No More Only Red, Comrade!

Are blue- and orange-coloured hammer and sickle symbols in sync with the CPM’s ideology?

Rabindranath Tagore once said in a conversation with Albert Einstein, “…colour may, by combination with lines, create great pictures, so long as it does not smother and destroy their value.” Looking at the CPM wall graffiti in West Bengal and especially in the 2010 Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) election campaign in the city, one can say that colour has indeed smothered and destroyed the value of the pervasive sickle-hammer-star party symbol. KMC polls are only a few days away and the city is decorated with festoons, hoardings, flags and of course graffiti on almost every wall of the city our eyes can fall upon.

Colours combined with lines have indeed made great pictures! But what happened to red, the identity of Left-wing communism? The party symbol has come in grey, fluorescent yellow, olive-green, shades of blue, gold with red border, orange with red and black background, pink, and mauve with yellow border. One representation shows multiple stars on the symbol, while another more creatively shows a blue sickle and hammer burning in the maroon- red fire of a torch! Imagination and creativity unleashed, no doubt.

The constitution of the party describes its flag thus: ‘The flag of the Party shall be a red flag of which the length shall be one-and-a-half times its width. At the centre of the flag there shall be a crossed hammer and sickle in white.’ But as nothing is mentioned about the representation and colour of the symbol if drawn on a wall or elsewhere, party cadres and hired unskilled signboard painters take the liberty of displaying their imagination and creativity on it. To make their art more saleable and appealing, the painters indiscriminately use multiple colours, and party leaders overlook or happily forget the source and importance of the colour red used in their flag: the colour has been associated with Left-wing politics ever since the French Revolutionary Socialists adopted it in 1848 and used it in the Paris Commune in 1871.

Poriborton, the Bengali term for change, is much in vogue these days, mainly brought into fashion by Trinamool Congress, the main opposition party in West Bengal. This ‘P’ word might be a bitter pill for the CPM, but undeniably, it has already been swallowed. How? Through its colourful symbol.

— Text by Nilayan Dutta

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