Though their credibility among the intelligentsia has suffered to an extent, the two communist parties, the CPI and CPI(M), have survived the worldwide collapse of communism both as theory and practice. Indeed, they have managed to retain their acceptability among the intelligentsia as well.
As socialism, with its emphasis on centralised planning and the public sector in control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, has lost much of its shine, the platform of secularism and national sovereignty, allegedly under threat from multi-national corporations, has come in handy. All this is rather surprising but only on a superficial view. In reality, there is not much cause for surprise, as a careful scrutiny will show.
The two communist parties have been Janus-faced. While they have practised the Leninist doctrine of “democratic centralism”, a euphemism for dictatorship of a small group known as the Politburo, in their internal organisations, they have had to behave as social democrats in the larger political realm, by virtue of having had to function in a democratic polity. To use the familiar cliché, communism in India has had a “human face”, though, of course, not as a result of a deliberate choice on the part of its adherents. And on account of the strength of the anti-imperialist sentiment in India, they have enjoyed an advantage communist parties in other democratic societies such as Italy and France have not.
It would have been a different matter if the communists had come into power at the centre in New Delhi. Regardless of humane inclination of some individual leaders, they would have had to engage in a ruthless suppression of dissent, and all it implies by way of concentration camps and torture on a massive scale. For, like their counterparts in other countries, they would have failed to fulfil their promises of equality and ever rising standards of living for the people and would have been forced to resort to mass terror to keep themselves in power.
On that point, there cannot be the slightest doubt. The communist model of economic development and management has been an unmitigated disaster everywhere, including the former German Democratic Republic, which had the enormous advantage of access to the European common market via the Federal Republic. The story could not possibly have been different in industrially backward India. Millions would have been killed or died of starvation in Communist India as they have in Communist China.
The fact of communists coming into office in Kerala, Bengal and Tripura cannot vitiate this argument. They have had to function within the perimeters laid down by the Constitution, even though they have on occasions stretched these perimeters. As such they could only have made modest promises and aroused modest expectations. And they have had the Union government and other political parties to serve as scapegoats to explain away their failures.
Neither communist party has been nationalist in the proper sense of the term. But for a variety of reasons they have not offended the nationalist sentiment too deeply on that score. The justified charge of extra-territorial loyalties and sources of financial and other forms of support has not hurt them in the esteem of the intelligentsia and the populace in any significant way.
The pro-China orientation of the CPI (M) has been patent ever since it came into existence in 1964. Indeed, the split in the CPI leading to the formation of the CPI(M) itself, was precipitated, on the one hand, by the refusal of the would-be CPI(M) leaders to condemn the Chinese attack on India in 1962 and by the pro-India and anti-China shift in Soviet policy, on the other. But the party’s pro-China bias too, has not offended India’s nationalist susceptibilities sufficiently to hurt the CPI(M).
Indian nationalism has been preoccupied with Pakistan in view of events leading to partition and the conflict over Jammu and Kashmir and with the United States, not only on account of Washington’s assistance to Islamabad but also on account of its struggle against the Soviet Union. There can be little doubt that India’s sympathies in the cold war were broadly engaged on the side of Moscow, the fact of India being a democracy and receipt of substantial assistance from the other bloc notwithstanding.
Washington’s pro-Pakistan stance on Kashmir only helped crystallise the anti-US and pro- Soviet sentiment in India. Its basic source lay much deeper. It lay in India’s struggle against British imperialism and its sympathy and support for anti-Western movements elsewhere.
China has doubtless constituted a headache for India both on account of its support for Pakistan, especially since 1962, and the security threat it has constituted by virtue of its massive military presence in Tibet, particularly since 1959 when it crushed the revolt there, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee to India with thousands of his followers. But anti-Sinoism has not fitted into the overall framework of Indian thinking and policies, determined as these have been by the larger fact of the East-West cold war and the endemic conflict with Pakistan exploding into war in 1965 and 1991.
There was a small and ineffectual pro-America lobby which served as an anti-China lobby as well up to the early Seventies when Washington and Beijing patched up their dispute in order to forge an anti-Soviet front. After that, the anti-China sentiment could not get consolidated, at least partly on account of the absence of a lobby. The pro-Soviet lobby continued to concentrate its propaganda campaign on the United States which remained Moscow’s principal rival and opponent.
As for the CPI, the story goes back at least to 1942 when it opposed the ‘Quit India’ movement on the ground that the imperialist war had turned into the people’s war with Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union and that it was, therefore, wrong to oppose the British war effort. The CPI also virtually supported the Muslim League’s Pakistan demand in the Forties on the basis of its dangerous theory of India being a collection of nationalities entitled to exercise the right to secede from the union if they so desired.
This should have been the end of the CPI. But it was not. As it happened, on achievement of Independence in 1947, it not only refused to acknowledge that India had become free but also initiated an armed revolt in Telengana as a prelude to a countrywide insurrection. This should have made it impossible for it to outlive its opposition to the freedom movement in its final phase and its support for the Muslim League. But it did not. By the mid-Fifties, it had in fact become a ‘respectable’ organisation with which other Indians were prepared to do business. This tells us a great deal about the character of Indian nationalism which has not received the attention it deserves.
