the term Right is used for denoting those who are for maintaining the status quo, Indian Communists are best described as the Right. In the French National Assembly before the revolution of 1789, they would have sat to the right of the chairman, where the aristocrats used to sit.
It is worth pausing for just a moment and considering how much the other parties have changed in the last 15 years -- and how little the Communists have changed.
The Congress, thanks to Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, has turned into a genuine Left liberal party which acknowledges the role of the markets and the private sector. And the BJP has given up on hard Hindutva.
But the Communists? Change?
They may not represent capital because they represent the unions. But, to the extent that change in the form of reforms will benefit labour by creating more jobs, and the Communists oppose such reforms, they do not represent labour either.
Amongst the Communists the lower rung today is, by and large, being fooled into believing the higher-ups. That is true of all political parties, perhaps, but the embedded hypocrisy is most pronounced amongst the Communists.
And those of them in the lower rungs who see things for what they actually are, are simply apparatchiks with an eye on the bureaucratic ladders that the Communists are so good at building.
Of the higher-up Communists, of course, the less said the better. Politburo sounds so self-importantly silly, anyway.
All things considered, if ever there was a cohesive political group that came closest to being a genuine national problem, I would point to the Communists. Their main "crime", to borrow their own pet word against their opponents, is to have discredited the entire Left idea.
Discrediting an entire idea, by the way, is a crime invented by Communists. It is the direct descendant of the Christian crimes of heresy and blasphemy.
But it is an idea that our country badly needs because so many millions of us are so abjectly poor and vulnerable.
It is the self-absorbed obstructionism of Indian communists that has made people so impatient with even the good policies that are aimed at the poor.
It is their obsession with state control, when they know its apparatus to be incompetent and venal, that has created a problem of credibility for the vast numbers of the genuine Left.
As a result, at the most generalised level, the Communists have succeeded in equating in the public mind even genuine concern for equity with populism.
This is the real nature of the long-term danger that the Communists pose. They will persuade the country to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But there is a difference between equity and populism. It consists, in the main, of the delivery mechanism: concern for equity turns into competitive populism when the delivery mechanism is the state apparatus.
But thanks to their insistence on the state mechanism, their obscurantism, and clearly revealed preferences for maintaining the status quo because it helps their own political fortunes, the Communists are destroying even common notions of decency in the middle class, which may well turn to some Indian version of Fascism.
Last week, I had written that the time had come for the Congress, and indeed other political parties, to reclaim the Left idea from the Communists. That is why I had called the article Garv se kaho ham sab Leftist hain.
The argument was that just as the Sangh Parivar could not become the sole vehicle of Hinduism, the Communists could not become the official keeper of the Left idea. No one should be granted such monopolies.
What I am proposing is not original. The same thing has happened elsewhere, most notably in Europe.
There the mainstream parties successfully managed to wrest back the Left idea from the Communists, who came to be seen as crazies on a par with flat earthers and the end-is-neigh wallahs. And this happened well before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which means the process started even earlier, sometime in the mid-1970s.
It is this process that needs to be started in India. The Left objectives have to be redefined and the instruments for achieving those objectives clearly spelt out.
The Congress thinks it is doing exactly this with its current policy mix. That may well be so, but it needs to take on the Communists far more aggressively. At present it gives the impression of doing everything under Left pressure even when it is not.
There is very little the Communists can do to harm the government. They will not pull out, for any number of obvious reasons, not least of which is the taste of power, the ability to tick off the thanedar so to speak, the warm glow that comes from preening before TV cameras, the sense of participation, etc.
A war is won only when you defeat the enemy on his own home ground. This means defeating the Communists in West Bengal. They have ruled there for 27 years using means that only they would call democratic.
Defeating them there means uniting the Congress vote. The vote shares of the Congress and the Communists, if all Congressmen unite, are not unbridgeably apart. It can be done, all the more easily now that Mamata Bannerji needs a raft to climb on to.
In sum, if a secular front could be created to defeat the BJP, a genuinely Left liberal front that stands for change can also be created to defeat the Communists. This is the real test for the Congress now.
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