Professor Amartya Sen has recently reiterated his criticism of the Left's political practice in India. Dr Sen is quoted to have said: "I was disappointed with the Left for not focussing on issues that are central issues of social justice and focussing much more on India's sovereignty and that kind of question."
He also chided the Left for "neglecting such issues as hunger and illiteracy and focussing on such issues as the Indo-US nuclear deal, which is not a central issue for social justice in India".
We are indebted to Amartya Sen for many insights into the nature of inequality and injustice in our society and system. His views on social justice in India and the glaring failure to address the basic problems of hunger, malnutrition and the need for effective public education and health systems are not only relevant but needs to be translated into action.
Dr Sen has charged the Left with neglecting to take up the issues of hunger, malnutrition and illiteracy and focusing on the nuclear deal and the defence of national sovereignty. This is not true. Presumably, he is referring to the period when the Left parties were extending support to the UPA government, that is, between 2004 and 2008.
A look at the record would confirm that the Left consistently took up the issues of food security and the public distribution system, the rural employment guarantee scheme, the impact of WTO rules on agriculture and farmers, land rights for tribal people, the need for greater allocations for health and education in Union Budgets, and the whole gamut of neo-liberal policies that adversely affected the well-being of the Indian people. The other feature of Left intervention was its resistance to bringing in legislation and policies that opened up the financial sector and the economy to speculative finance capital. The CPI(M) concentrated its main campaigns and agitations on the three issues of land, food and employment. All these are basic to the struggle against poverty, hunger and malnutrition. If the allocations for health and education in Union Budgets showed an increase in this period, some credit should also be given to the Left.
The conflict with the UPA government on the relations with the US began when the government signed the Defence Framework Agreement with the US in June 2005. This does not mean that the Left focused exclusively on relations with the US.
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While the Left pressed for policy measures that Dr Sen himself advocates, the Manmohan Singh government became increasingly eager to push through measures to increase FDI in various fields. It is in the context of the depredations of global finance capital, and pressures to withdraw state regulation, intervention in the domestic economy and the limited protection offered to sections of the working people, that Marxists have come out in defence of national sovereignty.
It is not any "gut anti-Americanism" or any exaggerated fear of the power of the US that influences the Left. It is the recognition that the neo-liberal policies get their greatest sustenance from the strategic link with the US. This link not only affects foreign policy but the domestic economic agenda as well.
The Left in India has not delinked its fight for social justice and against social and economic exploitation from the fight against the predatory neo-liberal policies perpetuated by imperialism. The Left has tried to integrate its strategy of fighting the forces that perpetuate injustice, poverty and exploitation in India with the struggle against the globalised imperialist system. The inability to recognise this role of the Left leads Dr Sen virtually to recommend that the Left play a subsidiary role, one of supporting the Congress, or at best to act as a sort of Left wing of the Congress party. More than six decades after independence, experience has taught the Left that this is not the path to take.
At the national level, Dr Amartya Sen would be right to say that the Left needs to do much more to bring the issues of hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy and deprivation to the forefront and to build powerful movements. But it is not very helpful to counterpose, as he has, the struggle for a better life for the people to the fight against imperialist domination. The two have to go together.
(Excerpts from CPI-M General Secretary Prakash Karat's article in People's Democracy)