Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Remaining in the UF means fudging the Budget and flying on hyperbole

Thanks to the downplaying of class as the determining line of divide, caste and community have taken over.

The masters of caste politics are those whom the Left is now in alliance with. The masters of communal politics are those whom the alliance of castes is now battling from atop communists's shoulders. How can the Left join one or the other? As a matter of temporary tactics to defeat the Congress, yes. But in the interests of the working class, no!

If the iron of opportunism has not entirely entered the soul of our comrades, it is for them to ask themselves two questions: Should they, in the Age of Coalitions, stay with their present partners, this ragbag gallimaufry of class enemies? Or should they, as in Kerala, West Bengal and even Tripura, put together a socialist coalition that will pit real Left alternatives to the nostrums of the democratic Right?

Manmohan Singh's 'new' economic policy was constantly being lugged back by what the Right calls the ideological 'baggage' of our Nehruvian past. It was not baggage, it was ballast. It is what gave balance to the process of reform.

The Left is now in the company of a finance minister who does not even believe that India is Asian. He has accepted wholesale the trans-Pacific canard that Asian means Asean. And that our role models are to be found in the likes of Lee Kwan Yew and Park Chung Hee (or possibly, given the phone calls he makes to newspaper proprietors about refractory columnists, Synghman Rhee and Chiang Kai Shek!). Is this really where we want to go? Is the Common Minimum Programme aimed at making a Taiwan of India?

Is that where the Left wants India to go?

Apparently not (unless, of course, Bengal Lamps is opening a branch in Taipei!). As a movement, the Left has a viewpoint grounded in a hundred years and more of serious, scientific political thought. It is not a viewpoint that can be cast aside with one shrug of the shoulder. That viewpoint is gravely inconsistent with the kind of market mania that has overtaken the United Front government.

If Surjeet does not wish to go the Gorbachev way, he and his comrades will have to rethink. They are among the very few in Indian politics who, in fact, can think. When they do they will quickly see that the politics of caste and the politics of community can be combated only by the politics of class. Remaining in the UF means fudging the budget and flying on hyperbole.

The Left has another and more noble calling to answer -- to restore the dividing line of ideology which has got so badly blurred these last two opportunistic decades. A country like ours provides a rich and fertile soil for elaborating a socialist alternative. Such an alternative might be called for very soon. For, the wind which the finance minister has sown may well reap a whirl-wind. The crisis when it comes, and that will be sooner than later, requires the Left to Be Prepared.

Are they?

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