Red Nehru

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is supposed to be in the vanguard of revolution,and thus is technically expected to be forward-looking,for fear that the revolution veer off into a ditch or something. In practice,however,the CPM tends to be among the most nostalgic of major Indian institutions. They never met a dying paradigm they didnt like. The partys general secretary,Prakash Karat,in his outburst against the Congress in Peoples Democracy,has helped to cement that reputation. Comparing 2009 and 2004,he said that if then India needed protection against a saffron-tinged threat,today neo-liberal dogma and crony capitalism of Congress leaders and their abandonment of the Nehruvian legacy is dangerous.

Ah,the Nehruvian legacy,that wonderful,fungible thing. Karat has praised it before. Last August,in the same party newspaper,he praised the Nehruvian vision of an independent and self-reliant India,something the Congress was willing to dump at the altar of neo-liberal policy and the nuclear deal. Yet,like the RSS and BJP singing the praises of Mahatma Gandhi,having Indias senior communist singing Nehrus praises jars. For years after Independence,the party despised Nehrus vision: Moscow may have called him an imperialist lackey,Beijing a running dog of the West,but Indias domestic communists were not far behind in their acid. When relations thawed between Delhi and Moscow,they did within India as well (Nehru became not wholly reactionary); but at no point was independence prized by the Left,merely an anti-American,anti-market orientation. To sing Nehruvian policys praises now seems historically illiterate.

The Nehruvian legacy that Karat is trying to appropriate is more complex than he would like,perhaps,like Nehru himself. It includes the delicate refusal to put oneself forward in the matter of a Security Council seat,yes but it also includes full-throated demands that the emergent world be recognised on principles that India,as its natural leader,would set. This is the Nehru who would defer to Chinese aspirations,for example,while warning the Intelligence Bureau that China had always been an aggressive country and economic growth would make it an explosive missile. Is the CPM truly ready to try for his mantle?