Crazy Little Thing Called LEFT

We will fight for the good of the common man. We will oppose every move to bring foreign investment to India because it will endanger the jobs of the hapless poor. We want to see India grow but cannot allow trade with the developed world. India should stay away from capitalism and embrace communism. China which holds a third of Kashmir as captive is our true friend while America is the biggest threat. The public sector units should be managed by inefficient people if necessary but control to private sector is totally prohibitive. We should subsidize every commodity in the market to help the common man even though it causes huge losses to the treasury.

Don’t be surprised. This is just an assimilation of the numerous speeches given out by the leaders of the Left parties over the decades. The archaic ideology, senility settled down in the cadres of the party, the octogenarian patriarchs….. all this is what the Left has come to symbolize today. The ever present blockade to any kind of growth plans the government might have, the Left parties can be assumed to be at the fore front of every dharna, gherao, bandh that you might come across in any part of the country. A personal opinion it might be, but, I doubt that outside the party lines and the camaraderie any sane Indian actually likes the Left policies. Their following among the masses owes more to tradition and brutal force rather than anything else. The failed and outdated ideology is what they have managed to cling on to even today.

Some say that the biggest FDI India has received in its history is the entry of communist ideology amongst the citizens and political parties. Their true intentions can never be gauged easily. What is the logic behind the decisions and statements made by the party heads is totally lost on me. Otherwise how could you explain the pullout of Marxist cadres from the Quit India Movement of 1942 at the last moment with the quote that the party had changed its thinking on the matter. Or how could one forget the call to usurp the newly established government in 1950’s with an armed uprising only to back down at the last minute and leave the hapless comrades to suffer the retaliation of the government forces while the party heads coolly made it in and out of jails without much delay or fuss.

In the nation where everyone denounces the emergency of 1975 till date, CPI was the only political party in support of it (apart from Congress of course). The communist ideology has failed in today’s time but the Left seems to cling on to it harder than a drowning man would to a floating plank. The rigidity in the party structure and the lack of young blood/generation amongst the party ranks has left the CPI, CPI (M) without any leader with remotely charismatic personality in its ranks. One of the major reasons Left has managed to stay put in the political circles is because of the feared ‘comrade raj’ in every state it holds a presence in. Brute force is what has helped Left to survive the tide of time. A good example – Quenching of protests in Nandigram in 2007 over land relocation issue.

At a time when the communist parties all over the world are shifting their stance to be more receptive to foreign investments and development projects and funds, the Indian faction continues to live by the ideology set by Marx in 1920’s. The hardcore communist regimes of Russia and China too have softened so much over the past decades. So much so that China today is the biggest receiver of FDI in the world. It has allowed unrestricted access to its territory to foreign players while the CPI threatens to bring the government down on talks of offloading government holdings in the companies. Their efforts concentrate more on getting done what they think is right rather than what is good for the nation as a whole.

The angst of the Left over the hike in fuel prices when every oil company was suffering huge losses due to crude price rise globally is quite bewildering. The funds that government has to cough up to make up for these losses have to come from somewhere. Most of the times it comes from the funds allocated for rural development and healthcare projects for the poor. So the proponents of pro-poor policy are taking away the funds that were allocated for the development of the poor in the first place. So who’s good are the Left parties really thinking when they oppose the price hike?

All this seems to reflect that the ideology of the left parties is not clearly thought through. How would otherwise explain their current stand in the face-off against the government over the nuclear deal. Knowing that they don’t stand a chance to bag majority in the elections if they are held now and accepting that they don’t want to see a BJP government at the centre, they are left with only Congress government at the centre as an option which not surprisingly is what we have right now. So why anyone in his right mind would topple a stable government just few months before polls when it wants the same government after the polls in the first place?

Hard to understand or defend the logic behind the decisions taken by the Left we are but mere bystanders to the political circus that is the Left we can only hope that people fight against the atrocities of Left and give them a resounding defeat so that they stay away from all kinds of decision making in the country…………
P.S. – Author is a non-political entity who opposes everything related to Left.