One hundred years of Left India’s solitude, and `death’
KOLKATA : As just other day quietly passed off the centenary celebration of Bolshevik’s November Revolution, the Left parties in Bengal didn’t open up much the way they were expected to. Bolshevik Revolution memories paled. Like once former CPI General Secretary A B Bardhan told this writer:
Even a rickshaw puller carrying me and (CPI(M)’s Subhas Chakraborty (Joyti Basu’s most favorite leader) once got irritated with foreign names, portraits on our way to a Left meeting, and told us: “So you have no Indian leader whose portrait I could see among foreign leaders?’’ Apparently Bardhan couldn’t reply back!
Only one party SUCI gathered up about a thousand followers with painted placard of Lenin and Stalin with a vague painting of mass gathering other day celebrated Bolshevik Revolution in the heart of the city and dispersed with mild traffic disruptions. But even lonely USCI’s rally carried a mistaken banner the most powerful missing man of revolution Leo Trotsky without whom Lenin couldn’t have managed the show.
Bengal Left taught by Stalinist brand of Bolsheviks wouldn’t have anything to do about Trotsky as not only former deported him and got him killed.However, how sad no matter the fading fables, myth of Revolution with money petered out the day perestroika and glasnost winds swept USSR triggered by Mikhail Gorbachev but left the Indian Left in unaffected solitude of Stalinist and Maoist world as neither spoke of “Socialism with a human face.’’
While long back welfare states blocked the export of Russian communism in Europe and in more developed nations, Indian Left, including first prime minister JL Nehru, remained tied to British-inspired constitutional socialism!
After perestroika and glasnosts they survived in India but as Dr Manmohan Singh and present political establishment went gaga over free market economy, the Left chose an intellectual death in India and in Bengal,’’ said Calcutta University Professor, adding, otherwise Left wouldn’t have retreated even now when they still have a sound reason to politically flourish.’’Thus where you see an air of celebration? It is better they spoke less, they are in retreat,’’ quips another Calcutta University professor of political science.