In 1942, the nationalist leadership was divided on whether to negotiate with the British and support the British war effort against the Nazis and Japanese militarists. But for Mahatma Gandhi, there would have been no ‘quit India’ movement. Nehru fell in line with Gandhiji with great reluctance.
After the end of the war, Britain made no attempt to hold on to India. On the contrary, Prime Minister Clement Attlee even advanced the date of the transfer of power from June 1948 to August 1947 under Lord Mountbatten’s persuasion, so anxious were the British to quit as soon as possible. Indeed, the winding up operation was a dangerously shoddy affair partly because it was so rushed.
The Mahatma came to be described as the ‘father of the nation’ on achievement of Independence. But apparently at a deep level in the national psyche the point was recorded that his movement was not all that necessary. Or so it appears to me.
The CPI was not formally exonerated of the charge of betraying the ‘Quit India’ movement. Communists in the Congress were in fact made to leave the party. But they did not become objects of hate. Indeed, as the nation’s attention got focussed on the struggle with the West- backed Pakistan on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir and Nehru whipped up an anti-US campaign in the country, the CPI’s commitment to a violent revolution, as illustrated by its activities in Telengana, got pushed into the background.
In course of time, this commitment too got toned down. Long before the Khrushchev-Bulganin visit to India in the 1955-56 winter and promise of support on the Kashmir issue among others, the CPI had begun to settle down as a more or less normal political party willing to play the game of democratic politics according to its rules. It formally abandoned the theory that a socialist revolution had of necessity to be a violent one. It could well be peaceful and constitutional, it now argued.
Nehru greatly facilitated the CPI’s rehabilitation after the Telengana fiasco. His economic policy, with its accent on the public sector and distrust of the business community, and his foreign policy, with its undeniable anti-US tilt up to the time of the Chinese attack in 1962, were certainly helpful to the CPI. But a larger factor helpful to both Nehru and the CPI had been at work in India. This related to the character and therefore orientation of the country’s dominant elite.
It is well known that the new elite is the product of the British system of education; the intelligentsia educated in the Western system has dominated almost all walks of life in the country. But it is not equally well recognised that it has arisen out of the ashes of the pre-British ruling groups. On the face of it, the Raj tried to prop up landlords, princes and princelings in order to counter the freedom movement led and manned by products of its own education system which made them familiar with the language and theories of nationalism, self-government and civil liberty. The nationalist propaganda, especially by the leftists inside and outside of the Indian National Congress, made effective use of this support to discredit the old order.
But the British were trying to prop up men and institutions they themselves had emasculated and divested of both authority and the source of that authority. The turning point was the decision to disarm the Indian peasantry. The power of local notables and ruling houses had rested on their ability to recruit soldiers from this vast military labour market and pay them; part of the money came from commercial activities. The extinction of this market dried up that powerful source of their power. They became appendages of the Raj. As such they survived as mere ghosts of their former selves
Just as the British made pulp of men and groups whose power came from the tip of the sword and barrel of the gun, they emasculated business communities as well by taking control of all key sectors of the economy and subordinating it to their economy. This paved the way for the rise to prominence and power of a new class of men from humbler and more literate social background. Pen did not in fact become mightier than the sword in British India. But the sword was in other hands. To Indians only the pen was available. Inevitably bureaucracy came to be prized in the government and law outside of the government. That would explain why the freedom movement too was dominated above all by lawyers from the district headquarters upwards and why the bureaucracy became so powerful after independence.
Nehru was the natural leader of this class. He had also a model, or more accurately, a mix of models, (broadly speaking, the British-style parliamentary system with Soviet-style planning) to commend. In that he scored over the Mahatma who had none. Gandhi’s self-sufficient village republic was a British-created and British-sponsored myth.
By the same token, socialism of the Nehru variety was the natural ideology of the dominant Indian elite, bookish, argumentative and unrelated either to land or business. Its deepest, even if unconscious, desire had to be to prevent the return of men of power and influence of the pre-British era, and not equity and development, however eloquent and apparently sincere its protestation on behalf of these goals.
The system was bound to fail and it has failed. I for one turned against it in the Forties because enough evidence was available by then to establish convincingly the utter inhumanity of the Soviet system. The Chinese occupation of Tibet further convinced me that Nehru’s policy of befriending China too would prove a disaster. Similarly, the construction of the Berlin wall to prevent East Germans from “voting with their feet” in Lenin’s picturesque phrase, convinced me that communism had been put on the defensive.
In India as ‘socialist’ planning proceeded to give the public sector control over the economy, corruption spread in the system like cancer. It could produce neither growth nor equity. It has not.
But after half a century of opposition to Marxism in its various incarnations, I also know that its appeal remains considerable in our country because the dominant Indian sentiment is anti-business and anti-success. The difference is that in the new context, its advocates do not have an example they can quote and a blueprint which they can recommend.
Meanwhile the power configuration in the country has also changed. The Brahminical order, to use a short-hand for a complex phenomenon, is in deep trouble. It is being challenged by the erstwhile warrior castes now rechristened other backward castes (OBCS). But a new and more relevant elite has not emerged, with the result that the political scene has become utterly confused. And so it is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. This gives communists and their allies in the academies and media enough room for manoeuvre. Beyond that it is difficult to see just now.
The Telegraph, 7 July 1992