A harder party line

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which is the dominant communist party today, has just concluded its Ninth Congress. This will be remembered most of all for the exit of the remaining elements of the Old Guard, the men who broke away from the parent Communist Party of India in 1964 to form a new party and which, a decade later, emerged as a major regional force.

With the torch having been passed to a new generation, the country may well be in for a more aggressive line than in the days of Harkishen Singh Surjeet. This may have something to do with the advent of coalition politics at the Centre and the opportunity for the smaller parties to flex their muscles, but it cannot be denied that the party's general secretary, Prakash Karat, has used it to maximum possible effect.

But Karat's ambitions go beyond stopping what he would call 'neo-liberalism' in its tracks. He has been keen to create a 'third force' in Indian politics, thus breaking its present bi-polar mould. His second objective has been to win for the party a foothold in the Hindi heartland. Both will take some doing. The big question is whether the party can make headway without re-orienting itself to the contemporary world.

A notable feature of the Ninth Congress is its failure to define a future for the party that could resonate with the driving ideas and forces of 21st-century India. These are the pursuit of wealth through increasing economic growth caused by the adoption of ever-superior technology. To the rest of the world, this formula represents prosperity, but to our communists, they represent a catastrophic vision of the world, as though nothing has changed since Karl Marx's view of capitalism.

Marx said that the generation of economic surpluses left the poor poorer, and that the use of technology was worse (though inevitable and inherent in the process of capitalist change) because it left the poor unemployed.

Country after country, including China, has shown that Marx's view of capitalism is no longer valid, which is why China has given up communism in all but name. India's communists, in contrast, seem to be caught in a time warp "" who can forget that they criticised the green revolution in the 1960s, as (in the communist view) it would not help small farmers and the landless?

Although the communists have adjusted to the parliamentary system of democracy, they find themselves incapable of taking the next step and adopting a social democrat view of the world, which might find more buyers than die-hard communism. It is this failure that will stunt the party, even under Karat's determined leadership.

The other point worth noting is that, unlike the communists in China and the erstwhile Soviet Union "" who, for all the talk of an international brotherhood, gave primacy to national concerns over ideological issues "" India's communists have consistently given ground on national issues and focused instead on ideological partnerships, a fact which has exposed them to exploitation by communists in other countries.

Indira Gandhi recognised this, so when she had a problem with the CPI, she complained to Moscow! Recall also the communist willingness to be a British tool during the days of the freedom struggle, the support to China during the 1962 border war, and now the failure to condemn Chinese violence against its Tibetan minority. If the communists do not identity themselves more with the national mainstream, they can never become a part of it.