What the myopic can’t see

For some time Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has been advising the Bhumi Uchched Pratirodh Committee to disband the organisation since the state government has abandoned for good the plan to acquire farmland at Nandigram, while the outfit’s nomenclature means it was formed for resistance against displacement from land.

If Mr Bhattacharjee believes he can meddle in the affairs of another organisation and suggest what it should do, one can jolly well advise him to either disband his own party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist, or, at least, re-christen it as “Capitalist Party of India-Marxist”.

Mr Bhattacharjee used the anniversary of his party organ to state the radical shift in his party’s ideological position. In fact, it was the first time that the CPI-M Politburo member and state chief minister publicly confirmed the suspicion that the Marxist party has not only become a votary of capitalism, but has decided to be the midwife of international finance capital which is out to prize open the precious resources of West Bengal along with other states.

Nandigram and Singur are but tell-tale symptoms of the disease that has infected the CPI-M almost beyond cure.
Even Mr Jyoti Basu, who till the other day claimed “the Communists can have no other interest but to work for the uplift of the poor”, has rallied behind Mr Bhattacharjee in defence of the party’s pro-capitalist tilt.

This shows how true the assessment of the Indian Communists by US analysts was long before they could go the capitalist way. The experts had concluded in the early 1990s that revolution is beyond the ken of this breed of top Marxist leaders who belong to the urban middle class and as such they are incapable of bearing the excruciating pain of waging a people’s war from jungles or hills.

What Mr Bhattacharjee and Mr Basu are now saying creates the impression that the Marxists no longer even harbour any illusion about revolution, but are too ready to give a red carpet welcome to their class enemy ~ the capitalists.

For, who was going to be the prime beneficiary if the mega chemical hub could have been set up on the virgin soil of Nandigram? Undoubtedly, the Salim Group of Indonesia representing international finance capital. The state government had signed a memorandum of understanding with the group for building long stretches of roads, bridges and related infrastructure for the mega hub.

Again, the rich fertile land of Singur was gifted to the monopoly house of the Tata group. The Marxists have gone out of their way and used all forms of deceit to bend the rules and exploit the loopholes in the existing laws so that the private sector giant can add one more feather to its cap of corporate ownership.

The CPI-M’s duplicity is seen to be believed. Its general secretary, Mr Prakash Karat, has been untiring in his tirade against international finance capital and warning that the corporate giants of India and the USA “have drawn up a blueprint to plunder the country’s resources.” For him the Indo-US nuclear deal is a but a quid pro quo for letting multinationals, aided and abetted by the homegrown big capital, enter the country and set up their ventures.

The rhetoric that Mr Karat & Co. spins is but a decoy to enable Mr Bhattacharjee to quietly pave the way for the loot of the state’s resources by international and national private players. Both the capitalist world and the Indian Marxists would benefit from this secret understanding. The Marxists are virtually doing back-seat driving of the UPA-government and hence if the country is to be opened up, they would have to be given their share of the loot. Hence, US and European multinationals are, as Mr Bhattacharjee announces with pride, “flooding” the state government with proposals for setting up their units. The US lobby has been trying for some time to make Mr Bhattacharjee agree to visit Washington. The latter, one can easily presume, would be too happy to be at the heart of international finance capital, but is presently delaying the visit so that his public image as a Communist and a US-baiter is not dented, especially at this juncture.

The CPI-M had been rather successfully implementing its agenda of pretending to be the champions of the poor, while playing the role of a crony-capitalist, till Singur and Nandigram made the headlines.

Till then it believed its muscle power, three-decade-long regime, which showed hardly any sign of being overthrown thanks to a divided Opposition, and its organisational prowess would enable it to do whatever was needed to give free passage to international finance capital to the state.

But, this overweening confidence subsequently let Mr Bhattacharjee down. There was not only resistance from the ill-fed, ill-clad, yet proud owners of small plots of farmland at Nandigram, but the CPI-M’s mask was ripped open and its capitalist face was laid bare for all to see.

Of course, the CPI-M can depend on the Congress in continuing to divide the Opposition ranks so that it still hangs on to power and implements the agenda blessed by Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi. But the rural poor, whom the Marxists have virtually reduced to “dumb, driven cattle” during the past three decades, are smarting under the betrayal of their cause. They are in no mood to give an inch of their land without a fight for plunder by monopoly capital.

The results of the Balagarh Assembly by-poll confirmed what the CPI-M has been fearing. Its candidate won because of disunity in the Opposition, which will continue till the Congress is further marginalised, but the margin of victory was down by a neat 10,000 votes compared to what the party had got not even a year ago before the grand Marxist design was yet to be unveiled.
Since it was all because of Mr Bhattacharjee’s bull-in-a-china-shop style of functioning that the Marxist calculations went awry, it was left to him to explain the agenda in public without any fuss.

Hence, he didn’t waste any time and within 24 hours of the dubious victory at Balagarh, he spoke with astounding clarity that “the reality today is that capitalism alone can fund industrialisation without which economic growth is simply not possible.” He also declared with all the force he had at his disposal that it’s capitalism and not socialism that can ensure industrialisation.
Of course, he couched his exposition with the hackneyed rhetoric that the Indian Communists “have no model to follow” and that “they would have to find their way while treading the uncharted path.”

At the same time, he made it clear that he would implement his party’s vision of capitalism and socialism with an iron hand in velvet glove. He asserted that the Marxists won’t let 63 per cent of the state’s land be locked up for agriculture which produces “a mere 26 per cent of the state domestic product”. On the contrary, they would increase the land share of urbanisation and industrialisation which now stands at 23 per cent.

He glibly glossed over the self-contradiction in his argument that only 1 per cent of the state’s land is fallow, which could otherwise have been used for industrialisation instead of farmland. He reminded his party men that other states have a far greater percentage of fallow land available. The fact remains that the state has 135 million acres of land and 1 per cent of it is 1.35 million acres!

When this writer pointed this out to the industries minister on one occasion, he did admit the size of the state’s fallow land “is indeed no mean”.

Only the myopic, which the Marxists have grown to become after having warmed the seats of power for 30 years, can pretend that they alone can see the truth, while the rest, including their junior partners in the Left Front, have their vision impaired. It’s for everyone else to see that the Buddhas and the Karats stumble when they see.

This article was published in The Statesman , January 7, 2008