by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
The ‘election’ of Sitaram Yechuri as the fifth general secretary of the CPI(M) at the just concluded 21st party congress at Vishakhapatnam, and the obvious though unstated defeat of S. Ramachandra Pillai, a proxy of outgoing chief Prakash Karat, may acquire more than symbolic value if Yechuri can prove himself to be an agent of change. He has age on his side, being 15 years younger than 77-year-old Pillai. Yechuri is also a pukka Delhi-ite, educated in St. Stephens and JNU, and is a fluent speaker in Hindi and Bengali, in addition to his native Telugu. He is as much a member of the capital’s Lutyen circuit as was the late Harkishan Singh Surjeet, party general secretary prior to Karat. Pillai’s credentials on these scores obviously do not add up to even a fraction of Yechury’s. But Karat is an enigma.
The ‘election’ of Sitaram Yechuri as the fifth general secretary of the CPI(M) at the just concluded 21st party congress at Vishakhapatnam, and the obvious though unstated defeat of S. Ramachandra Pillai, a proxy of outgoing chief Prakash Karat, may acquire more than symbolic value if Yechuri can prove himself to be an agent of change. He has age on his side, being 15 years younger than 77-year-old Pillai. Yechuri is also a pukka Delhi-ite, educated in St. Stephens and JNU, and is a fluent speaker in Hindi and Bengali, in addition to his native Telugu. He is as much a member of the capital’s Lutyen circuit as was the late Harkishan Singh Surjeet, party general secretary prior to Karat. Pillai’s credentials on these scores obviously do not add up to even a fraction of Yechury’s. But Karat is an enigma.
Though Yechury is more in tune with the changing world,
Karat is in fact a chip off the old communist block—westernized,
sophisticated and quite at a loss in the dirty world of Indian politics.
As a school student he wrote a competitive essay on the Tokyo Olympics that got him a ticket to Tokyo. As an undergraduate economics student of Madras Christian College he won a scholarship to Edinburgh, where he completed his MSc and came in touch with Marxist scholar Victor Kiernan. Back in India, he joined JNU where he founded SFI. The university is still the cradle of many communists. He never had too many friends, but even his limited associates showed elegance—like N. Ram of The Hindu fame and Congress leader P. Chidambaram. He’s a chip off the old communist block because most early communist leaders from India were like him: educated in Oxbridge colleges or Lincoln’s Inn, they were passionate about class struggle but were entirely out of depth with India’s working classes. Karat was out of place ever since he took charge of the party from Surjeet, an integral part of Delhi’s conspiratorial politics. After the party came under Karat’s charge he agreed to support the UPA but was devastated intellectually, and internally perhaps, with the Manmohan Singh government pushing for more and more reforms that were abhorred by ideologues like him as “neo-liberalism”, and befriending their arch enemy, the United States of America. His opportunity to liberate his party from the “twin evil” of association with either the Congress or the BJP came when Singh signed the civil nuclear deal with the US in 2008. He led the CPI(M) out of UPA amid not only jeers from his main competitor in West Bengal, Trinamool Congress (TMC), but the sullen eyes of many of his comrades who thought it was a stupid move to say goodbye to the government of the day because it signed a deal with the US. Why, isn’t China tied up with America in a variety of deal?
Yechury is among those who thought so and the differences between them became unbridgeable. On the floor for senior leaders at AKG Bhavan, the party headquarters in New Delhi, the two not only have different rooms but maintain different timings. Yechury, a polished debater, rubbished Karat’s anti-Congress (also anti-BJP) views as “sectarian”. At the party congress, Karat sought to explain away the party’s dramatic reverses, from 60 MPs in 2004 to 9 now, besides being routed from government in West Bengal and Kerala, as the result of flaws in the political-tactical line adopted at the Jalandhar congress in the 1970’s. But Yechury argued in an alternative political draft while there was nothing wrong with the party’s tactical line the party faced debacle because of “subjectivism” of its leaders, implying none other than Karat. His words came like music to the Bengal comrades who formed a big chunk of the 749 delegates. It was the snapping of ties with Congress in 2008 that paved the way for TMC to get Congress as its ally and muster sufficient strength to end CPI(M)’s 34-year-long rule. Many delegates gave vent to their inner feeling about Karat, that he is a bookish snob and is too preoccupied with the party’s Stalinist bureaucracy to bother about the changing world. The party is losing members (about 13 per cent annually since 2011 in West Bengal) not just because of its electoral reverses but due to its antiquated ideas about organization. In the less idealistic world of today, why should a party member pay a substantial “levy” to the party just for the sake of remaining a member? Besides, its “democratic centralism”, a Stalinist contraption.
As far as CPI(M)’s ideological conundrum is concerned, it is not purely in the realm of thought but will shape the party’s future. Its student membership is not growing fast enough because private institutions do not allow student politics. Can the party challenge growing privatisation of education? On the other hand, the reservation system of jobs and university admission is limited to Hindu underprivileged castes but keeps out the minorities on the plea that their religions have no caste system. Can the CPI(M) under Yechuri fight for a secular affirmative system? Rather than playing second fiddle to a dynasty-struck Congress, or joining the rustic guild of the Janata ‘parivar’, can Yechury get the party to lead the fight against BJP’s communalism from the front?
The transition from Karat to Yechury reminds me of an old story. In 1964, the CPI(M) was formed by a breakaway section of the undivided CPI who said they’d not participate in parliamentary elections. However, when election came in 1967, they put up candidates after giving a tortuous argument. At that time, Nagi Reddy, who became a Naxalite later on, told CPI(M) general secretary P. Sundaraya that “you are telling in bad English what (pro-Moscow CPI leader Shripad Amrit Dange used to say in good English”. Sophistry and ideological hair-splitting are Indian communists’ biggest undoing. It was the hallmark of Karat, a former aide to Sundaraya. Yechury will be lauded by his party if he can make it act and not just talk.
