DILEMMAS OF PARLIAMENTARY COMMUNISM

Abstract

In 2011, after thirty-four years in power, the Communist Party of IndiaMarxist–led Left Front in West Bengal was voted out of power. The Left Front was the world's longest running communist government to be elected to office. The Left Front governed a population larger than most European, African, and Latin American democracies. This essay examines the rise and decline of the parliamentary communist movement in Bengal. The authors argue that the prominence of the communist movement can be traced to a social imaginaire and a notion of “social citizenship” that the (undivided) communists developed through their participation in grassroots-level workers, peasants, and refugee movements, and equally crucially, through hegemonic interventions in “culture” since the 1940s. This social imaginaire became the basis of a “commonsensical idiom” in Bengal through the political practice of the communists, parliamentary and otherwise. The decline of the parliamentary communist influence started when their core constituency of peasants and workers perceived them to be violating this basis of social citizenship in the wake of their adoption of neoliberal policies of development beginning in the 1990s. The regional noncommunist opposition in West Bengal in 2011 captured the imagination of the electorate by appropriating and translating this long developed notion of social citizenship against the Left government.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Sandeep Banerjee, who read the initial manuscript and offered suggestions. Thanks are due to the five anonymous CAS readers, who graciously provided valuable critique and insights, and suggestions for making a sharper and more coherent argument. Finally, Tom Fenton, CAS editor, who encouraged and supported this work in more ways than we can mention. All errors and omissions, however, remain ours.

Notes

^1. New Configurations 1977, 816.

^2. In the state legislative assembly elections held on 20 June 1977, the CPI-M alone contested 224 seats out of 294 seats and the Left Front emerged victorious in 230 seats. Tasks in West Bengal 1977, 999.

^3. The population of West Bengal was 68 million in 1977. It rose to 91 million in 2011. The 1977 figure is given in Mallick 2007, 1; the 2011 figure comes from the projected population of West Bengal given in the Census of India website. Census of India 2011, Provisional Population. www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/prov_data_products_wb.html (accessed 26 May 2011).

^4. The largest European Union nation, Germany, has a population of 82 million. See europa.edu/about-eu/countries/germany/index_en.htm (accessed 16 June 2011). The most prosperous and functioning democracy of Africa, South Africa, has only 49 million people. See South Africa at a Glance: www.info.gov.za/aboutsa/glance.htm (accessed 16 June 2011). Except for Brazil (190 million) and Mexico (112 million) most Latin American countries had populations lower than that of West Bengal itself. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_American_countries_by_population (accessed 16 June 2011).

^5. The exception to this statement (of anti-incumbency and regime change in most parts of India) is Maharashtra: in that particular state, the Congress has managed to avoid being defeated, and has ruled continuously since Independence, excepting a brief period between 1995 to 1999 when the Shiv Sena, a regional party, ruled Maharashtra in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, the all-India Hindu Nationalist organization. Thus, apart from the Left Front in West Bengal, Maharashtra is the only state/province where one political party has been in power (almost) continuously. For details of these transformations in the 1990s, see Yadav 1996, 95–104. Indeed, the repeated victories of the CPI-M also registered their presence in the annals of global politics. E.J. Hobsbawm, the British Marxist thinker and historian, wrote in his tome on global history of the twentieth century, “Though communism disintegrated elsewhere, the deep rooted Left wing tradition of Hindu [sic] (West) Bengal, as well as competent administration maintained the Communist Party (Marxist) as almost the permanent government in the state.” Hobsbawm 1998, 370.

^6. Election Commission of India: eciresults.ap.nic.in/ (accessed 17 June 2011).

^7. Election Commission of India Constituency-wise results: eciresults.ap.nic.in/Constituency wiseS25150.htm (accessed 17 June 2011).

^8. Our usage of “commonsensical” is derived from Gramsci's discussion of cultural hegemony, in which common sense is “the diffuse, uncoordinated features of a general form of thought common to a particular period and a particular popular idiom.” See Gramsci 1971, 330n.

