The Left recapture of Nandigram with its scant respect for the rule of law and the Left veto on the nuclear deal are born out of the same dilemma haunting the Marxists for more than a decade now. It is about the inability to come to terms with a world where traditional Left ideology is no longer in ascendance. If the Nandigram brutality has resulted from blindly following an extra-constitutional model of governance perfected in the 1970s, the rigidity on the nuclear issue stems from a stubborn refusal to discuss imperialism in the changed global power scenario. In both cases, the Indian Left has avoided what Marxist jargon would describe as ‘engaging with reality’.

Communist visionaries had the daring to deviate from the beaten track because they had the pragmatic belief that ideologies are never cast in stone. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiao Ping married Marxism to the country’s economic needs from an entirely nationalist perspective. On the other hand, the Indian Left has always grappled unsuccessfully with the problem of letting the ‘ism’ thrive in the Indian reality. It was Lenin who advised M.N. Roy, that there was nothing wrong in participating in the freedom struggle led by bourgeois nationalists. There has been a tendency of both the undivided CPI and subsequently the CPM to look for ideological reassurance from sister Communist parties abroad. Consequently, the party has been prone to being more internationalist than necessary in the strict Communist sense.

In the post-Cold War context, the Indian Left was in a position to redefine itself and provide leadership to the global Communist movement. There was curiosity in Europe and Latin America about a cluster of Left parties that have survived and grown in a genuinely diverse, democratic milieu. The CPM and the CPI would have been taken seriously by a new conscientious and liberal Left, resuscitated especially in Europe by a shared pathological hatred for George Bush and the American misadventure in Iraq. But the CPM drifted along and failed to occupy that position of worldwide respect that was there for its taking. You cannot win over comrades in countries like Portugal or Cyprus (where the rejuvenated Communists have some following) by clinging to an obsolete Stalinist perspective. It was not expected of the CPM to go so far as to concede vast tracts of ideological terrain and become a social democratic force or like the British Labour Party, but it could have shed dead ideological baggage.

... contd.