Once holding complete sway over Bengal politics, CPM's future now rests on frail shoulders

By Gouri Chatterjee It is the picture they present – tired old men, all men save one pretty face, failed men, tottering on the dais, fists clenched in feeble red salutes, speaking the rhetoric of the past (though jargon like “fighting neo-liberalism” and “pro-imperialist approach of the ruling class” were surprisingly missing from the speeches). Not a party to energise the youth, or even live up to the expectations of the tens of thousands (the figures vary from two lakh to ten) that rallied around their leaders at the Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata on Sunday.[caption id=“attachment_1504829” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  CPM general-secretary Sitaram Yechury. PTI[/caption] A successful gathering at the Brigade is still seen as a sign of a party’s strength in this part of the country — the Congress hasn’t tried one for decades — and by that yardstick the CPM in West Bengal can be said to be booming or making a comeback, whatever you want to call it. But seeing is not always believing. A large ship takes time to sink, even the Titanic took days whatever the films might make us believe – and the CPM, sadly, is a sinking ship. Sadly, because there is a real need for a morally upright party that stands for equity, secularism, redistribution of wealth, growth of independent or self-reliant capital (i.e. not dependent on foreign capital). But these are not words that attract today’s youth any more. There was a time when college and university campuses were the happy hunting grounds of communist recruiters. Most of today’s leaders came up through the student movements. Fresh young faces burning with a desire to create a more just, egalitarian society were the hallmark of first the Communist Party of India and then the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which split from the CPI in 1964 and soon became the “big brother”. Today, according to news reports, the CPM’s party membership in West Bengal below the age of 31 stands at 13 percent while only 6.5 percent of its members nationwide are below 25 years of age. The representation of young people in the leadership is even worse. Figures available from the 20th party congress held in 2012 show that only two delegates out of the total 727 who participated in the congress were below the age of 30. The number of delegates between 30 and 40 was around 28; between 50-60 another 267; the largest contingent of 338 delegates was made up of those above 60. The party congress is the CPM’s highest decision making body according to its constitution. Another party congress was held in Vishakhapatnam earlier this year but the figures from that congress are not yet available but things are hardly likely to have improved with the new party general-secretary Sitaram Yechury publicly acknowledging the need to improve their connect among the nation’s youth and the three-day Plenum that began in Kolkata after the Brigade rally tasked to find out ways and means to do just so. Trouble is, the CPM hasn’t been able to reinvent itself since the collapse of the fall of the Soviet Union that coincided with India’s moves to liberalise and globalise. Today’s youth, born in the cusp of the 90s when the Berlin Wall fell and buried communism under it, are far more enticed by Narendra Modi’s promise of an acche din when they will have the comforts and opportunities of the developed world right here at home. Consumerism, not communism, is the new mantra but the Left leaders continue to hang portraits of Stalin in their party offices. In a world dominated by the service industry old style labour unions are seen to be passé, while the landless poor, the other supposedly natural constituency of the Left, are happy enough with populist moves such as NREGA and other food for work programmes, rice at Rs 2 a kg, free schooling for girls and cycles, etc. etc. and are not ready to bother their heads with such grand sounding programmes as land redistribution and power to the proletariat. West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee has realised this pretty fast and has been coming out with one populist scheme another every few days in the run-up to the 2016 elections, but the CPM can hardly object to them and still be seen as pro-poor. At the rally on Sunday, the leaders made no mention of these schemes but fell back upon Singur as their trump card, presumably in the hope that the youth will be lured by the promise of jobs that the CPM’s industrial policy promises. Add to this the burden of the past they have to carry in West Bengal and you can understand why the CPM leaders, while overwhelmed by the turnout on Sunday, constantly harped on the dangers of complacency and the need to increase their people-to-people contacts. Surjya Kanta Mishra, the leader of the Opposition in the state assembly and boss of the party’s West Bengal unit, openly talked about some elements in the party they would be better off without. Because the reality is, however much the CPM may cry themselves hoarse over the oppression of the Trinamool goons over their party cadres, which is a reality, people in the villages haven’t yet forgotten the brutality of those very same cadres when they were in power. This passing and indirect reference to such atrocities by Surja Kanta Mishra apart, the CPM has never felt the need to apologise to the people of West Bengal for their countless crimes of omission and commission. They seem to believe, as stated in a document entitled The Left Front government in West Bengal: Evolution of an Experience, adopted by the CPM’s West Bengal State Conference held in February 2015, the Nandigram events were a result of “unnecessary initiatives of a section of the local leadership”. After such knowledge, what forgiveness. And without West Bengal the CPM will simply wither away in this country. Sad.