The CPI(M) CC has released the draft review report on the party’s political-tactical line (PTL) for the forthcoming 21st Congress of the party. The report takes a critical look at the implementation of the party’s PTL over the last two and a half decades – the period that witnessed a sea-change in India’s political landscape with the rise of the BJP, proliferation of regional parties and consolidation of identity politics. The political changes have of course taken place in an equally significant paradigm shift in India’s policy realm, in the spheres of economic policies as well as domestic and external affairs. This is also the period which saw the CPI(M) reach its peak in terms of its national political profile with a sixty-odd contingent of MPs representing the CPI(M) and its Left allies during 2004-2009 and decline dramatically ever since then.

By choosing such a long period for review, the report tends to underestimate the current crisis of the party, balancing the ongoing decline with the gains of what now appears a distant past. This also helps the Central Committee avoid a really critical examination of the party’s line, instead focusing on the ‘implementation’ of the line. The resultant narrative is basically a recollection of facts, replete with many valid but rather general observations and devoid of any specific thrust or clear direction. The CPI(M)’s quest for the elusive centrist balance to camouflage the party’s steady rightward drift leaves the party effectively clueless at a critical juncture in the party’s history when the party is experiencing an alarming decline in its biggest erstwhile bastion.

In the wake of the CPI(M)’s ascent to power in West Bengal and the post-Emergency defeat of the Congress at the centre, the CPI(M) had adopted the idea of a Left and democratic front (LDF) in its 10th Congress held in 1978. The LDF was advocated primarily as “a fighting alliance of the forces for immediate advance” and not just for “elections or Ministry”, but in real life LDF became the name of the Kerala-specific CPI(M)-led front whether in power or in opposition while in West Bengal and Tripura, the CPI(M) managed to stay in power without roping in any non-Left party of the so-called “democratic” variety. The LDF advocated by the 10th Congress as a necessary platform for “immediate advance” and visualised as a stepping stone towards the eventual people’s democratic front remained a complete non-starter.

In course of time, the term “Left and democratic” was expanded to include a new category of “secular” (presumably to include parties like the Congress and other ruling parties defying the ‘democratic’ tag) forces. The CPI(M) used this idea of a ‘secular front’ to justify electoral adjustments with a whole range of parties and also indirect participation in Congress-backed or Congress-led coalitions at the Centre (the UF between 1996 and 1998, the UPA from 2004 to 2008). In the 2009 LS elections, the CPI(M) toyed with the slogan of a government of the ‘third front’ and even before the 2014 LS election it sought to explore the possibility in the guise of an ‘anti-communal conference’. Now in 2015, the draft review report laments the fact that the idea of a Left and democratic front has remained permanently relegated to the background!

Does the review report then restore the primacy of ‘Left unity’ or ‘Left and democratic front’ in the CPI(M)’s tactical line? A close reading of the draft review report clearly does not suggest so. The report is clear in its assessment of regional parties that they all tend to pursue neo-liberal policies; that they are not really bothered about following any democratic programme or developing agitation on issues of people’s interest, and that they do not have any scruples in joining hands with the BJP. The report has termed the CPI(M)’s idea of rallying the regional parties around a common set of alternative policies at the national level “unrealistic and erroneous”. So if the report has come to any conclusion it is about the impracticability of having a ‘national level’ policy platform or alliance with regional parties.

Now, we all know, regional parties exist and operate primarily in their respective regions. If they do not show any interest in joining an alternative policy platform ‘at the national level’, do they behave any differently in their own regions? The answer is clearly negative. The question is not so much whether the alternative policy platform is being attempted nationally or regionally, the crux of the matter is regional parties are just not bothered about any such principle and are driven purely by pragmatic considerations of power politics. While the CPI(M) has failed to rally the regional parties around alternative policies, the prospect of electoral alliance with regional parties discourages the CPI(M) against taking up the issues of agricultural workers and poor peasants and orienting their struggles against the rural rich nexus represented by the regional parties. As the report puts it, “One of the reasons for failing to do so can be connected to the fact that we are viewing the regional bourgeois parties representing this rural rich nexus as our potential electoral allies.”