^9. For detailed accounts of major works on West Bengal that either confirm or contest this assertion, see Kohli 1987; Nossiter 1988; Kohli 1990. While these accounts are more supportive of the Left Front government's policies in West Bengal, Mallick 2007 offers a trenchant criticism of the Left Front government's policies. For scholarship that focuses on the functioning of panchayat raj (local self-government) under the Left Front government, see Webster 1989, which provides a critical but balanced account of Left Front policies. Webster further elaborated his analysis of Left politics in Webster 1992. The most profound endorsement of the system is found in Lieten 1992 and Lieten 1996. See also, two important unpublished doctoral dissertations: Bhattacharya 1993 and Williams 1996. Bhattacharya provides critical insights into how the party penetrated rural Bengal by implementing land reforms not simply through bureaucracy but through popular mobilization. This view later found confirmation in a different context in the work of anthropologist Arild Engelsen Ruud (Ruud 2003). The list of scholarship produced here is only a rudimentary indication of wider attention that the parliamentary Left experiment in West Bengal has attracted.

^10. By social imaginaire, we imply a new vision of society based on structural realignment and transformation of the social relations of production. Accompanying this program of political restructuration, and reinforcing it in complex ways, there developed a cultural imaginary that sought to represent what this new society would look like. See Cornelius Castoriadis' pioneering discussion of social imaginaire and Marxism in Castoriadis 1998. Social citizenship denotes how “popular classes” would gain access to resources of production for a sustainable livelihood and culturally, a notion of belonging. See Gramsci 1971.

^11. For a detailed discussion of refugee issues, see Chakraborty 1999; Bose 2000; Chatterjee 1992. For a wider account of political transformation in this period, see Chatterji 2007. Chatterji, however, tends to underestimate the role that class struggle played in the rise of the Left in Bengal. For a detailed description of agrarian struggle, see Cooper 1988. For an interesting account of how Hindu middle-class hegemonic identity incorporated peasant resistance, see Bhattacharyya 1978. For details of the history of labor struggle for wages and paradoxes associated with the mobilization of clerical workers, see Gourley 1983.

^12. The three-volume compilation of documents of this movement by Pradhan 1979 contains detailed documents related to the movement. For critical accounts of the movement, see Bhatia 2004 and Gopal 2005.

^13. The appropriateness of the Polish Marxist Michal Kalecki's notions of “intermediate classes and regimes” to the postcolonial Indian context was the subject of fierce debates in Indian Marxist circles in the early 1970s, refuted most notably by E.M.S Namboodiripad, the CPI-M leader and ideologue, on account of the presence of the Indian “domestic big bourgeoisie.” See the discussion of this episode in Ahmad 1985 and Harriss-White 2001.

^14. Guha 1963; Bhaduri 1976.

^15. For details, see Kling 1976.

^16. Sumit Sarkar, in particular, has drawn attention to the internal differentiation in the bhadralok (educated colonial intermediate classes) category; see Sarkar 1997. See also Partha Chatterjee's notion of the “mediational category” of bhadralok and its relation to “culture” in his defining study, Chatterjee 1993.

^17. For details of the contrasting patterns of industrialization between Mumbai and Calcutta, see Bagchi 1972.

^18. For a fascinating account of the rise of intermediary Marwari capital, see Goswami 1991; for a more detailed account, see Timberg 1978. For the cultural history of the Marwari community in Bengal, see Hardgrove 2004. For a detailed analysis of the stranglehold exercised by British Managing Agency Houses, see Mishra 1999.

^19. For an account of the bhadralok's preoccupation with cultural capital, see Bhattacharya 2005.

^20. Roy 1964; Basu 2004.

^21. Basu 2004.

^22. Singh 1988.

^23. Ahmad 1969.

^24. To access the mentality of various constituents of subaltern groups, see the autobiographies of Dalit and Muslim writers, such as Palit 1915 and Ahmed 1975. Both accounts provide a combination of class and ethno-religious anger against Hindu landed domination and prescribe various forms of resistance. The prescription for resistance, in the case of Palit, follows nonpolitical Victorian discourse of improvement through cooperative movements and self-help; in the case of Abul Mansur Ahmed it was directly the organization of the Krishak Proja Party and the Muslim League. See Ahmed 1975.

^25. For details of such movements and theorization of peasant insurgencies, see Guha 1983. Roy 1999 is the classic account.

^26. For detailed analysis of such a triad, see Ray and Ray 1973; Ray and Ray 1975; Ray 1979. The powerful role of jotedars in Bengal's agricultural history has been questioned by Bose 1986 and Chatterjee 1984. We believe that the Rays were correct in conceptualizing such a triad.

^27. For details, see Basu 2004.

