•Coomi Kapoor: What is your take on the Left’s poor performance in the elections?

D. Raja: The elections are a setback to the Left. It is a very serious reverse. It is a debacle. But it is only a temporary debacle. At the moment, there is a tendency to say the Left is over, there’s no place for the Left. It is not true. We are confident that we have that the tenacity and the potential to overcome this setback. The Left has a definite place in Indian polity. We do understand the seriousness of the current situation. We had a meeting of the CPI’s national executive and a preliminary review of the election results. We have asked all state units to go in for a very self-critical and critical review of the election results. Kerala has already done this, others are in the process of doing it. We had a meeting of the four Left parties also. We discussed the election results and we agreed that it is a reverse. Once individual parties do their internal reviews, the four Left parties will get together and have a collective assessment of the emerging situation.

•Coomi Kapoor: Was the idea of hastily putting together a Third Front, without any commonality of ideology, a historic blunder in retrospect?

Firstly, we never called it the Third Front. We always said an alternative—a non-Congress, non-BJP alternative. The media gave the name ‘Third Front’ and it became an accepted term. I strongly believe that the idea of an alternative is correct. We have been talking about an alternative since 1977-78. But we always meant it to be an alternative which emerged through the people’s movements, people’s actions based on certain policies and programmes. It cannot be a kind of ready-made group, bringing certain political parties together at the time of elections and projecting them as an alternative. That’s where our understanding went wrong. Moreover, our electoral adjustments with certain parties were mainly state-specific. The electoral adjustments with AIADMK was only in Tamil Nadu, with Telugu Desam only in Andhra, with JD(S) only in Karnataka but there was a tendency to project them as a national alternative. So the way we projected the alternative became very unrealistic, unviable.

... contd.