The rugged electoral landscape of India doesn’t seem to offer any heartening idea of what the outcome of the country’s 15 th Parliament election is going to be. The three-cornered contest -with the centrist Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Left-supported third alternative actively in the fray - is all set to throw up a fractured mandate and split the secular votes of the UPA and the Left parties and their supporters.
It is too early to hazard any guess on the electoral outcome of the Parliament elections beginning on April 16. The Congress is hopeful of emerging as the single largest bloc in Parliament and is confident that it can form the government with its supporters. The BJP is also making its calculations to lead a government. The crucial question during the electioneering now is whether the Left-led third alternative comprising regional parties led by half-a-dozen Prime Ministerial aspirants can secure enough seats in Parliament so that it can seek the Congress support to stake claim to the gaddi in Delhi. We can expect the corridors of power in Delhi to be chock-a-block with power borkers of all hues engaged in bargaining and intrigues after the election. The Left-led by Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) will be playing its own role in the post-poll scheme of things and in the scheming.
Every party in the country has its own bagful of hypocrisy. But the CPI-M’s duplicity cannot be clearer as it struggles to reconcile itself with contradictions. The Left parties including the CPI-M gave outside support to the UPA government during the first four years of its term and then withdrew the support in protest against the Indo-U.S. nuclear issue. The CPI-M is now claiming credit to all the flagship projects of the UPA government such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP) that assures 100 days employment for the rural poor and the Right to Information Act. But it faults the Congress for all the ‘neo-liberal’ and ‘pro-imperialist’ policies of the government.
The Left’s 'anti-neoliberal' and 'anti-imperialist' (read anti-U.S.) positions are always rhetorical. During the first four years of the UPA rule, the Left was just barking but not biting. It withdrew support when the nuclear deal reached its final phase. Let us recap the Left stand on the deal as the nuclear partnership underwent different phases of its evolution. The Prime Minister announced the nuclear deal with the U.S. during his visit in July 2005. After that India voted with the U.S. against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) twice, thus endorsing the ‘imperialist agenda’ of the U.S. If it had been serious about its 'anti-imperialist' slogan, the Left should have withdrawn support to the UPA government then. Instead it intensified its opposition when the deal was in its final stage. But it then softened its stand on the deal in the wake of the Nandigram incidents in March 2007 and allowed the UPA government to proceed with nuclear safeguard negotiations in the IAEA as a trade-off. As a quid pro quo, the Congress was largely silent on the Nandigram issue.
So much for the anti-imperialist posturing of the CPI(M) or the Left. The double-speak of the CPI-M is unambiguously evident in its stand on globalisation which it treats as ‘imperialist’. Despite its opposition to globalisation, its governments in Kerala and West Bengal have no qualms about borrowing funds from funding agencies such as the Asian Development Bank and ideas from international consultancy firms such as McKinsey. The controversial SEZ Act was passed unanimously in Parliament in early 2005. The CPI-M-led government in West Bengal sought to suppress the agitation in Nandigram against its bid to acquire fertile agricultural land for an Indonesian company to set up a chemical hub.
The CPI-M’s excuse for its duplicity is that it cannot fully apply its agenda in the States it rules because of the ‘neo-liberal constraints’. The flipside of the story is that the party that claims credit for the UPA government’s pro-poor NREGP did not implement a similar legislation in West Bengal (where it has been ruling for more than three decades) that can assure at least 50 days work to the rural poor. Lal salam (red salute) to the comrades.
