Yechury: General Secretary too late
If only an open-minded person like Yechury become the leader of the party in the early 1990s, when the bankruptcy of Communism as conventionally practised had become clear!
Yechury: General Secretary Too Late
Sitaram Yechury became the General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2015, after the party had receded to the margins of India’s polity. That the party retained its presence on the national stage, figured in Opposition confabulations and its leaders were still quoted in the mainstream media outside Kerala and West Bengal was due in large part to the energetic exertions of Yechury, making use of the relationships he had built up as a Rajya Sabha member and as the right-hand man of Harkishan Singh Surjeet, party general secretary from 1992 to 2005.
What if Yechury, rather than Surjeet, had become the general secretary in 1992, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, and shortly before the first dynastic succession in the Communist world, in North Korea -- that is, after the bankruptcy of the traditional Communist worldview had more or less been established beyond doubt? By Yechury, we mean someone with a relatively open approach to the world that set Yechury (and a few other Communist leaders) apart from the moribund apparatchiki who have become the standard bearers of Communism.
A vision devoid of ideological blinkers would allow the world as it is, rather than as it ought to be according to Communist teachings. You thought the Matrix movie franchise was original, in portraying people who live in a simulated world, with no clue that they are being deluded? The Communists got there first, and believed to be a simulation the world they could see around them, of steadily improving living standards for the working people in much of the capitalist world, of rich world governments that channel more than 40%, more than 50% in some instances like France and the Scandinavian states, of domestic output through the state, and narrowing of the income gap between the rich and developing worlds. The Communists, of course, were the only ones who had taken the red pill and could see the reality of growing immiserisation.
To suggest that Yechury was capable of seeing reality as it is, and not through a dogmatic prism, might seem to fly in the face of facts. One, the glowing report he filed about the conditions in Ceaușescu’s Romania, shortly before the Communist dictator with gold faucets in his bathroom was overthrown in a popular revolt. In Yechury’s defence, it must be said that he visited Romania not as a free agent, but as an emissary of the CPI(M), and was under duress to report that four legs were better than two.
Two, Yechury was part of the party establishment that censured, and eventually got rid of, the rising mass leader from Bengal, Member of Parliament Saifuddin Choudhury. Saifuddin perceived the emerging threat to the secular polity from the rise of the Sangh Parivar, in the wake of the demolition of the Babri mosque, and the need for the Communists to move away from consistent anti-Congressism in order to combat the common, larger enemy. When the minority Narasimha Rao government of 1991-96 needed to show its majority and the Congress sought the support of the Left, at least by staging a walk-out that would reduce the opposing vote count, Saifuddin and Somnath Chatterjee were in favour. That was deemed intolerable compromise with a government that had initiated neoliberal reforms. Yechury went along with his senior comrade Prakash Karat. In the process, a potential rival to party leadership was moved out of the way.
And three, Yechury was against the Karat line of withdrawing support to the Congress-led UPA government over the nuclear deal with the US. However, he went along with the party line, and the party’s MPs voted with the BJP to oust Manmohan Singh as prime minister.
Given this history, why entertain the hope he would have made a difference as party leader in 1992? He has the capacity to interact with fellow human beings on their own terms, rather than purely as representatives of the groups into which Communists tend to sort people. He was an educated, intelligent man, who kept abreast of global developments, and had the training to perceive shifts in the currents of history as they rushed along. Had he been the top leader with a free hand, he could have appreciated the need to overhaul the party, its goals, strategy and tactics play the role of is a prerequisite for understanding the world as it is. Communists know that leaders are to be negotiated with, followers, to be convinced and placated, comrades, to be made to feel comrades, journalists, to be briefed, and stumped, if they persist with pesky questions, writers, artists and artistes, as producers of culture, to be exhorted to lace their creation with social commitment, even as interacting with them shines some reflected glory back on the Communist. Yechury could interact with people with spontaneity.
In the autumn of the Communist patriarch, EMS Namboodiripad wrote a trenchant critique of Stalin, in the party’s Malayalam newspaper, Deshabhimani. He made three points. One, by imposing collectivization on an unwilling peasantry, Stalin weakened the foundations of the socialist economy. Two, by privileging the White Russian nationality, he alienated other nationalities in the Soviet Union. Three, he conducted the affairs of the party and the state in a manner that did not allow any initiative from below. If developed and extrapolated to the contemporary world, this critique would to a total revamp of the Communist party, dumping concepts like democratic centralism, and allowing ideas to compete for acceptance by the wider party, instead of imposing the wisdom of the General Secretary, dressed up as that of the Polit Bureau and the Central Committee on the party as a whole.
Prior to the Russian revolution, the Russian Communist party had had many factions, intense debates, multiple journals for airing a variety of views and critiques of others’ views. Inner-party democracy was alive and kicking. Russia’s civil war after the revolution put paid to all that. After the initial expectation that advanced capitalist countries like Germany would lead global revolution, Russian Communists were left to defend the only revolution that actually took place: their own, in the stunted capitalist nation of Russia.
The party resorted to terror, to crush all Opposition, and confiscate resources for the war effort. Inner party debate and democracy were replaced with totalitarian control, dubbed democratic centralism. What originally began as Civil War emergency measures became reified as The Party, the model for Communists around the world, including in India. China and Vietnam are, of course, countries in which labour power is a commodity, and are thus capitalist countries, albeit with authoritarian single-party rule.
Strictly according to the traditional theory and practice of Communism, the ideal future of humanity is North Korea, whether the Communists you know would care to admit it or not.
Communists in Kerala originally served as a force for democracy, organizing people into unions, building on the dynamics of change unleashed by social reform movements against caste and for modernization of custom within castes. Land reforms helped. All other parties bought into the social agenda of democratization championed by the Communists. But the Communist agenda fell short of democratizing gender relations, eradicating caste and modernizing the economy.
In Bengal, the Communists carried out land reforms, but practised patronage politics, rather than democracy.
Communist politics as currently envisaged, has run out of steam. The right moment to forge a new emancipatory imagination had been after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yechury became the party leader a quarter century too late. Is there anyone to pick up the gauntlet?