Fusion confusion

What is the possibility of India’s two Communist parties burying the sickle, forgiving each other for splitting decades ago, and hammering out an ideological concord?

Sankar Ray Kolkata

The manner in which Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet snubbed the Communist Party of India (CPI) leaders, without quite naming names, stunned those capable of reading the echocardiogram of Left politics. In his inaugural speech at the 21st West Bengal state conference, Surjeet rebuked the CPI for "bargaining" with the CPI (M) "for unity".

The Marxist patriarch's problem is that the repeated appeals from CPI leaders to the CPI (M), notably from CPI general secretary A B Bardhan, to push for the "reunification" of the Indian communist movement has the support of many unattached Left intellectuals, including fellow-travellers among the Old Guard.

The CPI (M)'s characterisation of the Congress today is almost the polar opposite of its stand against the Congress at the time of the Marxist divorce in 1964.

The CPI (M)'s top brass then endorsed Ram Manohar Lohia's socialist anti-Congressism. The CPI, in contrast, studiedly refused to differentiate between the Congress and other bourgeoisie such as the Jan Sangh and the Swatantra Party.

CPI (M) stalwarts at its headquarters at A K Gopalan Bhavan in Kolkata refuse to admit that the ideological gap between their party and the CPI has considerably reduced. After Surjeet's recent gibe at the CPI, Anil Biswas, the CPI (M)'s West Bengal state secretary and politburo member, told the media that the ideological difference between the two parties is of "basic and qualitative nature".

Bardhan, intent on keeping Surjeet in good humour at the cost of the undeniable hurt of his senior CPI comrades, who resent CPI (M)'s big brother-with-a-big-stick attitude, said at a mass rally during the 22nd West Bengal State Conference at Asansol on February 19 that the draft political resolution for the party's 19th congress, to be held in Chandigarh in early April, would place "unity" on the agenda, not "merger". The problem for him is that the precedence cannot so easily be erased: the CPI's 14th congress, held at Calcutta in 1989, had adopted a unanimous resolution urging "reunification".

The seeds of the split were sown at the 6th congress, but the actual schism occurred at the Palghat congress of 1956. There were two ideological lines — democratic front, subsequently developed into people's democracy (PD) and people's democratic front (PDF); and national front, developed into national democracy (ND) and national democratic front (NDF). At the Vijayawada congress, Bhupesh Gupta and P Ramamurti placed a draft party programme of the PD/PDF. S A Dange, P C Joshi and G Adhikari put forward that of the ND/NDF. After the split, the CPI (M) adopted the PD while the CPI embarked on the ND.

Dr Ranen Sen, a member of the first central committee (1933) of the CPI, said, "The possibility of inner-party struggle didn't exhaust. I refused to be a party to the split which was inspired by Chinese communists." Factionalism despoiled intraparty political and ideological debate. Factionalism drove away ideological issues. Dange, for his part, bucked up the split.

The updated programme of the CPI (M) in Thiruvananthapuram (September 2000) was a shift to the Right: it welcomed, among other things, "foreign direct investment in selected sectors" on grounds of "acquiring advanced technology". An enduring irony of Indian Marxist history is that the Dange-Joshi-Adhikari draft went on to seek the restriction of foreign capital in the first stage and then its elimination.

This time round, Biswas' statement said, in effect, that ideological chasm between the CPI (M) and the CPI was essentially unbridgeable because it was generic. And there lies the rub. Both the PDF and the NDF agreed on an alliance of a quarter — the working class, the peasantry, and the patriotic sections, the petty and the non-monopoly bourgeoisie. The rift is down to definitions: the state is bourgeois-landlord for the CPI (M) while the CPI calls it a bourgeois state with feudal remnants. This is why the CPI (M) is no longer allergic to the Congress.

Given this deep factiousness among the Marxists, the words "unity" and "merger" are no more, and no less, than semantic cousins. All this fire-breathing is dialectic verbiage.