Left at the Crossroads: The last communist Brahmins

© PhotoMarc Saint-Upéry
Marc Saint-Upéry - Sputnik International
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A powerful communist regime has just been consigned to the dustbin of history and almost no one noticed.

A powerful communist regime has just been consigned to the dustbin of history and almost no one noticed. No, the sentence you just read is not the result of some strange back-to-the-soviet-future time warp. I’m talking about West Bengal, the Indian state with a population the size of two Ukraines or nine Hungaries.

After 34 years of uninterrupted rule, the world’s longest-serving elected communist government was severely defeated in May by the Trinamool Congress Party, a local breakaway from the national Congress Party led by a firebrand lower middle-class populist in a white sari, Mamata Banerjee.

The Bengali branch of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had built its strength on the struggles of landless laborers, poor peasants, slum dwellers and industrial workers. Once in power, the CPI(M) promoted a relatively successful land redistribution program, gaining huge support among the rural masses.

Yet the Bengali Communists rapidly showed their limits. While their comrades governing the southern state of Kerala made remarkable progress in health care and education (admittedly helped by previous local traditions of enlightened governance), the CPI(M) administration in Kolkata performed very poorly in terms of social and economic development. Among the large states of the Indian Union, West Bengal’s per capita income fell from 6th in 1981 to 11th in 2008.

Deeply entrenched in Marxist-Leninist dogma, the CPI(M) managed to capture the public institutions, controlling the civil service and feeding a soviet-style bureaucratic elephant. To teach in a school or practice in a hospital, you had to be affiliated to the party, and in some cases even taxi or rickshaw drivers had to prove their loyalty.

The police also came under control of the CPI(M), occasionally helping to fix local elections. A stifling cultural orthodoxy was imposed in parts of the academic sector. English speakers were “class enemies,” computers were evil because they would expel human labor, and rock music was “a cultural pollutant.”

A few years ago, the Bengali Communists eventually embraced a Chinese-style industrialization policy and tried to attract private investment in special economic zones. Unsurprisingly, they implemented their new corporate-friendly politics in the same authoritarian manner, alienating part of their rural base with brutal and unfair expropriations of agricultural land. As for the Kolkata middle-classes, they had long been estranged by the Communists’ mismanagement and incapacity to confront urban decay.

A curious characteristic of Indian Communist cadres is that they are often refined Brahmins whose relation to the masses is not completely devoid of aristocratic paternalism. They may promote class struggle in theory, but they’re not well attuned to the new brand of populist politics now sweeping various regions of India, with lower caste parties and emerging plebeian leaders eager to negotiate their share of power in the context of a booming economy. To a certain extent, Mamata Banerjee’s success in Bengal also responds to this trend.

Those new forces are often very corrupt and their ideology is rather hazy, but their mass appeal is based on new forms of identity politics that enhance the self-esteem of their followers, while their capacity to control big chunks of the local states’ bureaucracy allows them to hand out coveted government jobs.

This kind of regionalized, fragmented and unprincipled plebeian politics does have a certain democratizing effect as it erodes the power of the traditional high caste elites. But it is hardly a solution for the magnitude of the social woes that plague Indian society. And in spite of all the propaganda about the new “shining” India, the abyss of appalling injustice and inequality that subsists won’t be filled with call centers and software companies.

The callousness of the emerging Indian middle-class is sometimes quite impressive. In the luxurious new shopping centers of Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore, some bookstores are shelved with the complete works of Ayn Rand, the American best-selling author and libertarian diva aptly described by British journalist Johann Hari as the “fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls.” Rand’s tacky paeans to the legitimacy of selfishness and the innate moral superiority of the ruthless entrepreneur come in handy to modernize the traditional theological narrative about the karmic curse of the lower castes.

Of course, modern India is also full of vibrant social movements. A new generation of “mahatmas” (great souls) devote themselves to the welfare of the poor and the disenfranchised. Those brave activists, it should be known, are more often than not women. But their admirable efforts are not always reflected in the realm of parliamentary politics and public administration. That’s why India definitely needs a strong democratic Left.

Will the Indian Communists reflect on their decline and shed their dogmatic baggage and sectarian arrogance? This remains to be seen. Should they embrace a reflexive ideological pluralism instead of the present mix of bureaucratic pragmatism and Stalinist impulses, they might eventually merge with other progressive forces to define a new forward-looking agenda of social justice and democratic governance.

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Globalization might already sound like a stale catchword, but the new interconnected reality it describes still has surprising tricks up its sleeves. So what do you do when you’re a leftish French writer born in Africa and living in South America, with a background in Slavic Studies, a worried fascination for emerging Asian powers, and interests ranging from classical political philosophy to Bollywood film music? Read, travel, wonder. And send scattered dispatches from modernity’s frontlines.

Marc Saint-Upéry is a French journalist and political analyst living in Ecuador since 1998. He writes about political philosophy, international relations and development issues for various French and Latin American publications and in the international magazines Le Monde Diplomatique and Nueva Sociedad. He is the author of El Sueño de Bolívar: El Desafío de las izquierdas Sudamericanas (Bolivar’s Dream: the Left’s challenge in South America).

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