The last General Secretary

Why India should be indebted to Prakash Karat

An apocryphal story has it that at the height of the perestroika debate of the late 1980s, a lean and hungry-looking comrade from a party village in Kannur, one of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM’s Kerala strongholds, noted with glee that Mikhail Gorbachev would redraw the boundaries of the Soviet Union into a geographic entity resembling the scar on his balding head. The comment didn’t evoke laughter, but anger and concern within the party panel where the discussion came up. The fall and disintegration of the Soviet Union a few years later left many scars, but very few Indian Communists bothered to learn from the failure of the experiment initiated by Vladimir Lenin, who neutralised the soviets, or the council of workers, and aped the Catholic Church in giving sweeping powers to the party. Notably, the late CPM patriarch EMS Namboodiripad suggested that the party he helped found should shed its Stalinist roots and adapt to new political realities—but soon found himself censured by fellow politburo members and other senior officials, including the then young Prakash Karat, the party’s current General Secretary, under whose watch it has shrunk to its historical low as an electoral force.

“True, Karat was the one at the helm when the party suffered one jolt after another. I am aware of the comment that he has succeeded where the Indian bourgeoisie failed for almost a century: to get rid of us from mainstream Indian politics,” notes a senior CPM leader from West Bengal, caught in a pensive mood. In his state, where the CPM was in power for an uninterrupted 34 years mostly under the late Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, the biggest Left party in the country has in recent years suffered a resounding drubbing at polls, first at the hands of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress and now the BJP, which has shoved it to the third position in the just- concluded Lok Sabha polls.

Nothing is more dangerous than wounded pride, the senior leader warns, referring to the party cadres. “They tend to blame the central leadership, comprising ‘elites’ such as Karat, for steering the party sloppily,” he adds. Within years of his takeover in 2005, Karat, a leader with no experience in political grassroots, has attracted criticism for blunders only the politically naive would commit. He has also incurred the wrath of a few party veterans, eminent hardliners in their prime, through his rigid posturing long before assuming the post.

But before we dig up the list of his gaffes, it is pertinent to keep in mind his future plans, which smack of myopic ambition. Karat, who is bound to step down as party chief at the upcoming triennial CPM Party Congress in 2015, prepares to rule by proxy by anointing his loyalist, 76-year-old S Ramachandran Pillai—instead of a younger Sitaram Yechury (61)—as his successor. The 66-year-old leader has received flak for presiding over a major downfall of the party. When he took over in 2005, CPM had 43 seats in the Lok Sabha; a power of veto over what it thought were Congress’ anti-people policies. It was also the undisputed leader of the non-Congress, non-BJP forces. A year earlier, Karat’s predecessor, the shrewd Harkishan Singh Surjeet, had played a pivotal role in putting in place a non-BJP government headed by Manmohan Singh, thanks to his privileged access to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.

Tragedy of errors

Unlike Surjeet, who was well-versed in the dynamics of national politics, Karat, affecting an inflexibility that some insiders see as a ploy to hide his liberal traits, has often betrayed his political naiveté when it comes to dealing with allies, especially those like the Samajwadi Party (SP). Ahead of the 2009 elections—following a faux pas involving the withdrawal of outside support to the Congress-led coalition over its decision to go ahead with the India-US nuclear deal—Karat tried to browbeat the SP in Uttar Pradesh by getting into negotiations with SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s arch rival, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). His colleague Yechury has repeatedly made it clear that “alienating” the SP was a huge mistake and that the decision to “court” an unpredictable Mayawati was taken on a whim by the likes of Karat and Pillai, without confiding in the rest of the politburo. In fact, the party went on to assess that pulling out of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in haste was a costly move; in the 2009 elections, the Left Front, led by the CPM, won 35 fewer seats in the Lok Sabha.

But Karat is not new to political naiveté. While it is well-known that he was at the forefront of a vicious intra-party battle to deny Jyoti Basu a golden chance to become the prime minister— the then West Bengal CM was a choice favoured even by a few senior BJP leaders—what piqued Surjeet no end was that the “young brigade” failed to realise their mistake in 2004 and refused to join the Congress-led coalition, lining up the “same old, stale arguments” they had raised eight years earlier. In protest, he refused to attend party meetings for a while; he was relentlessly persuaded until he yielded.

“These young leaders are behaving like Naxalites,” Surjeet reportedly said, referring to the likes of Karat who, despite being a cricket afficionado, a man of taste and intensely private, is a breakaway from the mould of politicians that the University of Edinburgh produces. “Karat might be the most erudite and academically qualified of all general secretaries that the CPM had so far—right from [founding member Puchalapalli] Sundarayya,” said one CPM politburo member. “But he is just a textbook revolutionary.”

Now the problem isn’t merely about myopic leadership, it is also about a lack of preparation for Communists to evolve into something else; such as social democrats. “The Left parties have failed to come to terms with changing realities and globalization,” says Sudha Pai, a former professor of politics at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, Indian Communists clung on to their old ideologies and anti-US stance, besides treating national parties as ‘bourgeois entities’, and in the process squandered away multiple opportunities to lead and be part of the central government.”

“Karat is singularly responsible for not snatching such opportunities,” a senior politburo member (known to be opposed to the General Secretary) told Open. He added that Karat mishandled affairs in West Bengal, where the state unit wanted to retain former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee within the party fold; many of them wanted to pitch him for the post of President of India, something Karat and his team opposed.

“Karat, out of sheer ego, squandered away numerous opportunities for the party. And you must realise that ego alone played a role in these decisions, besides political immaturity,” says a Delhi- based central committee member of the CPM. Of course, there was a forlorn weariness on Karat’s face as he faced the media after the CPM-led alliance, ideologically in a deep stupor, suffered a massive backlash in West Bengal in the 2011 state polls: of the 294 seats in the state assembly, it won merely 69 compared with 229 in 2006. The main opposition party, the All India Trinamool Congress (AITMC), swept to power, ending three and a half decades years of the Left Front rule.