^28. For the earliest articulation of this position from an Indian Marxist perspective, see Roy 1920.

^29. Initially an organization founded by a section of the Indian National Congress, the Aituc became a communist stronghold within a decade of its formation. The Indian National Trade Union Congress (Intuc) was started by the Congress party in 1947 to counter the communists. See Ralhan 1998.

^30. Ahmad 1969.

^31. Chattopadhyay 1970.

^32. Though Rajarshi Dasgupta deals with this issue in Dasgupta 2005, he misses the long-term process of plebianization of Bengali literature from the tales of kings and generals to that of rural folk and/or middle-class women.

^33. Basu 2004, 199–202.

^34. Moni Singh later became the chairman of the Communist Party of Bangladesh. See Singh 1988.

^35. Basu 2004, 37–74.

^36. For a detailed and constructive reappraisal of the communist policy, see Bhattacharya 1995.

^37. See Bhatia 2004, 76–94.

^38. Heller 1999.

^39. For detailed description of the revolutionary situation in India on the eve of Independence, see Chattopadhyay 1976.

^40. For a detailed description of this election, see Sen 1982.

^41. Sen 1981; Greenough 1982.

^42. For a detailed analysis of the riots of 1946, see Das 1993.

^43. For a detailed analysis of the role of Hindu communalism in the Partition process, see Chatterji 1994.

^44. For details of the Tebhaga movement in Sundarban region, see Ojha 1983.

^45. For a detailed analysis of the Telengana revolt, see Sundarayya 1972.

^46. See Bandyopadhyay 2008.

^47. For an account of communist mobilization of squatter-colony activism and refugee rights, see Chatterji 2007, 275ff.

^48. Das and Bandopadhyay 2004.

^49. See Basu 2000.

^50. In 1962 the United Left Election Committee secured eighty seats and nearly 33.6 percent of the polled votes. The Communist Party of India alone secured 24.96 percent of votes and fifty seats. In the 1957 state assembly elections the CPI secured forty-six seats and 17.81 percent of votes. Rao 2003, 216.

^51. The new party traced its origins to a special convention held between 7 and 11 July in Tenali, Andhra Pradesh, convened by thirty-two delegates who walked out of the CPI Congress held on 11 April 1964. Later the Party was re-christened at a national conference in Calcutta between 31 October and 7 November 1964. For details, see Bose 2005, 37.

^52. Interestingly, quite a few of these artists dissociated themselves from both the IPTA and official party lines, especially in the 1960s. Nevertheless, their contribution was still valuable in the construction of Left cultural hegemony. For a discussion, see Banerji 1998. For a different reading of this shift, see Chatterjee 2006.

^53. For details of the 1967 election in West Bengal, see The Reluctant Rulers 1967.

^54. Revolution in Dhoti 1967.

^55. Prafulla Sen Slept Here 1967.

^56. Laying on a Conspiracy of Lay Off 1967.

^57. The government declared that police would not intervene in legitimate trade union activities and this led to a massive gherao (confinement of managerial staff to industrial premises) by workers and union activists. The number of such blockades increased from a mere 32 in March 1967 to 151 in May 1967. See, for details, Rao 2003.

^58. Politics of Gheraos 1967.

^59. One Voice on Gherao 1967.

^60. Calcutta Diary 1967.

^61. Who Will Feed the Hungry? 1967.

^62. Trouble Up North 1967.

^63. For the influence of China on the Naxal revolution, especially the conflict between the Naxal projection of Mao Zedong as “Our Chairman” and the Chinese leadership's rejection of same, see the account by Chakrabarti 1990.

^64. The most comprehensive account is the early one by Banerjee (1980). See also, Ray 1998. For a contemporary appraisal of different aspects of Naxalism in Bengal, see Basu 2010.

^65. The CPI-M won 111 seats out of 277, compared to the Congress's 105. The governor of West Bengal, however, invited Ajoy Mukherjee, who had 5 seats to his party's credit, to form the government with Congress support. See the official CPI-M document, Biswas 1997, 9.

^66. As a contemporary commentator noted, “With 16,000 to 20,000 persons in prison without trial, with about 2,000 murders in two years, with the application of Prevention of Violence Act and Maintenance of Internal Security Act against the opposition…it was not possible for the opposition to work openly without fear.” Congress candidates “won” in historically Left electoral constituencies “with huge majorities of 40,000, 50,000, and even 60,000 in some cases.” Dasgupta 1972.

