Election Result, Concrete Situation And the Left

Arup Baisya

[This article outlines the broad narrative of the recently concluded parliamentary election and delineates the inherent social dynamics ingrained in political articulations in the hustings. The decline in the left’s vote share in the erstwhile left bastions and gain in new areas reveal the divergent trends in left politics. The concatenation of events in the hustings and election result indicate a change in the social reality where a radical paradigmatic shift is possible provided the ideas of intertwined criteria of class struggle from below and reform from above is internalised in left strategy and praxis.]

Recently concluded Indian parliamentary election reveals that the two formations, NDA and INDIA, focused their campaign on two contested political terrain of Hindutva and development on one side and the caste democracy and constitutional federalism on the other. The CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey report makes it quite clear that people’s assessment of their own economic conditions made a large difference in their voting choices. Those who felt economically secure or experienced improvement in their financial well-being had likely to make their choice to vote for the candidates of the ruling regime. Conversely, individuals facing economic hardship, job loss, or financial instability might have sought to punish the incumbent. But the victory pattern of INDIA especially in northern and western India unveils the fact that the incumbent BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) faced a tough challenge and electoral drubbing in the regions and states where impacts of farmers’ movement, Agniveer protest in continuation of the migrants’ reverse march as mark of protest against sudden Covid lockdown were significant. It means that collective social dynamics were set in motion to articulate and transform the individual need emanating from economic distress into a desire for the defeat of the incumbent government. Both sides of contesting political formations tried to accommodate this desire in their political narratives by incorporating welfarism by the BJP and distributive justice by the Congress. A section of voters who felt financially secured are the beneficiaries of the limited trickle-down effect of GDP growth and developmental investment in infrastructure in consonance with the policy framework pursued by the incumbent Government which promoted the neoliberal logic of accumulation through displacement. The majority of voters who are left outside the ambit of this policy of the BJP Government had been attracted by the demand-side policy and distributive schemes announced by the Congress in their manifesto. The almost equally poised election result in terms of seat and vote share makes this election a fascinating story to delineate the shifting coordinate of the intersection of three dimensions of the here and now as stated above.

This shifting coordinate of the three dimensions taken paripassu provokes the observers to undertake a thought experiment. In this election, the left votes from the erstwhile left stronghold marked a significant decline. Interestingly enough, a CPM candidate from Rajasthan secured a victory score and made the sole left political presence in northern India a reality. Furthermore, a large number of Lohiaite socialists and social activists who had hitherto remained out of the purview of any political party and political activism found it an opportune moment to emerge as a collective force to build public opinion against BJP’s divisive politics and Modi’s authoritarianism. They were extremely active in favour of INDIA, especially in UP and they took a tactical position in Bihar in favour of the old guard in JDU. This is not merely an old phenomenon that is reconstructed in a new setting. To understand the shifting coordinate, the emergence of a new dimension in the here and now needs to be analysed. Unlike the bourgeois revolution in the Western world, the late capitalist development in the countries of the third world or global south trod a path of passive revolution and thus the concomitant emergence of doubly-free workers and civil society is aborted. But society is agog with the desire to surpass this barrier due to the internal dynamics of capitalist social relations of production especially in agriculture. Despite the thrust of the neoliberal restructuring to accommodate emerging civil society to transform it into a political society, a new kind of civil society with Indian characteristics is raising its head in this transitional phase with shifting coordinates. The effective role of Lohiate socialists and social activists in this election can be visualised in this backdrop.

What would have changed in the Indian political canvass had the communists and the left adhered to the logic of class struggle without siding with the forces of neoliberalism or welfarism of mixed-economy or political centralisation and diversity from the beginning and led the various emerging class and social struggles? It would have certainly ensured the presence of the left forces in the entire Indian political geographical landscape. This would have given them much leverage in aligning with the forces of bourgeois democracy for a fight against authoritarianism or fascism, although fascism is systemically placed on shaky ground in the changing dynamics of the post-Covid scenario and shifting global balance of power. With the left forces in a declining trend with continuous weakening of power, the three dimensions of the here and now as revealed in this election process boiled down to a Cartesian coordinate of two dimensions. Both sides, NDA and INDIA, had accommodated the third dimension for a social status quo ante of Indian ‘unity and diversity’. The result shows the same two repertoires of pitting Mandal against Kamandal being reenacted in differently articulated languages and socio-economic accommodations to counter the rise of plebeians. But this time forces of Mandal politics have not been defeated under neoliberal pressure, rather the juggernaut of Hindutva politics has been contained in such a way that the space for the rise of plebeians has been extended with forces of liberal democracy remaining out of power.