A Kerala-based CPM leader, who enjoys good ties with the rebel CPM veteran and former chief minister VS Achuthanandan, is of the view that history has proved ‘Karat and Company’ wrong. Yechury, who initially favoured Basu’s being prime minister in 1996, later switched sides when he found himself outnumbered in the central committee. Ironically, the likes of Namboodiripad, Surjeet and other seniors had argued for CPM’s joining the deferral government.

“After shooting down a proposal by the winning alliance—[the political coalition of] United Front—to name Basu as prime minister [Basu would later call it a historical blunder], in 2004 Karat struck again by refusing to join the federal government. Instead, he offered to back the Congress-led government. In 2008, the CPM pulled out over its opposition to the India-US nuclear deal, in yet another America-phobic political blunder. Party chief Karat’s efforts to reach out to certain recalcitrant outfits, to push the ruling party to the ropes, alienated some of the party’s own allies. All of these were acts of political hara-kiri,” says a senior West Bengal leader based in Delhi.

A Delhi-based CPM leader argues that the state unit deserves a lot of blame, too. “People could no longer stand their disruptive activities,” he says. For his part, Ravi Nedungadi, former chief financial officer, UB Group, who grew up in Bengal during the heydays of Left rule, notes that the CPM failed to realise that the young people of West Bengal think no differently from those in Mumbai or Delhi.

Blind leading the blind

The generation of leaders that preceded Karat’s was comprised of hardliners: those who walked out of the Communist Party India (CPI) National Council in 1964 to form the CPM. But even they seemed far more in tune with changing realities and grassroots politics. Left watchers say it was Namboodiripad who co-opted younger leaders into the party’s national leadership. Leaders such as Karat were being groomed to take on larger responsibilities, and others like Pillai were named to the central committee of the party as early as 1985. They were special invitees to the politburo even prior to this. Karat was then 37 and Pillai 47, and Yechury was the youngest nominee at 33. In the next few years, five relatively young leaders— Sunil Maitra and P Ramachandran, in addition to Karat, Yechury and Pillai— were nominated to a new panel, called the Central Secretariat, who attended politburo meetings.

“The idea for such an exercise was to bring in a generation that better understood India’s changing realities,” says a senior CPM leader. Even before Namboodiripad went on this “hiring spree”, in West Bengal, then state secretary and CPM stalwart Promode Dasgupta had invested a lot of time and energy in grooming young leaders, and they included Biman Bose, Subhash Chakraborty, Anil Biswas, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and others. In Kerala, CPM patriarch AK Gopalan had enthused younger leaders and inspired them to take up more responsibilities.

But Karat has refused to take inspiration from illustrious predecessors to recruit young talent.

The last Party Congress was proof of this. The politburo’s three new entrants were West Bengal’s opposition leader Suryakanta Misra, Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) president AK Padmanabhan from Tamil Nadu and MA Baby from Kerala; then 58, Baby was the youngest recruit.

Karat has never seemed to understand that Communist parties that believe in parliamentary democracy have often fought alongside national movements, and often “controlled” such movements to gain prominence. In South Africa for example, the South African Communist Party had the reins of the leadership of the African National Congress. Similarly in other countries, like our neighbor, Nepal. “The blame goes to his predecessors as well who hardly participated in the national movement at its crucial junctures, such as the 1942 Quit India movement,” says renowned historian MGS Narayanan.

More ego clashes

In 2006, the Karat-led politburo overruled a proposal by the Kerala state leadership to ally with a Congress breakaway group.

“This was entirely an ego issue,” says a Kerala leader of the party. “Pinarayi Vijayan, the Kerala CPM state secretary, had gone ahead with talks with this group, as he is entitled to, and consulted Karat only later. This irked Karat and without looking at the political opportunity such a pact would bring, he decided to spike it.”

Kerala state leadership, which has now veered towards Karat, earlier blamed him for not initiating disciplinary action against an erring Achuthanandan. “Later, after he earned a lot of appeal for surviving within the party despite questioning it, thereby gaining a cult status, Karat began to be stern with him. By then it was too late,” a politburo member from Kerala told Open.

Cold war between Karat and Yechury hasn’t helped either. Yechury has meticulously used various occasions to denigrate Karat, according to senior party leaders from West Bengal. What bothers Yechury is that he is not number two in the party despite his prominence on TV chat shows. He is not seen as a natural successor to Karat. Instead, it is Pillai who is in charge of the ‘organisation’, a stepping stone to the top job and a position previously held by Karat when Surjeet was general secretary. Surjeet held the same post when Namboodiripad was General Secretary.

Unsurprisingly, in the four Sangharsh Sandesh Jatha campaigns of the recent past, the most significant one, according to a Delhi-based CPM activist, was given over to Pillai and the most insignificant one to Yechury. Pillai led the 18-day southern jatha, Karat the 13-day eastern jatha, his wife (and politburo member) Brinda the nine-day northern jatha and Yechury the eight-day western jatha.

“But all these fights will cease to make headlines with the CPM being reduced to a fringe force,” notes Narayanan, with a smile. The CPM-led Left, which had a historically high tally of 61 in 2004, is now reduced to just 11 seats in its kitty from three states; just about enough to afford it national party status. The CPI, a Left constituent, won only a singl seat this time around.

The goals envisaged in the 1978 Salkia Plenum resolutions of the party, to transform it into a mass movement with countrywide presence, remain a far cry. The Marxists have already lost the argument and the country. As Karat oversees the last rites of a lost ideology, India is indebted.

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Ullekh NP

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