Superstructure loses intellectual base

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Chandrasekhar Bhattacharjee talks to intellectuals from Kolkata who have been opposing the ruling Left Front right from the Singur-Nandigram days and tries to find out if they are veering towards the right

Professor Walden Bello, a fellow of the Transnational Institute and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines Diliman, made a pertinent remark two years back on the dilemma of the public intellectual of today. It is especially valid when it comes to the Left circle of intellectuals in India. “The tension between truth and politics becomes greatest when the public intellectual is part of a political organisation. What happens when the demands of truth and the demands of the organisation begin to diverge? This has been the greatest fear of intellectuals of the left, for, as I said, our moral or political side is very demanding. In the interests of the bigger battle against the right, against reaction, and against imperialism, it is a very great temptation to ignore, rationalise and defend abuses committed by our side and close ranks.” Bello, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, said this at his speech at the 49th Annual Convention of the San Francisco-based Outstanding Public Scholar Award Panel, International Studies Association.

Bello’s words help us understand the clear divide among the Left towards the official Marxist parties, the CPI(M) in particular. The disillusionment about what is still the largest Leftist entity in the parliamentary arena was evident during the Kolkata Film Festival in 2007 when Argentine film maker Fernando Ezequiel 'Pino' Solanas said that he would never come again to the Film Festival of Kolkata. It was in November when the so-called ‘Operation Sunrise’ was on in Nandigram and a section of film-makers and theatre personalities such as Aparna Sen, Shaonli Mitra, Bibhas Chakraborty, Kaushik Sen, etc. boycotted the festival and came out in protest. Artistes and cultural activists, who went to demonstrate outside Nandan, the festival venue, were manhandled and arrested. Solanas was kept from watching TV news, daily newspapers were not delivered to his hotel room and even his movement was restricted. The chagrin was against the chief minister and CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, projected as a cultural cognoscenti not only by CPI(M) but its allies as well.

The issue raises a controversy as to whether the dissenters are shifting towards the right? Bibhas Chakraborty, a leading light of the theatre movement in Bengal, contests this perception: “Who says we are turning against the Left? We are not. Our criticism is against a party that is pseudo-Left. And I won’t say this is something new in the global sphere. It happens at a time when several intellectuals all over the globe are brainstorming over the theory and practice of official Marxism and raising big questions. The authoritarian trend in the erstwhile socialist countries and even in China today is a fact of life. The protest from intellectuals and artists is a natural reaction.

Rabindranath Tagore warned against this in his Letter from Russia. Lenin sensed this before Tagore in his ending years. Mikhail Satrov’s play Blue Horse on the Red Grass, a day in Lenin's life set in 1921, is a vivid testimony of this.

Shaonli Mitra, one of the well-known stage artistes of Bengali theatre, is against the right-left dichotomy. She told TSI: “I don’t care about the Left or the Right. Our and my protest is always against injustice, oppression and trampling of freedom of expression. That is why we went to Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh. That is why we braved the state’s autocratic threats and sided with the oppressed and poor people. We wrote to the chief minister thrice but he did not care to reply to our plea. But erstwhile Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi responded readily, gave us a patient hearing and assured us of conveying our resentment to the administration. Take the 26-day hunger strike by state Opposition leader Mamata Banerjee demanding return of land to unwilling farmers of Singur. We wrote to the chief minister and Mamata Banerjee, asking them to hold talks to try to break the deadlock. Kaushik Sen, Bratya Basu and I met with Mamata Banerjee to discuss the situation while the CM didn’t even care to reply to any of our letters. This attitude of the Left Front government and its captain has distanced those who are not involved in party politics. It’s not a question of who is Left or not." She adds, “People in the cultural field do not have a single way of assertion. There are several transitional layers.”

Chandan Sen is an eminent theatre personality of Bengal, who is a state committee member of the CPI and had once contested the Assembly election. He said, “Chilean President Salvador Allende regretted just before his death as to why the Left intellectuals did not help him by pointing out his failures or wrong steps. Of course, we pointed out the mistakes and wrong steps of our Left Front government but our suggestions went unheard. But we tried sincerely.” Sen had joined the massive rally of the civil society against the state and CPM-sponsored ‘Operation Sunrise’ in Nandigram on November 14, 2007, along with his like-minded comrades like Meghnad Bhattacharjee. Talking to TSI, he added, “I feel the intellectuals and the civil society’s response was justified. Their role is limited to just pointing out the wrongs. They did it and will continue to do so in future.” Shamik Bandopadhyay, another noted Left-minded intellectual of Bengal who is presently attached with JNU in Delhi, wrote an excellent piece in a vernacular publication by narrating the days of torture and execution of the greatest Russian theatre personality, Vsevolod Meyerhold, during Stalin's rule. The Left Front rule, at least in the last decade, has seen a spurt in injustice, oppression and trampling of freedom of expression, opposed even by Left intellectuals. One can remember the last minute intervention of Chinmohan Sehanabis, an intellectual leader of CPI, to thwart CPM's attempt to outlaw some of the novels of Samaresh Basu. “Had he not objected, the Left Front government could not take credit for organising the funeral procession of Samaresh Bose,” remarked poet Amitabha Dasgupta over a decade back. “Taslima Nasreen was thrown out of the city in a secret plot hatched by a section of CPM men, who triggered unprecedented violence in Kolkata,” said a leading poet of Bengal.