^67. Banerjee 1980. See also the journalistic account by Ghosh (1974).

^68. The elections in 1972 were possibly rigged; see Dasgupta 1972.

^69. The Janata Party wanted to contest 204 seats out of 294, much more than the 153 offered by the Left parties. See Biswas 1997, 11.

^70. The Left Front secured 230 out of 294 seats, with the CPI-M winning 178. The Janata Party and the Congress won 29 and 20 respectively. Santosh Rana, the ex–CPI-ML leader, contested and won from the Gopiballavpur constituency in west Medinipur district as an Independent candidate. See the website of the Indian Election Commission: eci.nic.in/eci_main/Statistical Reports/SE_1977/StatisticalReportWestBengal77.pdf (accessed 21 December 2012).

^71. For an account of major negative appraisals, see Mallick 2007. “Rather than promoting the interests of the urban and rural lower classes, it [the Left Front] gave primacy to the traditional rural and urban middle-class base of the Communist movement, which ultimately proved an obstacle to the further advancement both of lower-class interests, and those of the Communist movement as a whole” (4). In our view, such a formulaic class-division analysis does little to comprehend the social imaginaire that the Left historically created in Bengal, and does not explain how the CPI-M–led Left Front ultimately managed to destabilize its hegemony among the “rural lower classes” in its turn toward neoliberal governance policies.

^72. Notwithstanding the often charged tone of the debates on the efficacy of the Left Front's decentralization and land reforms programs, the overall opinion expressed is usually positive, especially for the earlier period (see note above for contrary position). For an updated list of evaluations, see Hazra 2006. For a recent quantitative study, see Banerjee, Gertler, and Ghatak 2002.

^73. Post-liberalization, especially after the late 1990s, the CPI-M suffered greater difficulties in countering the increasingly corporatized media's onslaught on traditional Left policies and attitudes in West Bengal. Although a full study is outside the scope of this article, we note in passing that the pronounced shift in media practices since the late 1990s, and the proliferation of numerous corporatized regional language–TV and other media, posited a crucial site for struggle over the social imaginaire in West Bengal (and beyond) that the Left failed singularly to tackle.

^74. See the discussion of party-society with respect to West Bengal in Bhattacharya 2004 and Bhattacharya 2009.

^75. Dasgupta 1995.

^76. For a discussion, see the collection of essays in Bose, Harriss-White, and Rogaly, eds. 1999.

^77. Quoted in Roy 2004, 148.

^78. The Left's constant upholding of a “secular” political approach and strident denunciations of “casteist,” “identity-politics” elsewhere in India paradoxically meant that the complexities of the caste as well as minority questions received little attention beyond vacuous reiterations of Left dogma. A significant pointer was the overwhelming dominance of high-caste Hindu middle-class men at almost all ranks of leadership.

^79. Another pointer of the Left's increasing ideological conservatism; whereas the Jyoti Basu–led CPI-M had clamored for West Bengal's secession from the Union of India after the constant Congress central interventions in 1971, citing the Leninist principle of the “right of national self-determination,” such positions and principles were relegated to the wayside over the decades, leading the CPI-M to severely condemn secessionist movements as, rather tautologically, “anti-national.” For a discussion of this shift in the larger context of the parliamentary Left's loss of predominance at the all-India level, see Nigam 1998.

^80. Ironically, this is the only time when the Left Front, especially Bhattacharya, was applauded by the corporate media. The largest media house in West Bengal, the influential Anandabazar Patrika (ABP), reversed its traditional hostility to the Left and projected Bhattacharya's industrialization drive as the harbinger of long-awaited “reforms,” including foreign direct investment and special economic zones. This media support continued even after the widespread popular dissension post Singur and Nandigram episodes of 2007–2008.

^81. For an example, among many, of Marxist intellectuals' attack on Left policy, see Sarkar and Chowdhury 2009. The website of the civil rights group Sanhati has a useful archive containing many of the critiques articulated by activists and prominent civil society members against the Left Front's policies in Nandigram, as well as Lalgarh. See sanhati.com/articles/4155/ (accessed 12 December 2012).

^82. For an account of the numerous local debates over land acquisition, the alienation of significant portions of the minority Muslim population and the Left's defeat in 2009, see Chakrabarty 2011.

^83. Marx 2008, 16.