Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: June 7, 2004
URL: http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/07swadas.htm
It helps to acknowledge new realities.
Even six weeks ago, no one, apart from the hapless citizens of Kerala and
West Bengal and members of the Indian History Congress, gave a damn for
Communists. They were harmless bores who counted for very little outside
the drinking area of the local Press Club. As for trade unionists, they
were invariably perceived as noisy and pampered racketeers, adept in the
art of cutting deals on the side. In an India that was in unseemly haste
to make up for the time lost under Socialism, these relics from the dark
ages were neither seen as righteous nor relevant. They symbolised everything
we wanted to unlearn.
Since May 13, India has turned topsy-turvy.
It is not merely that a BJP-led coalition has been replaced by a Congress-led
coalition. Circumstances have catapulted the Left from the margins of polite
company to the centre of power. With nearly 100 MPs swearing allegiance
to the evergreen Comrade Surjeet, the Communists have a stranglehold over
the Government of India.
Between 1969 and 1977, the CPI exercised
a tremendous influence over the Indira Gandhi regime. The Reds and their
'progressive' fellow travellers got some of their insane economic prescriptions
transformed into official policy. Thanks to the patronage of Nurul Hasan,
Leftists systematically took over the bastions of intellectual power. What
they lacked in electoral
clout, they made up through influence
in the right places. However, at the end of the day, as Sanjay Gandhi demonstrated
so starkly, it was the Congress that called the shots.
In the Manmohan Singh government,
it is the Left that has the final veto power. What the likes of Surjeet
and A B Bardhan want will not necessarily always happen, but what they
definitely don't want will not happen under a UPA government.
Harsh economic realities may propel
a modification in the future balance of power. For the moment, however,
the Left is one of the main puppeteers. As West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev
Bhattacharya put it at a public rally in Kolkata: 'When we want them to
stand, they will stand. When we want them to sit, they will sit.'
Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel
was the first to experience the Left veto. With all the overzealousness
of a frequent flier, he imagined the Left would be placated if the foreign
direct investment norm for airports was brought down from the NDA's generous
74 percent to a modest 49 percent. He is now undertaking a crash course
in cohabitation with the Reds.
First, the Left-controlled trade
unions in the airports began an agitation against any privatisation proposal.
Second, despite Patel having consulted Left leaders before making the announcement,
CPI-M Politburo member Sitaram Yechuri participated in the trade union
dharna and proclaimed his party's opposition to the sale of profit-making
public-sector units. Not to be left out, the CPI added its own veto.
In short, the UPA government's first
hesitant attempt at economic reform was scuttled even before takeoff. Regardless
of what the Cabinet finally decides, no worthwhile investor is going to
put his money into a project where trade union opposition is going to be
coupled with political hostility from the ruling coalition.
There are important lessons to be
learnt from the fiasco over airports. First, militant trade unionism, particularly
of the white-collar variety, has received a major boost with the new importance
of the Left. The impact of this is almost certain to be felt in the public
sector, whose lack of efficiency had been targeted by the NDA government.
With the fear of privatisation receding
fast, India will experience the clout of a labour aristocracy. It will
demand more privileges, more subsidies, more protection, and more pay for
less work. Finance Minister P Chidambaram got a taste of this when Left
trade unions demanded that the interest rate on provident fund deposits
be raised by a further 3 percent.
The knock-on effects of this demand
for special status will, in turn, spur aggressive trade unionism in the
entire organised sector, particularly in areas where the Left's electoral
presence is nominal. India's small export-oriented units that depend on
labour flexibility to maintain global competitiveness will be the first
casualties of this process.
Secondly, the pressure on the Left
to act with exemplary restraint and not rock the fragile boat of Indian
capitalism will be compromised by intra-Left competition. Both the CPI
and the CPI-M don't want to be at the receiving end of charges that they
tempered labour militancy for the sake of governance. The leadership of
both parties will want to demonstrate to the committed that they have not
lost their fire. The parliamentary Left is always vulnerable to charges
of 'reformism' and 'revisionism' from those who still perceive themselves
as revolutionaries.
It may be instructive to be reminded
that the wave of labour militancy and the 'gherao' movement that led to
the flight of capital from West Bengal in 1967 wasn't initiatited by the
CPI-M. The man who unleashed mindless militancy was a representative from
a small, ultra-Left outfit called the SUCI, or Socialist Unity Centre of
India. The CPI-M, harassed by another radical peasant uprising in Naxalbari,
merely followed suit. To normal people, this is infantile politics. But
let us not forget that there are enough crazy people out there who dream
of the Red Star over India.
To those who have learnt nothing
and forgotten nothing, it doesn't matter if India's airports are shoddy
and ill-equipped to cope with the volume of air traffic. What matters is
that more and more people get involved in the 'struggle'. Unlike you and
me, the Communists have no stake in the India as we know it.
Manmohan Singh's real problem is
not Laloo Yadav or some of his tainted ministers. At best, they will sully
his personal reputation. His long-term threat comes from a Left that has
got the chance of a lifetime to play being Communists.
