India - Comrades sent packing

Prakash Karat cuts a sorry figure today. His ideological posturing has cost the Left dearly. In 2004, his predecessor Harkishan Singh Surjeet offered the UPA support and enabled the Congress-led coalition to form the government. In 2005, Karat replaced Surjeet and almost immediately the relationship between the Congress and the Left turned sour. The dogmatic new general secretary unveiled a new era of hectoring the Congress and pushing an unreconstructed ideology that survives only in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Elsewhere in the world, the communists have been pushed to the fringes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between April 2005, when Karat replaced Surjeet, and July 8, 2008, when he foolishly withdrew support to the UPA, the Indian Left enjoyed more influence over the Indian government than Israel has over various US governments. And they blew it. Karat's obduracy has painted the Left out of the reckoning. Beijing's mandarins cannot be very pleased. This is abundantly clear from foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon's statement that China will support the Indian application to the Nuclear Suppliers Group. His dour, immature brinkmanship cost the Left its invaluable influence over government policy. The current crisis is of Karat's making; it has rocked the India story that the world believes is crucial both in geopolitics as well as in international economics. What the commissars don't understand is that the entire world in banking on India's emergence from a regional to a global power. US president George Bush was among the first to grasp the importance of the transformation. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says, the whole world is rooting for India to emerge from its poverty and its Third World victim mindset. Should India succeed, it will set an example for poor countries. It did that in the 1940s when the Indian National Congress won independence from Britain and presided over a relatively smooth transfer of power. India's economic transformation will send a more powerful signal to the world than China's phenomenal growth. The only other large nation that succeeded in wiping out mass poverty was the US more than two centuries ago. Sure, China has lifted more people out of poverty than India; at the same time, it has clamped down on political opposition. “An iron fist in a velvet glove,” a Chinese-American scholar once called it. What China lacks is soft power. That's what the Olympics exercise is all about. The fact is that without the fuzzier aspects of power, it will always be an outsider wanting entry to the world milieu. The charge that India's communists are a Chinese fifth column is not made lightly. Many in the highest levels of government believe it to be true. Any rational explanation of Karat's latest move must factor it in. If we give Karat and his commissars the benefit of the doubt, the only conclusion left to draw is that they are irresponsible and dogmatic. Any which way, they do not deserve to have a veto on government policy. Either as quislings or as juvenile ideologues, they should be banished to the fringes from whence they sprang. So Karat has now wrought his masterpiece of absurd theatre. It reminds me of a scene from the acclaimed film, ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'. With the law closing in on them, the duo found themselves at the edge of a cliff with a river flowing furiously below. They had no option but to jump. Sundance was hesitant because he couldn't swim. Butch told him not to worry “because the fall will kill you anyway”. That's the fate of the Left today. They have pulled the plug and find they are the ones who will be flushed down the drain. The Congress is a mighty political player with over a century's experience. It ran circles around the juvenile commissars and emerged triumphant. The writer is a New Delhi-based public affairs analyst.