Just 3 more years in India?

There can be no better proof of the CPM’s current national status than the fact the party forced the Congress to junk its favoured nominee for the president’s post. Never has the Congress ruled in Delhi and accepted such a fait accompli. History was made then and not when, as a wonderfully straight-talking A.B. Bardhan told this newspaper, the PM casually suggested the name of Pratibha Patil. And if presidential elections play out as the UPA and the Left want it to, who knows, we may have a Marxist vice-president.

The CPM has also, in a display of excellent political horse sense, abandoned the silly idea of a ‘Third Front’ and decided to stick with the UPA. This is good thinking not only for the obvious reason that the ‘Third Front’ is not a winning proposition. It is smart because the CPM will extend support to a Congress that seems exhausted in government. In the next two years of UPA rule, the odds are against the Congress taking on the Left over any fresh ‘anti-people’ policy. Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury, thoroughly intelligent politicians both, may even privately lament the Congress’s suffocating ‘pro-peopleness’. What will the press releases be about in the next two years?

The CPM will, of course, have more serious things to worry about — the beginning of the slide to the bottom, a near-future that may be worse that the pre-1977 situation. Assume, for the purposes of this argument, that in the 2009 general elections, Bengal more or less returns the usual quota of Left MPs. Now consider the following.

Elections in recent years have seen the Left losing those small but significant pockets of influence in the broad swathe from Bihar via UP to Punjab. Marxists are without any political traction in the Hindi heartland. This, close readers of Marxist political praxis will recognise, is a huge blow. The loss of those few MLAs in the big northern states makes the Left’s quest for a true national presence worse than a fantasy.

There’s Kerala, of course. Malayalis, like Bengalis, like to see two sides playing a game of soccer. But Malayalis, unlike Bengalis, prefer to see two sides in a political contest, too. And in 2009 national polls, history strongly suggests that it will be the turn of the other side.

So what have we got so far? Bengal does its turn for the Marxists, Kerala doesn’t and they are nowhere in the Hindi heartland. Now consider the only two realistic outcomes of the general elections: a Congress-led or a BJP-led coalition managing to come to power. (The unrealistic possibility is that a Third Front manages to win; the monumentally unrealistic possibility is that if it does win, it can pick a prime minister without imploding).

The anti-incumbency thumb rule suggests that the probability is greater the Congress will lose power than retain it (In all but two national elections since 1977 when the Congress lost power for the first time, the incumbent has floundered; the exceptions were ‘special’ occasions. In 1984, the Indira assassination sympathy wave got the Congress back and in 1999, the Kargil-engendered patriotic wave got the BJP back. No wave means the incumbent gets washed out).

If the Congress returns to the Opposition benches in Parliament, the Left, with only Bengal MPs giving it a measure of respectability, returns to near-irrelevance. The Congress is hardly likely to court another loser. The BJP in power would probably seek to proactively toast the Left’s marginal status. But let’s also assume the anti-incumbency rule doesn’t operate. Suppose the Congress surprises itself in 2009 even more than it did in 2004 and manages to get the numbers. Happy days for the CPM? Hardly.

If the Congress does manage to break the anti-incumbency rule, it will almost certainly have more seats than it does now and the Left will have considerably fewer. Ergo, far less bargaining power for the Marxists if they are outside the government.

But could they again tell the Congress that they would like to remain outside? Would the Congress, flush from a second consecutive victory, allow them the luxury? If the Congress puts pressure on the CPM to join the government, whatever the latter decides can turn out to be another historic blunder: Say no and be pushed to the margins, with little influence on policy. Say yes, and then necessarily become a party to decisions against which the Left would like to send out critical press releases.

Such decisions would be inevitable because, whatever the political rhetoric of the day, the Congress and the BJP have a minimum reformist core as far as economic policy is concerned. In power, the core will get activated from time to time, especially in the first half of the term. Let’s put it this way. Neither party would actually like to preside over a trend reversal in India’s economic growth.

Far smaller, far less influential and, if it is part of a national government, in a severe crisis of ideological conscience — that’s the CPM’s likely national future, never mind anniversaries in Bengal.

So, really, no apologies for my lack of bourgeois grace. What India will do to Marxists in the next 3 years (by 2010, the next national government will have been in power for a year) is so much more interesting than what Bengal has done for Marxists in the last 30.