Friedrich Engels had said that one of the principal outcomes of the proletarian revolution would be the withering away of the state. In India, post-2019, the state has emerged stronger than ever before and it is the Communist parties which are actually withering away! While much of the focus after the recent Lok Sabha election has been on the disastrous performance of the Congress, the real big story is the declining fortunes of the two Communist parties in India.
The Left parties had a decent presence in several states in the early decades after Independence. The undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) won 16 seats in the first Lok Sabha election in 1951-52. It rose to 29 seats in 1962; the party got around 9 per cent of the votes polled. After the party split, the CPI and the CPI(M) bagged 42 seats in 1967, but their vote share hovered around 9 per cent. This trend continued for three decades.
The two parties put up their best performance in 2004 when they together secured 53 seats in the Lok Sabha. Thereafter, their fortunes crashed. In 2014, the two could win just ten seats and their national vote share dropped to 4 per cent. This time, they are well below the danger mark having secured just five seats and about 2 per cent of the national vote.
While most political parties around the world, including Communist parties, re-invent themselves to stay afloat and win popular support, the CPI and the CPI(M) have stubbornly stuck to the theories and slogans that defined them decades ago. Their ideas about the working class, organised labour and the capitalist-proletariat binary remains unchanged, even though the world has moved on. This writer found examples of this during the Lok Sabha poll in West Bengal, where, during the road shows, CPI(M) cadres kept chanting “Inquilab Zindabad” while waving their red hammer and sickle flags.
Which revolution were they talking about in this day and age when the market economy rules the roost! The best example of how these two parties are completely out of sync with today’s reality is their refusal to acknowledge the advantages accruing to the poorest of the poor through many innovative schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, the Jan Dhan Yojana and the direct benefit transfer scheme.
Mudra is an innovative programme launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to kindle the entrepreneurial spirit among the poorer sections of society. The idea is to “fund the unfunded”. The applicants get loans ranging from `50,000 to `10 lakh. These small entrepreneurs in turn employ five to ten people to run their enterprise, be it a small eatery, a bakery, a garment or leather-goods making micro unit or a tea stall.
This writer met many beneficiaries during his travels to several states recently. The available data on the Mudra scheme is indeed heartening. Women entrepreneurs are the major beneficiaries of Mudra loans across sectors and constitute 70 per cent of those who have taken advantage of this scheme. Earlier this year, the government announced that it had disbursed loans worth `7.23 lakh crore.
Under the Ujjwala programme, the government provides a free cooking gas connection to families below the poverty line. Over 70 million families have benefited from the scheme. Another such programme with far-reaching impact is the scheme to build houses for the poor and toilets in every home. Though some of these schemes were initiated by the previous governments, the implementation was sluggish in the absence of motivation and commitment. These schemes picked up pace after Modi became prime minister in 2014.
All these schemes are aimed at ensuring the dignity of women and children. One would have thought that programmes of this kind would be hailed by the Communists, but that has not happened. The spokespersons of these two parties have been consistently running down these schemes meant exclusively to better the lives of the poorer classes, simply because these schemes were launched by Modi and since he is the driving force to ensure their completion within the shortest possible time. The election results show that this kind of negativity has not gone down well with the people.
There are many other factors which have rendered the two Communist parties unpopular. The first of these is their approach to secularism. The two parties have moved far away from the Shah Bano days when Somnath Chatterjee, Saifuddin Choudhury and several others took on the Muslim clergy and strongly opposed the Rajiv Gandhi government’s decision to bring in a law to prevent Muslim women from taking benefit of a civil law and a Supreme Court judgment providing maintenance to divorced women. That was in 1986.
However, over the last three decades the Left has become the standard bearer of the pseudo-secular brigade, become hostile to the Hindu majority and is pretending as if radical Islam is not an issue at all. The most recent example of its contempt for Hindu sentiment is the way it handled the Sabarimala issue and encouraged individuals to deride Hindus, their customs and their way of life.Where will they go from here? Will they do what the British Labour Party did some decades ago and change the way they think and work itself? If they again turn left, it’s a dead-end. If they turn right, they will cease to be left! Where are they headed? The nation wants to know!