2014 elections: The last gasp of the Indian Left

Is it just me spooked by the pre-election mood music? Or is it really curtains for the Left? End of the road finally? Going, going gone ?

Opinion polls are dire. It looks that the Left parties could be headed for their worst performance ever with their tally likely to fall even below the "historic low'' of 2009 when together they managed to win only 24 seats.

A file photo of a previous rally by the Left.

Not surprisingly, Left leaders have been quick to rubbish the polls, but the fact is that they don't sound very confident themselves. Repeatedly pressed in a television interview to give a sense of the Left's prospects, CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury would simply say that they hoped to "do better".

But that's not the sense on the ground where the view is that Left has "no fighting power left" and has "no clue" where it is going, as left-wing historian and commentator Rudrankshu Mukherjee put it. Far from a likely comeback, there are fears it will struggle even to retain the 2009 tally. On the other hand, it is the fledgling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that is now widely seen as a more acceptable left-of-centre alternative to the Congress than the more doctrinaire Left.

Meanwhile, amid all the sound and fury ahead of next month's elections the Left is conspicuous by its silence — and the near invisibility of its campaign. The few times it has made headlines has been for the wrong reasons. First its bid to stitch up an 11-party non-Congress and non-BJP alliance was a non-starter. Then it was publicly snubbed by AIADMK leader Jayalalitha when she rejected the CPI and CPI(M)'s seat adjustment formula choosing, instead, to go alone. CPI leader A B Bardhan says he felt "insulted" the way she treated them.

Such is its state that the Left is no longer regarded even as a nuisance factor. That honour has been stolen by AAP. Left's hopes now rest on a deeply fractured election result which might give it a chance to intervene and play the king-maker as it has done in the past. A prospect that seems highly unlikely judging from the opinion polls.

So, how has the Left come to such a pass?

It had been long in coming. Left leaders like to blame it on the 1964 split in the Indian Communist movement and "international developments" such as the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that's only part of the story.

Actually, the Left recovered rather well from the split with both the CPI and the CPI(M) creating their separate spheres of influence -- the CPI in the north especially UP and Bihar; and CPI(M) in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura.

Likewise the collapse of East European communism did not have much impact on the fortunes of the Indian Left. In fact, the 1990s were its golden age as under the leadership of Jyoti Basu, Harkishan Singh Surjeet and Indrajit Gupta it cleverly used the political uncertainty at the Centre to punch above its weight and emerge as a major powerbroker.

Jyoti Basu nearly became prime minister in 1996 and memorably described his party's decision not to accept the offer to lead a United Front government at the Centre as a "historic blunder" ; Indrajit Gupta became home minister in Deve Gowda's government; and Surjeet, the wily networker, had "secular" parties eating out of his hands.

All three are now gone and their exit has been a big blow causing a leadership vacuum at the heart of the Left movement. But by then its long-term decline had already begun and behind the hype over its role in promoting a "third" alternative at the centre it was running on empty.

I was among a small group of left-leaning journalists in Delhi who spent a lot of time following its fortunes, and we could sense that the end was nigh. It was like a ticking bomb. The question was "when" rather "if" it would go off. And, boy, didn't it go off with a bang starting with its rout in the 2009 general elections. That set the tone for that mother of all bangs --the Left Front's slaughter in its own backyard, West Bengal, in the 2011 Assembly elections at the hands of an upstart TMC bringing its 34-year uninterrupted rule in the state to an end. With that whatever little clout it had at the national level vanished as its erstwhile "secular" allies abandoned it.

Yechury has admitted that the Left has been guilty of making "wrong assessment" of political developments from time to time. What he failed to acknowledge was that almost every single wrong assessment was a result of ideological blinkers.

In this respect, the Left's biggest mistake and which it now admits was to ignore completely the importance of non-economic factors in Indian politics such as caste, religion, regional identity, etc, focusing instead entirely on "class struggle". This approach contradicted the basic tenet of Marxist theory that any class struggle must take into account the "objective" conditions and realities. In India this meant the oppressive conditions imposed on millions of people because of their caste.

By the time the Left realised its mistake a host of caste-based regional parties had already sprung up across the country and were making hay. That's when the Left first started unravelling. Later, it was forced to align with these parties as second fiddle in order to appeal to Dalit/lower caste voters.

The blinkers have still not gone away. Even the language, couched in the 1950s rhetoric of "imperialism" and "capitalist enemies", has not changed. For a flavour, read the CPI(M)'s election manifesto.

If the Left is to survive it must re-invent itself as a European-style vehicle of social democracy; or take a cue from comrades in Beijing. It should stop bothering about the colour of the cat and start catching mice for a change.