At a recent business school conference, a student said that the Left parties got what they deserved in the last election because any political party that stands in the way of economic growth is unpatriotic. While there are no reasons to doubt the integrity of Left parties, the ongoing operation at Lalgarh represents bypass surgery when preventive cure or a healthy lifestyle over the years would have been less painful, invasive and jarring. The country today pays for their unwillingness to take on the Maoists in West Bengal long after they could and should have. The Left’s stand on economic issues is out of sync with a young and resurgent India. Their honesty and idealism as national parties is a valuable addition to the political debate (unlike some regional parties) but their role will only be fulfilled if they review their dated dogmatism around class struggle, economic development, geopolitics, labour markets and deregulation.

Nandan Nilekani aptly describes the Left’s “Politics of No” as inappropriate for an India that is younger, more confident and less fearful of foreigners. Lalgarh shows that our national security requires dominance of the rule of law.

India’s population has been repackaged as a demographic dividend. But for every Indian to reach her potential, we require massive changes to our education, employability and employment ecosystem. Our current labour laws breed unorganised employment and encourage the substitution of labour with machines. Yet the Left parties project job preservation as a form of job creation and present the self-interest of a minority (8 per cent of the labour force in the organised sector) as the national interest. India’s five labour market transitions (farm to non-farm, rural to urban, unorganised to organised, subsistence self-employment and school to work) are journeys to a better life but India’s people supply chain is broken. The Left parties’ opposition to labour law reform, foreign investment and performance management in the public sector sabotages the demand and supply side of labour markets.

The biggest disappointment with the Left hinges around their failure to confront the so-called Naxalite “liberated corridor” running through seven states from Andhra to Jharkhand by their abdication of political space to their violent but ideologically close cousins. Koteshwar Rao is a creation of the Left’s traditional unwillingness to take on the Naxalite mission of competing and defeating the state by collecting taxes, enforcing property rights, and subverting the judicial process. By consciously not setting up their organised and disciplined cadres in these areas and confronting Naxalism earlier, the Left created the Frankenstein that has now turned on its creator. Their track record in West Bengal (the birthplace of the Naxal movement) has been lame; the only persistent and strong campaign to tackle Naxals in West Bengal was under a Congress government led by Siddhartha Shankar Ray. After the Central intervention in Lalgarh, we hope that this has changed for ever.

A second national security critique of the Left parties’ stand on national security is pivoted on their stand around the Indo-US nuclear deal. Their opposition to the nuclear deal overlooked the intertwined leverage from strategic collaboration with the US in resolving the export of cross-border terrorism. Without US involvement in Pakistan, it would be unimaginable to have the Pakistani political system and army fight terrorism on their home ground. It also jeopardised the temporary window for a deal with George W. Bush. India and the US were always natural allies in the fight against terror since Kashmir started festering in 1989 but this theoretically elegant construct only became a reality after 9/11, 26/11, Afghanistan’s escalation and our nuclear deal.

The communist parties have a pathological distrust of the US but obviously this is not xenophobia; they deify a German writer, declared war on the Indian state in 1952 under Russian orders and take spiritual guidance from China. The communists are important to Indian politics because they are honest, hard working and idealistic. But they need a radical review of dogma because India is the only country in the world growing younger and the young are less burdened by history. In an unforgettable scene in the movie Valkyrie, Tom Cruise as German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg plotting the assassination of Hitler interviews an assistant with the question “I am committed to commit treason with all means available to me; can I count you in?” Stauffenberg did what he did because there was a conflict between his duty and his conscience; one hopes his equivalent in the

Indian Left emerges soon.

The writer is a former director-general of J&K Police

express@expressindia.com