| November 15, 2007 | Thursday | Ziqa’ad 04, 1428 |
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The curse of Stalin in Nandigram
LAST week saw the coronation of the first rightwing Hindu chief minister in South India. The BJP, which had been ruling Karnataka as a junior ally of the strangely named Janata Dal (Secular), was given the reins of the government as part of a mutual power-sharing agreement.
On the other hand, religious rightwing consolidation in India, a feature of the body politic since the arrival of Manmohan Singh and his neocon economic policies in 1991, has made serious inroads into the Marxist bastion of West Bengal, not electorally but even more worryingly, politically. The link between religious revivalism and Manmohan Singh-style reforms has its own logic. Indians are polarised into parochial categories when they go to vote. And then the agenda is handed over invariably to anyone who can best represent corporate interests. The rule applies to both the Congress and the BJP.
Apart from Karnataka, the BJP rules Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttaranchal on its own and Orissa and Punjab as an ally of regional parties there. The expansion of the BJP in the south and a threatened abbreviation of Marxist power in the east should signal the classic Left-Right confrontation. But this unfortunately is not about to happen, not quite yet.
Ever since the assault on the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992, which briefly catapulted the BJP to power in New Delhi in 1996 and in a more entrenched way in 1998, the Communist Party of India (Marxist, CPI-M) that leads India’s pro-parliament leftists, has been warning against the rise of Hindu fascism. The CPI-M leads a coalition of assorted leftist partners in Bengal, Kerala and the northeastern tribal state of Tripura, which borders Bangladesh.
During the BJP era, in the aftermath of 9/11, the CPI-M too began using the jargon of terrorism, pointing to the alleged influx of Muslims from Bangladesh. At the same time the party embarked on an ambitious plan to industrialise West Bengal citing the Chinese example. Its critics accuse the CPI-M of seeking to emulate China without the wherewithal that the Chinese Communist Party has at its command — namely, state power. Others have accused the CPI-M of being ‘Stalinist minus revolution’.
Indeed, at the heart of the Marxist woes in Bengal are a dismayed Left-liberal support base together with a looming stand-off with fellow Stalinists on the extreme Left, known variously as Naxalites and Maoists.
Their battleground is the village of Nandigram with a substantial Muslim population where the CPI-M government had planned to install an industrial chemical hub with multinational and Indian corporate support.
A violent stand-off ensued with, strangely enough, the rightist pro-business Trinamool Congress opposing the move to create Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Nandigram. The Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Hind, the Muslim reactionary outfit, which nevertheless claims to oppose American imperialism, has also moved in to oppose the Marxists. But the most disturbing blow has come from the Left-liberal support base, a completely new challenge for the CPI-M.
Eminent Marxist historian Sumit Sarkar and the renowned Romila Thapar are among those leading the chorus against the Left Front’s shocking behaviour in Nandigram. In his critique of the West Bengal government’s industrialisation policy he published in January, Sarkar said: “The West Bengal government seems determined to follow a particular path of development involving major concessions both to big capitalists like the Tatas and multinationals operating in SEZs.”
He went on to say: “... the strange thing is that these... are things which Left parties and groups as well as many others have been repeatedly and vehemently opposing. No less a person than the CPI-M general-secretary, in the course of last week, made two-three statements attacking SEZs. The CPI-M has been at the forefront of the struggles against such developments in other parts of the country.”
Later, in a joint statement, Romila Thapar, Arundhati Roy, Jeane Dreze, Sarkar and others said the situation in Nandigram was “likely to be repeated across the state if the policy continues to be executed as it has, without consideration for human rights, democratic procedures and livelihoods.”
Stung by criticism from the intellectuals over Nandigram, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee shot off a letter to them to explain his government’s land-acquisition policy. Bhattacharjee in his letter gave details of the land-acquisition procedure and the compensation being handed out. But this has not impressed any of his leftist critics. Sarkar’s rejoinder was moving: “As a lifelong Leftist, I am deeply shocked by recent events in the countryside of West Bengal…What is happening at Nandigram is a near civil war situation.”
When Stalin died in 1953 the entire communist world grieved for him. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is one of the very few who are alive today who had met Stalin. In his autobiography, Interesting Times, so titled after the Chinese curse — May you live in interesting times — he gives a moving account of some of those who continued to admire Stalin even though they had been at the receiving end of his anger.
Among those who continued to believe in Stalinism were “hard-bitten leaders like Palmiro Togliatti, who knew the terrible dictator at close quarters, and even by his real or prospective victims,” writes Hobsbawm.
“Molotov remained loyal to him for thirty-three years after his death, though in his last paranoiac years Stalin had forced him to divorce his wife and had her arrested, interrogated and exiled, and was plainly preparing Molotov himself for a show trial.
“Anna Pauker, of the Comintern and Romania, wept when she heard of Stalin’s death, even though she had not liked him, had indeed been afraid of him, and was at the time being prepared to be thrown to the wolves as an alleged bourgeois nationalist, agent of Truman and Zionism.”
According to Hobsbawm, there are two ‘ten days that shook the world’ in the history of the revolutionary movement of the last century; the days of the October Revolution described in John Reed’s book of that title, and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) which met on Feb 14-25, 1956. “To put it in the simplest terms, the October Revolution created a world communist movement, the Twentieth Congress destroyed it.”
Had Hobsbawm cast a critical eye on India, he would have noticed an unusual event here. Going by the global communist response to Khrushchev’s speech in 1956, India was a different kettle of fish. For instead of going down the tube with many others, the Communist Party of India installed the first ever elected communist government in Kerala in 1957.
It is another matter that Nehru’s Congress government in Delhi soon derailed the communists in Kerala, thus opening a still festering schism. But the communists too spared no opportunity in getting even with the Congress by aligning on several crucial occasions with rightwing parties of the Hindutva DNA they were to later fight.
The challenge in Nandigram for the first time goes beyond the Left-Right paradigm and transports us to the two events described by Hobsbawm. The October Revolution ushered a global communist revolution. The CPSU’s Twentieth Congress equally effectively quelled it. Compared to those events Nandigram exists in a time warp. And yet the ghost of Stalin has been seen brooding over the village by its impoverished residents and their intellectual sympathisers. They have much to lose from the looming confrontation, including the world that they had set out to conquer.
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