Many things have been written about the Communist Party of India (Marxist), not least in these columns. And yet, some of its central claims about itself are rarely challenged. First among these is that it is a player at the national level at all, and if it is, it is qualitatively different in scope from regional or ethnic parties. There is something, we are expected to believe, that sets the CPM apart from, say, the Telugu Desam Party or the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham, something unrelated to its actual numbers in Parliament, something that makes it a genuine “national party”. Then there’s the other claim: that the CPM — and the Left, more generally — is somehow less touched by the mud that permeates our political process, that the selflessness and purity of ideology insulates them from sleaze.

For these shibboleths of socialist self-righteousness, it’s been a bad week or so. First, the Lavalin affair blew up. Pinari Vijayan, when power minister, led a contract renegotiation with the Canadian company that the Comptroller and Auditor-General subsequently declared was rammed through with unseemly haste; allegations of various quid pro quos caused the Central Bureau of Investigation to decide last week to prosecute Vijayan, now a member of the party’s politburo. Then reports emerged that the party’s central committee meeting in Kochi, called to reconsider the size and scope of its alliances nationwide, had reconfigured its plans for the north. In Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, the CPM apparently intends to contest only one seat; they remain unrepresented in the region in the current Lok Sabha. This is a far, far fall from the post-Independence strength of the communists in the industrial towns of north India, as well as in Harkishen Singh Surjeet’s Punjab.

... contd.