Mahasweta Devi is candid: “We cannot tolerate this. We will continue this even after the government changes.”

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It was eventually a convergence of their mutual interests that helped seal the seat alliance between the Congress and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal. Both sides appreciate the seminal importance of the West Bengal Assembly election. The outcome of the 2011 polls in Bengal and Kerala would have national significance. For the TMC, a defeat at the hustings would raise questions about its very survival.

Congress insiders maintain that these elections would influence the trend of national politics in the years ahead, assuming that the ruling Left Front is defeated. The opening shots of the bitter battle between the Congress and the CPI(M) in particular were fired by the latter. Led by party general secretary Prakash Karat, the CPI(M) withdrew its support to UPA-I on the Indo-US nuclear deal and sought to defeat it in a Lok Sabha vote. The rest is history.

Congress leaders acknowledge that party president Sonia Gandhi, who along with the Prime Minister, walked the extra mile to retain Left support for the UPA, has not forgotten the snub. For both, marginalising the CPI(M) is priority number one — a task which the disastrous outcome of the 2009 Lok Sabha polls for the Left made easier for them.

Despite game efforts made by the CPI(M)' suave man– for-all-seasons Sitaram Yechury and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who made occasional soothing noises about the Congress, there has been no softening in the hard stance adopted by the ruling Congress. Unlike in the past, Bengal has not been accommodated much in its acute self-made financial crisis by Delhi of late. Even if defeating the CPI(M) involves tolerating the whimsical and populist ways of the TMC's leader, on land acquisition, price rise or its ambivalence on Maoists, so be it.

Once the Left is cut to size, its very existence would be open to question. Winning consistently in West Bengal is the bedrock that supports and sustains the CPI(M). Already marginalised at the Centre, the CPI(M) now struggles to survive in the one state which helps it maintain its identity. Its power to dictate terms to ruling formations in Delhi is in question.

This would spawn a rightist shift in national politics, post May 2011. The weakened Left would be forced to rediscover its lost relevance. Its dependence on secular, democratic parties like the Congress would increase. The late S.A. Dange's arguments favouring closer ties with secular democratic forces led by the Congress would then come true.

As for the TMC, its urgency to win is more acute than that of the Congress. Although the TMC runs the railway ministry, its increasing mass following from Darjeeling to Digha remains the foundation of its present national eminence and power, something that had served the CPI(M) earlier.

For the CPI(M), the unfolding political script in West Bengal carries an element of déjà vu. In 1977, what had helped the Left Front to come to power was the total consolidation of all parties and forces, right or left, on a pro-democracy anti-emergency platform, against the Congress. And in 2011, it is a similar consolidation of forces, from the Maoists to the Matuas, that confronts the ruling Left on an anti-CPI(M) agenda. Already, this has ensured a 3 to 8 per cent anti-Left vote swing in different parts of West Bengal since 2009.

CPI(M) leader Gautam Deb talks about only 11,00,000 votes separating the Left Front from the Congress-TMC vote bank in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls (the latter polled 1.96 crore votes, the Left 1.85 crore). This means, the Left Front needs to win back only 10 votes in each of the state's 56,000-plus polling booths.

Simple? Time will tell. But what of the nearly 50,00,000 new voters enrolled for the Assembly polls, mostly youths with no evocative memories of Vietnam, Che or the Emergency? The struggle to win back the hearts and minds of the disillusioned is harder than Gautam Deb lets on.

However, the Left is fighting back hard, doing its best to regroup. And it is a travesty of truth to say that in 34 years the Left Front had ”done nothing for the state”. The state's administration functioned fairly well until the early 1990s. Older voters remember that quite clearly. The fight is not easy for either side. For all their determination and unity of purpose, the Congress-TMC alliance will court their own peril if they underestimate the power of the Left to hit back.

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