The Indian National Congress won 206 seats and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) took 116 in a house of 543 in the recent Indian elections. Some 35 parties contested of which 25 won less than 10 seats each and a dozen got no more than one each.  Some commentators have been interpreting the Congress victory to mean that communalism in India has been rejected. This interpretation should be received with appropriate caution.

The BJP, which is admittedly a communal party, has emerged as the second largest group in the Lok Sabha. This is not a bad showing. It indicates that communalism is alive and well in India. That which is not well is the left. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has won only 16 seats and one of its factions has won four. This is a disaster for the left which had been running the governments in West Bengal and Kerala. It maintained a small but significant presence in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

The left has had an uneven career in Indian politics, The CPI-M surfaced in the first Lok Sabha in 1952 with 16 members. Its presence in the Lok Sabha increased to 27 following the general elections of 1957 and it registered a slight increase to 29 in 1962. It went through ups and downs, all of them slight, during the next 40 years. A huge rise in its fortunes occurred in the elections of 2004. The CPI-M won 43 seats in the Lok Sabha, 20 of them from West Bengal and 12 from Kerala. Its estranged sister, CPI, won 10 seats. Two other leftist parties, one of them called the Socialist Revolutionary Party, won three seats each. And then disaster struck five years later, 2009, as noted above.
 There is no obvious explanation of the left’s dramatic success in 2004 and its equally dramatic fall in 2009. We are reduced to speculation. Noteworthy is the fact that the left’s sway was limited to West Bengal, Kerala, and the tiny state of Tripura. It played second fiddle to the regional parties in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Its standing in much of the rest of India remained marginal. It could join hands with other groups in creating trouble on the streets, but it had neither the inclination nor the capability to do anything positive on its own.

It is easy for ideological parties to remain internally cohesive and faithful to their professed principles when they are not in power. They can ignore the uncongenial ground realities. But that changes when they take the responsibility for governing the country. Now the ground realities must be dealt with. In some cases it may be possible to remove or modify them, but when they are intractable the government will have to modify its own plans and policies to accommodate them.

The CPI-M in Kerala was not at peace within itself. The party’s local boss and its chief minister were reportedly not on speaking terms with each other. The communist government in both Kerala and West Bengal made deals, behind closed doors, with external political figures and bureaucrats to get the administration moving and work done. Nor did they make any visible efforts to stop political and bureaucratic corruption. The party was so preoccupied with being the ruler that it forgot to go back to the people to find what they wanted and needed.

India had a booming economy during the couple of decades or so prior to the onset of the global recession. This boom may have kept many of the people moderately satisfied with the quality of their lives and also kept from view the CPI-M government’s lack of economic dynamism. This may be an explanation of its particularly good electoral performance in 2004. The boom changed to a bust within a few years, which may explain the party’s unusually poor performance in the elections of 2009.

Going beyond India’s specific circumstances, a global trend should also be kept in mind. Barring a couple of Latin American countries where it has had a resurgence, socialism has been in retreat since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.The socialist creed, from all according to ability and to each according to his needs, sounds beautiful. But it has never actually been implemented. Its workings have been managed by party bosses and government bureaucrats. Under socialist regimes they replaced the capitalists as the people’s exploiters.

The communist government in West Bengal did not go out of its way to meet the people’s needs and aspirations. Capitalism, on its part, has shown a great deal of durability and resilience. It has demonstrated that it has the capacity to modify its organisational forms and drives to accommodate changing trends in human interaction. Desire for ownership of property, and that for profit and accumulation remain alive in the human breast, but capitalism has also awakened to a sense of social responsibility. Its managers realise that their enterprise cannot go forward except in society. They must have people to work for them and consumers to buy their products. It is thus to their advantage to keep society in good health.

No wonder then that capitalists have given billions to establish colleges and universities, libraries, museums, centres for the promotion of the fine arts, stadiums and places of public entertainment. Because of its conventional association with greed, the word ‘capitalism’ has been replaced by terms such as private enterprise and free-market economy. But the profit motive is the engine that runs the system whatever the name it bears.

In actual Indian practice socialism as a guide to public policy called for a substantial expansion of the public sector through nationalisation of major industries, financial institutions, and certain commercial houses. The state did not have business managers on its payroll. The management of state-owned enterprises fell to its civil servants who had no experience of running a business and making profits. In most cases nationalised industries lost money because of mismanagement and became a burden on the public exchequer. This is another reason for the public’s disenchantment with socialism.  

The writer, a former visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics, is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts. anwarsyed@cox.net