Nandigram: the demise of the red influence

by Arabinda Ghose

Tragic as the events of Nandigram have been, they also demonstrate the waning influence and ideological confusion among the communist rulers in India. It is much like the Europe before finally the much loathed Wall of Berlin was pulled down by the people leading to the ultimate demise of communism. So, is Nandigram like the pulling down of the wall? Has communism started panting before the final few gasps?

Condemning the killing of 14 people on March 14 by the Police and C.P.M. cadres in Nandigram in East Medinipur district of West Bengal, a life-time Communist supporter   in an article in the daily Pioneer a few days ago had recalled how in the 1960s Milovan Djilas of Yugoslavia had written about the "New Class" emerging in the Communist system. This book had come years after Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito had revolted against the Stalinist Soviet Union and had carved out a separate path for his country without wholly renouncing Communism.

However, with due respect to the intellectual, one would venture to suggest that the situation in India today with respect to the Communist movement, their spheres of influence, and their ideological confusion suggest that it is ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI's "The Grand Failure: The birth and Death of Communism in the twentieth Century" which truly portrays the situation in India with respect to whatever remains of the Communist movement in India.

It the quotations from the book, written in 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, one will find striking prognostications this former Security Adviser to the Carter Administration in the United States having been the Director of the National Security Council, had made.

But first a number of straws in the wind. In Nandigram, the CPI-M supporters and cadres along with members of their families have been ousted from a number of villages in the Nandigram Block and they are unable to re-enter their homes. This is quite a role reversal, as it were, because it have been the CPI-M cadres who have been indulging in this act against those violating the party diktats in matters such as casting votes in elections.

Second, almost the total disappearance of the two Communist parties from States such as Bihar , Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra in particular as also Madhya Pradesh. The most dramatic "disappearing act" has been performed by the Leftist in Punjab, where in the recent State Assembly elections, 58 of the 59 candidates had lost their security deposits.   Only one could save it. No question of any Communist being elected in Punjab where the tally in the past had reached even the double –digit figure of 15.

In Madhya Pradesh, since the beginning of the election process, a Communist candidate had repeatedly won the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat, Gwalior too had returned a Communist candidate.

Maharashtra had been a bastion of the Communist movement. S.A.Dange, Parulekar, Ahilyatai Rangnekar, S. S. Mirajkar and others had dominated the political scene there. The C.P.I. General Secretary A.B. Bardhan's only electoral foray had been from his home town Nagpur during the Samyuka Maharashtra movement in 1957 and he had won the seat for the then Bombay Assembly with votes even from the Bharatiya Jana Sangh as there were understanding among all opposition parties in the Vidarbha region to fight the elections against the Congress unitedly.   Only the PSP of Vasant Sathe and Ashok Mehta had not joined forces with the opposition.  Today a CPI or a CPI-M candidate is unlikely to be elected to Parliament or State Assembly from this region. The same is the case with Orissa. In Kerala it is in power now, but in the next elections, the Congress is most likely to win, as has been then tradition in that State.

The third example in this story is from Nepal, in the same region. The Maoists there had taken to arms in 1996 after they had miserably failed to make a mark in the two elections in 1991 and 1994 held when Parliamentary democracy was restored in 1990. They have been successful in their armed struggle in toppling the King. But the political parties remain a strong force even today. The Maoists have joined the democratic system, but having joined it have found to their chagrin that there is hardly any support for them in the Terai region of Nepal, the southern plains bordering India's   Bihar and Uttar Pradesh States. The Maoists who are used to wield sophisticated weapons, lost 29 of their men in the Rauthat district in the Terai when the Madhesis (the Non-martial "dhotiwalas") clobbered them with bamboo "lathis" on March 22.

Now let us see what Mr. BRRZ EZINSKI had predicted in his book in 1988.   In the introduction, he had said: "This is a book about the terminal crisis of Communism".   It describes and analyses the progressive decay and the deepening agony both of its system and of its dogma. It concludes that by the end of the next century communism's irreversible historical decline will have made its practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human conditions.  Prospering only when it abandons its internal substance even if still retaining some of its external labels, communism will be remembered largely as the twentieth century's most extraordinary political and intellectual aberration'.

In his conclusion, the author says :"Humanity's catastrophic encounter with communism during the twentieth century has thus provided a painfully but critically important lesson" Utopian social engineering is fundamentally in conflict with the complexity of the human condition and social creativity blossoms best when political power is restrained. That basic lesson makes it all the more likely that democracy –and not communism – will dominate the twenty-first century".

The nearly forty million Soviet citizens exterminated by Stalin (the author's estimate), the continuous killings of "class enemies" by the Naxalites in India, the carnage of Nepal in which 13000 young Nepali men and women were killed, and incidents like Nandigram justifies his prognostication that democracy and not communism will dominate the twenty-first century.

He summaries the entire scenario in a chapter on Future prospects with this introduction: In the year 2017, one hundred years after the Bolshevik revolution, scaffolding the Lenin Mausoleum on the former Red Square, now renamed Freedom Square. The scaffolding is masking the reconstruction of the mausoleum into the entrance to an underground parking garage designed to accommodate the masses of tourists visiting the recently opened permanent exhibit in the Kremlin entitled "One Hundred Wasted Years, Fifty Million Wasted Lives".

Well, when this reporter, who went to Moscow in order to cover the fall of Communism in 1991, still remembers the excited manner in which one officer of the Novosti news agency (official organization) had greeted him then:  "Mr. Ghose, there is no Soviet Union from today". (I had known him during my two earlier visits to Moscow). He writes for a prominent English daily of India even today.

One feels that this historical lesson has to be learnt by all political parties of India, both the ruling and opposition parties. It has to be realized that in spite of the critical support to the ruling party at the Centre, the parties which represent the Left, have no future to look forward to.  India will opt only for parliamentary democracy, not communism of any variety.