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Ashok Mitra

EMS's final message was that there can be no collaboration with the Congress

A certain appropriateness attaches to the fact that on the very day Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his ministerial colleagues were being sworn in in New Delhi, E M S Namboodiripad shuffled this mortal coil in Thiruvananthapuram. An India infested by Sukh Rams, Kalyan Singhs, Sonia Gandhis and J Jayalalithas was perhaps much too much for him.

In any case, the last few years were an excruciatingly uncomfortable experience for him: while his mind was clear, his physical frame had almost completely disintegrated. Much worse, the country had entered a particularly ignoble, a particularly amoral phase. EMS was a gross misfit in the emerging milieu.

Most newspapers, intensely occupied with stories concerning Cabinet formation activities in the nation's capital, could not spare more than a bare quarter of a column, pushed way down in one of the middle pages, to convey the news of EMS's passing away. Some of them tried to make amends the day after by writing solemn-sounding editorial essays offering the verdict that this man was at best a socialist theoretician who knew little about the ways of the world.

They could not be more wrong. EMS was, of course, a great Marxist theoretician whose thoughts had a pure classical grandeur. He read well and extensively and wrote with a boundless energy -- on history and historiography, on the drift of Indian politics since the mid-19th century, on the personalities who shaped this politics, on Kerala and its cultural and ethnic roots, on Malayali literature and arts, on the agrarian crisis in Kerala and India in general, on the processes of Indian planning.

He was not a snob: pamphleteering came easily to him; such descent into 'common' levels was implicitly accepted as vitally important for advancing one's cause. Born in the highest echelons of a rigid Brahministic order, an order that was not only arch conservative but arch reactionary as well, EMS nonetheless had no difficulty in declassing himself. He taught himself to think in the manner of an Ezhava dispossessed from his land. He was no less an activist though.

From fuddy daddy baronic politics to Congress socialism and finally to Communism was a long stride -- it marked his challenges, struggles and endeavours. Such endeavours called for total application and willingness to accept at a personal level hardship of all descriptions.

The head of the supposedly first 'democratically' elected Communist government, EMS created many legends concerning political tactics and stratagems. These legends, however, could not, and did not, shove off the principles which were the source of his political beliefs. Scholarship and activism are not necessarily a rare combination in the annals of global Communism. In that sense, EMS was not an exception. But what evoked astonishment was the advent of such a personage in an environment where a popular democratic revolution has always been a distant dream.

EMS proved to be non pareil. He was not unknown to the rough and tumble of politics: never mind, he could not be nudged from the still-centre of his tenets -- for was not any deviation from the moral code a slide into corruption? Hate is a weapon a Marxist dedicated to the cause takes pride in. EMS hated with gusto the venal political crowd assembled in the nooks and corners of the country.

The happenings in New Delhi no question filled him with disgust. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its friends have succeeded in putting together a government. They have also succeeded in putting together a so-called national agenda. Like the non-barking dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, the remarkable thing about this agenda is its silence on the issue of corruption, an issue on which the party had cried itself hoarse in the pre-election season. The document makes a minor reference to the need to bring the office of the prime minister within the ambit of the Lok Pal Bill.

That is, however, about all it has to say on corruption. It could hardly be otherwise; the BJP has obviously decided to survive in government with support garnered from diverse sources, and it would not mind striking a deal with all comers, including from crooks and cheats.

As the parleys preceding the election of the Lok Sabha Speaker indicated, the party would not even mind entering into understandings with Congressmen.

Given this background, the Left Front and the rump of the United Front are rendering themselves slightly ridiculous by their current activities. Neither the BJP nor the Congress has any use for any third party intermediation for their coming together or falling apart. Corruption is a great and secular bridge builder between them. It also stretches credibility that the Congress represents lily white secularism, while only the BJP is to be considered as belonging to the suspect species. There is a steady flow of opportunist politicians from the Congress to the BJP, and occasionally in the reverse direction. Such being the case, any attempt to draw an ideology-based differentiation between the two parties is bound to come a cropper.

Old man EMS had no illusion on this score. Till the end, he held fast to his conviction that the Congress is now reduced to a political formation exclusively of the crooked, by the crooked and for the crooked. The much-talked of Nehru-Gandhi legacy, besides, is one of unabashed authoritarianism. The manner in which the lady of 10, Janpath was installed overnight as the party's supreme leader clinched the case.

In one of the very last pieces he authored in Frontline, EMS appended the following caustic comments on the credentials of this dynastic leader: "Sonia Gandhi does not have even the level of nationalist tradition that her husband or her mother-in-law had. She took Indian citizenship only several years after becoming Rajiv Gandhi's wife. She has been nothing other than the wife of Rajiv Gandhi and the mother of Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi. Even today, she is no more than a primary member of the Congress. That she should become the main campaigner of the Congress, sidelining even the party president, shows the level of degeneration of the Congress party. Those who declare that the Nehru-Gandhi family has the right to govern the country are, in effect, renouncing the nationalist tradition created by Jawaharlal Nehru and generations of Congressmen and women who, through their sufferings and sacrifices, built the party and fought for the country's freedom."

These are the words of no Bharatiya chauvinist, but of EMS. And EMS did not quite stop here. He felt impelled to add: "Disgusted by the Hindu communalism of the BJP, some people may welcome the 'Sonia wave', since it will help prevent the BJP from securing a majority in the 12th Lok Sabha and forming a government at the Centre. However, such a view would be shortsighted because the BJP and the Congress today are two faces of the same danger, both threatening India's democracy, national unity, communal peace and cohesion. There is nothing to choose between the BJP and the Congress."

EMS made these observations on the eve of the poll. Nothing has happened between then and now to erode the relevance of his comments. It is a good thing that he is not around to witness the kind of opportunism blatantly displayed by specimens getting jittery at the assumption of office by a BJP-led government. This new regime cannot be much worse than the Congress one which has been instrumental in leading the country back into the grim darkness of 19th century colonial rule, and which was an active abettor of the Babri Masjid demolition.

The Left could not stop either of these developments. Should the BJP's ambition overreach itself because its luminaries now constitute the nation's government, the Left must organise the barricade of resistance; sectarian fundamentalism needs be effectively crushed. But it will be outrageous to pretend that this task could be achieved through collaboration with a characterless, corruption-soaked authoritarian-minded political formation such as the Congress.

In effect this was EMS's final word of admonition to his comrades: there can be no collaboration with class adversaries who are, to boot, corrupt, and corrupt to the core.

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