This thought experiment can be extrapolated to put into reality check if the main left parties’ electoral wins and losses are juxtaposed for comparison. In the erstwhile stronghold of Kerala, Bengal, and Tripura, CPM and CPI combined won a single seat. The vote share in Bengal and Tripura plummeted from 6.33% in 2019 to 5% in 2024. While BJP has increased its vote share in Kerala, there is a significant 2-4% erosion in the Left’s vote base compared to 2019. The secular decline in the left support base is the result of CPIM’s strategy as the main left party eschewed the class struggle to create a space for a class compromise in the neoliberal phase to remain in power at any cost. A brief account of the left’s rise and decline would substantiate the claim that the shrinking left base is the fallout of preferring reform from above to struggle from below. CPIM’s leader from Kerala, EMS Namboodiripad, spearheaded the self-respect movement of the Ezhava caste and subsequently the worker-peasant struggle. In this backdrop of struggle, left government under the stewardship of EMS was formed in 1957, and before the swearing-in ceremony; EMS went to Punnapra-Vayalar to pay tribute to the martyrs of the uprising led by the communists against British India’s princely state of Trivancore. It was the message that the class struggle is the foundation of a left party in power.

The land reform act was promulgated in 1969 in Kerala. Effective implementation of the act was possible largely due to the organised strength of the left movement and the fact that land reforms were implemented by the left-oriented government, unlike in most other states where the reforms were sought to be introduced from ‘above’ before the peasant masses were politically organised to fight for their rights. The movement which developed since the abolition of tenancy has three main components: struggle for higher wages, demand for fair prices for farm products, and struggle for land. But poor peasants have not in general been able to raise the productivity of their lands and their living standard for obvious reasons. Proletarianisation occurred as cheap labour along with pauperisation. In 1973, CPIM’s central committee resolution adopted the strategy on agrarian questions. In this resolution, Sundarayya added emphasis on peasant struggle rather than on legislation of the government as a concession from the ruling class. Similarly, in the 1966 resolution, it was stated that working class hegemony over the Kisan movement could be ensured only if the proletarian party placed its principal reliance on the rural labourers and poor peasants. But this direction of left politics emphasising the class struggle from below as the driving force was gradually abandoned under pressure from two seemingly opposite directions to adopt the line of class compromise and reform from above without politically rejuvenating the masses from below for class emancipation. When the strategy of agrarian class struggle in the 1960s and seventies reached its culminating and limiting point thereby necessitating the adoption of a new strategy of class struggle, the left thought it wise to break the barrier through reform from above. This in conjunction with the neoliberal phase of restructuring from above since 1980s instilled a sense of TINA factor which gradually decelerated the motion of party life based on struggle, and eventually, the staticity of mindset has become all-pervasive. The reform from above for the docile masses below is the best-case scenario for the ruling class politics to thrive and establish their political hegemony. This is what has happened in Kerala and other erstwhile bastions of left politics.

The left parties have jointly improved their performance in this LokSabha election as they managed to bag nine seats in four states. CPIM bagged one seat from Rajasthan as its candidate from SikarAtma Ram won the election by more than 72000 votes. The CPI and CPI ML(Liberation) gathered two seats each in Tamil Nadu and Bihar respectively. CPIM had cut inroads earlier into Rajasthan by winning two assembly seats in 2018 by wresting both seats from the BJP. Both the constituencies have been hotbeds of farmer agitation and left-wing militancy. The party there had organised a slew of farmer agitations against the BJP governments in the state and the centre.

The gain of the left in certain areas indicates that the situation is changing. But the statement “situation is changing” is meaningless even in the essence of Newtonian relativity in the laws of physics of uniform motion, provided the change is not considered relative to something. The gain in other places especially in Rajasthan relative to the loss in the erstwhile left bastion of Bengal, Tripura, and Kerala reveals that there is a mismatch between objective reality and left subjective effort. The electoral performance of the left and the Congress in the recently concluded parliamentary election tells people that the overall situation is taking a left turn opening a new horizon for a living interaction between ongoing class struggle and the left subjective effort for a political resurgence of masses from below and reform initiative from above. Such a scenario is anathema to ruling class hegemony that necessitates reform from above and docile masses below. The left in their erstwhile stronghold has fallen trapped in the ruling class narrative of passive revolution and thus the left is destined to leave space for BJP in their traditional bastions. Gramsci first indicated a revolution that was directed from above by elites and occurred without the active participation of the masses. His second conceptual framework described a passive revolution as a long historical process involving a set of molecular changes in society. Gramsci treated passive revolution as a blocked dialectic and an exception to the paradigmatic form of bourgeois revolution. In his terms, a passive revolution represented the contradictory concept of a revolution without a revolution. The resurgence of class and mass struggle is the third dimension in the here and now that breaks the status-quo-ante provided the left reorients their strategy to focus on the struggle as a pivot for change, and this sets the three-dimensional coordinate in motion for a radical change of space-time continuum. Thus the thought experiment finds its validity in reality check.

[E-mail id: baisya_arup@rediffmail.com]

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Vol 57, No. 8, Aug 18 - 24, 2024