Stalin’s tips to Rahul Gandhi & Karat
THE CONGRESS AND THE CPM are two national parties that are consistent in its ideological opposition to the BJP.That is why Modi-Shah duo is investing so much time, energy and resources to make India Congress and Marxist free
Some 70-odd years ago, Joseph Stalin, then chairman of Communist Party of Soviet Union, talked about the cardinal role of “Organisation” for a political party. “Political line may be 100 per cent correct but that has no meaning without an Organisation capable of carrying this correct political line to the people,” Stalin asserted. BJP president Amit Shah may or may not have read the great Communist icon, but Shah’s singleminded focus on Organisation has undoubtedly brought rich electoral dividends to BJP. It is time Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and CPM leadership in Kerala, Prakash Karat in particular, took a leaf out of Stalin’s organisational book. Marxist party’s rigid adherence to political-tactical line at the cost of organisation and the “subjectivism” that has crept into the decision-making process have become self-destructive. What is the use of an outdated political-tactical line, a relic of 1978, if it retards organisational growth? Election results of last 10 years are testimony to this.
The Congress is also facing a piquant situation. Unlike the doctrinaire CPM, the Congress’ political line is often marred by confusion and subjectivism with Right, Left and Centrist elements swaying in different directions. Even three years after its unprecedented, shocking rout in the Lok Sabha elections, barring some cosmetic changes, the party has done precious little to revamp the AICC. Rahul Gandhi is busy with reactive politics and peripherals like selecting NSUI officebearers through corporate style interviews overlooking the critical condition of the party structure. How can a political party fight election without a strong organisation? If you don’t have an organisation you will not win elections (as is happening now) and if you don’t win elections your cadre and leaders will desert you; it is a vicious circle in the greedy world of power politics.
The Congress and the CPM are two national parties that are consistent in its ideological opposition to the BJP. That is why Modi-Shah duo is investing so much time, energy and resources to make India Congress and Marxist free. And yet much to BJP’s delight, early this month Karat ruled out a grand alliance with “motley bunch of secular parties”. In an editorial in the CPM mouthpiece People’s Democracy, he said such an alliance is unworkable because of the unreliable character of many of the regional parties. “Most of the regional parties have embraced the neo-liberal policies and are prone to make opportunistic alliances.” The Congress, the editorial said, “is primarily responsible for the imposition of neo-liberal policies and it stands discredited due to years of misrule and corruption.”
Karat’s postulation is contradictory. The CPMled Kerala coalition government has “neo-liberal” parties such as the NCP, Congress and JDS as members. Why did the CPM join the neo-liberal, Congress-led UPA I coalition in 2004 to defeat the BJP led by a moderate Vajpayee and now shying away from an anti-BJP coalition when a polarising figure like Modi is at the helm? Marxist puritans from Kerala scuttled Jyoti Basu’s chance to become the first Marxist Prime Minister in 1996, a denouement the communist veteran himself termed as “historic blunder”. Some would say untimely withdrawal of support to UPA I over the Indo-US nuclear deal was another historic blunder; the third being party’s refusal to allow Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee to be the UPA’s presidential candidate in 2012 squandering a rare opportunity to have country’s first Marxist President. The pragmatic RSS has no such hang-ups.
Some would even say that denying another Rajya Sabha term to Sitaram Yechury, an astute political animal and an articulate law maker, due to opposition from the Kerala lobby, is yet another historic blunder. While the BJP has been bolstering its fire power in the upper House by bringing in Amit Shah and Venkaiah Naidu (as chairman), the Opposition rank has since depleted. Yechury and Mayawati are out and there is a question mark over Sharad Yadav after his fall-out with Nitish Kumar. Yechury was denied another term because the rabidly anti-Congress Kerala comrades did not want Congress’ help in sending him to the upper House. As a result, the CPM not only lost a seat but also a powerful anti-BJP voice in the RS.
It is high time the party balanced dogmatism with pragmatism. Shortly after he was elected general secretary (2015), Yechury, in an article in “The Marxist”, stressed the need to address organisational deficiencies and combat “subjectivism” without fundamentally altering the political-tactical line as he buttressed his arguments with quotes from Communist icons Lenin and Mao Zedong. Lenin, he said, while discussing Kant’s philosophical positions in his writing “Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic”, noted the need to struggle against subjectivism. “There are occasions when we seek to fit the existing situation into our pre-conceived subjective theoretical construction rather than on the basis of a proper objective assessment of the situation. This leads often erroneous conclusions,” Lenin said. Strong likes and dislikes on the part of the leadership encourages sycophancy and a behaviour of ‘pleasing the leadership’ on the part of the cadre, Yechury said adding: “This tendency leads to a dangerous phenomenon of reporting from lower levels being guided by ‘what the leadership wants to hear’ rather than giving a proper objective description and assessment of the situation.”
Summarising another point made by Mao, Yechury said: Committing mistakes is not a mistake, but not learning from the mistake is a mistake; not understanding why that mistake was committed... Finally, not correcting the mistake and persisting with the wrong understanding is a mistake. Mao had also said that if a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, “he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice”. It looks as though Mao had Kerala comrades in mind when he delivered this veiled message – look beyond your boundaries.