Contradictions galore

India's Left parties have traditionally been able to demonstrate a degree of inner-party democracy that denies the Stalinist record of their cousins elsewhere, while also avoiding the building up of any personality cult. In both respects, they have been better than most of the non-Left parties.

But the signs suggest that things may be changing. First comes leader worship, hitherto associated with parties like the Congress. This got exposed when a photographer with the party mouthpiece in Kerala lost his job after he passed sarcastic remarks about the latest screensaver on computers in the office""pictures of the party's new general secretary, Prakash Karat. It appears that disciplinary action was taken following the setting up of a committee to go into the matter.

If that makes you wonder whether Stalinist tendencies are staging a comeback, witness what happened to the branch secretary of the party in a Kerala panchayat when he opposed the party line. It appears the party-run cooperative, Dinesh Beedi, was running into losses and announced job cuts.

Perhaps without pausing to consider who owned the factory, the branch secretary of the party (who is also the vice-president of the panchayat) organised a sit-in at the cooperative's head office. The poor man has been banned from all party positions/activities while yet another committee has been set up to decide the final punishment.

Meanwhile, the local party division is planning to launch an awareness drive to get its workers to understand that if they do not accept wage cuts, the factory will become uncompetitive and will have to close down""logic that capitalists are not allowed to propagate.

But while the CPI(M) is with the workers in all its rhetoric, and in the stances it adopts at the Centre, it has in fact emerged as a significant employer of both capital and labour.

The finance minister, P Chidambaram, in his capacity as the editor-of-the-day of a financial paper, suggested an investigation into the finances of the Left parties in Kerala; what was found was a Rs 4,000 crore empire that spans a satellite TV channel, a super-speciality hospital being set up, and even an amusement park.

What is hard to understand is not why the CPI(M) practises such doublespeak, but why the UPA at the Centre is unable to point to the contradictions and embarrass the Left into supporting policies that will benefit the vast majority of people in the country.

Other than the Prime Minister making some weak comparisons between what the Left Front government practises in West Bengal and what the Left preaches to him in New Delhi, the government has lost in virtually all its encounters with Mr Karat & Co.

The Dinesh Beedi case can surely be used to argue in favour of policies that encourage a flexible labour market. As for the EPFO, where the Left parties are constantly agitating for increased subsidies/payouts, it has been proved that only a very small number of workers benefit""the EPF covers barely 5 per cent of the country's work force. And far from being the vanguard of revolution, this 5 per cent is more in the nature of a high-wage island that wants to have nothing to do with the surrounding sea.