April 07, 2008	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 29, 1429

Archives Write to Mr. Jawed Naqvi

INDIA’s two main communist parties — the CPI-M and CPI — held their national congresses during the last week or so. The more radical Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist, CPI-ML), not to be confused with a few other similarly titled arms-bearing Maoist groups of yore, held its own Congress in December. The CPI-M leads the Left Front, which includes the CPI but not the CPI-ML. The Left Front shores up the otherwise minority government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The CPI-ML, which a few years ago chose parliamentary democracy over its quest for an armed insurrection, doesn’t like this relationship between the CPI-M and a bourgeois party like the Congress. And yet, the Left Front’s opposition, nudged by the CPI-M, to the nuclear deal with the United States nearly brought down India’s “bourgeois” government. Today any prospect of the nuclear deal being agreed by the ruling coalition despite the Left’s opposition can only be seen as suicidal for the government if it does make intend to make such a move.

There were thriving and vibrant communist parties in nearly all the South Asian countries some years ago when they kept their millions of followers riveted to hope for better times. Often still weak on their own legs, they would work with a Mujib here or a Bhutto there, and in doing so, as the pro-Soviet CPI did with Indira Gandhi’s emergency, they would sometimes even put up with the authoritarian streak of their bourgeois allies. And they would idolise Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry and journalism of hope and radical mission and lean on Nazrul Islam’s mystical call to fight social bigotry. They split and then split again within their national boundaries, but they continued to hold hands with their counterparts across the borders.

But for Indira Gandhi’s military intervention, the Trotskyite communists of Sri Lanka, the JVP, nearly succeeded in toppling Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s government following a 1970 uprising. It is another story that they were co-opted into the mainstream by Mrs Bandaranaike’s daughter, the former president, Chandrika Kumaratunga. And now the Maoists in Nepal have overthrown their feudal monarch, something their lesser Marxist colleagues who shared power before them in Kathmandu were hesitant to dream of. And so the sublimation of an idea, no matter how controversial or subversive it is thought to be by many, continues.

There was a time when Indian communists would closely follow and try to learn from the struggles of their comrades in Pakistan, for example, against Gen Ayub Khan’s martial law regime. Today the movement in Pakistan seems to have all but dissipated. Occasionally we find one or two communist representatives from there attending a party meet of one of their communist allies in India (as Rahat Saeed did last week when he came as an observer to the CPI’s national conclave in Hyderabad). I don’t know if someone came to attend the CPI-M’s meeting in Coimbatore as they did in the previous congresses.

However, a question that bothers quite a few in the region is: What has happened to all the communists of Afghanistan since the fall of President Najibullah? They must be there somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere. What are they thinking or doing about the state of affairs in their country? Are they covertly supporting the Taliban or have they migrated to the United States in a Faustian trade-off?

A young Pakistani who was in Delhi last week with a TV crew told me he had friends in a Trotskyite party in his country, which brought instant affinity with Tariq Ali’s brand of radicalism of the sixties and seventies but without any certainty of what is happening on the ground. So what are the Trotskyites thinking about dealing with their country’s old and new “cronies” of imperialism? Or have the Trotskyites discarded the easy habit of tarring everyone as collaborators and so on. Times change.

In India, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s euphoric description of imminent revolution (Hum dekhenge, made popular by Iqbal Bano) was widely used in 1990 of all the people by upper caste Hindu groups to rally support against the pro-poor Mandal Commission’s advice for widening caste-based affirmative action. But not everyone singing the famous tune could be a right-winger. Surely in Pakistan too, Faiz has not been entirely co-opted by the right even though the right has a long history of stealing cultural symbols of the left to beat them with.

The mullahs in Aligarh had usurped Marxist poet Kaifi Azmi’s emotive lines – Ailaane haq mein khatra-e-daar-o-rasan to hai/ lekin sawaal ye hai ki daar-o-rasan ke baad! (For many a seeker of truth, the hangman was no mere scarecrow; but your resolve could yet make him one, you know!) But how valid is the standard left-right framework for the resistance, which seems to have spontaneously evolved, to US military presence in the region? Two massive anti-American rallies on successive days greeted the visit to Delhi by President George W. Bush in 2005. Muslims of Deoband, whose ideological cousins the Taliban are, led one and the other organised by the CPI-M and its other leftist allies.

So when the CPI-M announced its draft political resolution for discussion by the xix congress in Coimbatore, it appeared to reach out to a wider range of end-users than to the communist parties in South Asia alone or beyond, some of whom have had an ideological makeover meanwhile or else have disappeared from the scene altogether. There were others stepping in to follow the formulations from India’s main communist party, including some of their former religious detractors. There are after all a very few left in the field that continue to understand and intone the turbulent minds of the masses, which is not to say that the rhetoric is always congruent with their action on the ground.

How many political groups in South Asia today, including the left and the right in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and of course Nepal could seriously disagree with the latest impressions from Coimbatore of what is wrong with the world today, and some of the prescriptions that could set things right? “The international situation since the 18th Congress has been marked by the continued efforts of the United States to expand and maintain its hegemonic drive,” says the party’s political document. “It seeks to do so by the imposition of neo-liberal policies through imperialist globalisation; by coercive methods such as sanctions and blockades and through direct military intervention. The unsustainability of imperialist-driven globalisation accentuates the US drive to make it sustainable by the intensification of exploitation, both domestically and of the developing countries; by the capturing of economic resources and the use of military force around the world.

The period has also seen growing resistance to the unilateralist moves of the United States and strengthening of the trend towards multi-polarity in the international arena.” Any arguments with that? Then take the assessment of the global economic crisis. The party in particular and its members in general are so often dubbed as dogmatic that it becomes easy to ignore their ideas even when they make perfect sense.

How can godless communists woo the religious right? Think again. Isn’t it curious that from Algeria to Afghanistan or Iran and from Indonesia to the Philippines, wherever the communists or some other secular left formations were suppressed we find their anti-imperialist anger, for want of a better word, being expressed by religious groups. I do not know if the Taliban in Afghanistan or the newly created radical Islamic groups in Iraq would disagree altogether with the CPI-M’s understanding of the current economic and military crisis.

“Imperialist globalisation and financial opening is resulting in a net flow of resources from the developing countries to the advanced economies,” observes the party document. It quotes the UN’s latest World Economic Situation and Prospects 2007, to assert how the net financial flows in developing economies have gone from a net inflow of $40 billion in 1995 to a net outflow of $657 billion in 2006.

“Such transfer of resources from the developing to the advanced economies is mainly on account of interest payments on debt, profit remittances by MNCs and investments made in the financial markets in developed economies by the corporates and the rich of the developing countries; which far offsets the capital inflows into the developing countries in the form of foreign investment and aid.”

Moreover, developing countries together hold over $3 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, which further contributes to resource flows from the developing to the advanced economies. The US alone borrows over $2 billion a day from poorer countries.” This is the backdrop to much that is going wrong in our region. And Indian communists may not be alone in believing so.

—jawednaqvi@gmail.com