There is a long history of such conduct, going back to the Communist hostility to the Congress-led freedom movement and the willingness to act as agents of the British imperialists (because both Soviet Russia and Britain were on the same side in World War II). That was followed by the denouncing of Independent India as a bourgeois sham, leading to armed insurrection against the lawful government. And when the Chinese attacked India on the northern borders, the Communists once again did not take a clear position with the national mainstream.
As for economic issues, when the Green Revolution was achieved, the Communists criticised it as a phenomenon that would displace labour and help only big farmers "" whereas it is the Green Revolution that helped India become self-sufficient in food. Indeed, in Punjab which was at the heart of the change, there has been a growing labour shortage, and not the creation of surplus labour. The Left was also critical of the induction of computers, organising strikes to stop computerisation and thereby condemning office workers and whole organisations to manual processes long after they should have computerised and achieved quantum gains in productivity. Once again, the war cry was that workers would be displaced, whereas it is the computer age that has created huge employment in the country "" with the Left Front-ruled West Bengal now struggling to reap some benefit by inviting the computer software giants to come to the state. And, of course, the Communists were bitterly critical of the "IMF-World Bank-dictated" economic reform programme that got launched in 1991; ironically, it is this very programme that has given the country freedom from IMF conditionality and also from the need to borrow from the World Bank.
Till date, no one in the country has heard the Communists uttering any mea culpas on these and other issues. Instead, the states where they rule have been the biggest victims "" West Bengal and Kerala. The former lost its industrial primacy and suffered a flight of capital for the best part of a quarter century. And Kerala, despite its excellent socio-economic indices, attracts the least investment among the southern states. There are occasional signs that some lessons have been learnt from this experience, but no change in fundamental positions.
For many years, the Communists have also criticised those not of their ilk as being foreign agents, compradors and such like. Yet, as Soviet documentation has established, it is the Communists who were busy taking money from a foreign country, even as they pointed fingers at others. And coincidentally or not, the Left's opposition to the nuclear deal happens to tie in quite nicely with the interests of Communist China, which would like to see India remain in a nuclear straitjacket.