But even as the draft review dubs it unrealistic to try and forge programme-based alliances with regional parties, it leaves the possibility of electoral alliances or seat-sharing arrangements wide open. The report talks about adoption of “suitable electoral tactics in the states for understanding with the regional parties” subject to the caveat that such understanding “should not be dictated by any all India line to rally the secular bourgeois parties for a national alliance.” So electoral alliances need not constitute any political alliance and state-level arrangements should be delinked from national level understanding. But as the report has revealed amply clearly, it is the electoral alliance which really matters most in the CPI(M) scheme of things. Over and above this abundant flexibility, the draft report also makes a specific provision for what it calls “flexible tactics” in view of contradictions emerging “amongst the bourgeois parties and within them”.

The report also acknowledges the fact that while all successive central governments since 1991 have pursued the neo-liberal policy trajectory, the CPI(M) has “downplayed this aspect from time to time”. It notes the fact that in 1996, the CPI(M) “became party to a Common Minimum Programme of the United Front government whose main trajectory was to pursue policies of liberalisation and privatisation.” We are now also told that “the UPA government’s main thrust through the CMP was to implement neo-liberal policies.” These admissions are made after two decades in the case of the UF government and one decade in the case of the UPA government.

Does it mean the CPI(M) would not repeat this course if similar situations are to arise in future? Going by the CPI(M)’s track record and the evasive formulations of the draft, there is clearly no room for such a conclusion. We should also remember that if the CPI(M) Central Committee did not accept the offer of making Jyoti Basu the Prime Minister in 1996, it did so by invoking the famous Para 112 of the party’s programme which ruled out participation in a bourgeois government at the Centre, but the so-called Thiruvanathapuram ‘updating’ of the party programme in 2000 has already diluted that provision and opened up the possibility of the party’s future participation in bourgeois governments.

If relations with bourgeois parties have been a key aspect of the CPI(M)’s current crisis, the biggest loss of the party’s strength and credibility has happened in West Bengal, the state which saw the CPI(M) rule uninterruptedly for as long as 34 years. There have been talks of rectification ever since the CPI(M) lost power in West Bengal, but till date there has been no real analysis, let alone seeking any public apology for the major blunders that have alienated large sections of the party’s loyal supporters and discredited the party in a big way in public perception. The 20th CPI(M) Congress held in April 2012 did little to analyse the party’s West Bengal debacle and now three years later, the 21st Congress draft report does hardly any better except mentioning the need to critically examine “the policies adopted by the Left Front government in the last decade of its tenure.”

The CPI(M) obviously thinks it has all the time in the world to do this examination for it treats the question of drawing proper lessons only in the context of providing “a proper course of action when the need arises in the future.” It does not occur to the CPI(M) that without a ruthless review and open apology for the blunders committed – from forcible land acquisition and neglect of the basic interests of the rural poor to political terror and unmitigated arrogance – the party has little chance of winning back popular support in West Bengal. The BJP is making the most of this situation in West Bengal, and trapped between a rapidly intensifying polarisation between the TMC and BJP, the CPI(M) is finding itself subjected to a double squeeze.

The review report does not even mention Singur which triggered the CPI(M)’s dramatic decline in West Bengal, citing only Nandigram where the party perhaps feels the blame can be laid at the doorsteps of the local leaders some of whom are no longer with the party. The inability or refusal of the CPI(M) to understand the disastrous implications of its ill-advised ‘Singur model’ of industrialisation makes it clear that it was no aberration. In fact, according to the CPI(M)’s own script, Singur was supposed to be a great success story, the party – including the party’s central leadership and not just sections of the West Bengal leadership – could never really understand why Singur peasants reacted the way they did, all it could see was a ‘conspiracy’ which needed to be crushed with the iron hand of the state. It was not just the arrogance of a few leaders which had led to Singur but the folly of treating bourgeois state power as a communist goal and privileging it over the actual journey of class struggle.

The draft review report makes it clear that even though the CPI(M) finds itself in an alarming state of decline, the party does not have the sense of urgency or necessary courage to come to grips with the situation. At a time when Left forces are getting reenergised in Latin America and Europe through powerful mass resistance against the neo-liberal onslaught – and when India too is witnessing an unmistakable awakening of the working classes and other deprived and marginalised sections of people– the CPI(M) continues to live in a state of denial and inertia.