Contradictions are an integral part of communist ideology, and more importantly, praxis. Sitaram Yechury, who passed away on Thursday was the most well-known contemporary communist leader in India. Yechury’s political persona is best described by a contradiction, which was articulated, not by Karl Marx or his ideological descendants, but by nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan or Mirza Ghalib, as he is known popularly. One of Ghalib’s most famous couplets is as follows.
Mohabbat meñ nahīñ hai farq jiine aur marne kā,
usī ko dekh kar jiite haiñ jis kāfir pe dam nikle
(In love there is no difference between life and death do know,
the very one for whom I die, life too does bestow)
Yechury was the most well-known face of the communists in India (at least in the last decade) in political circles and among common folk. His passing away has left a void, which communists will find difficult to fill, especially when it comes to political interventions and strategising in the anti-BJP political camp.
And yet, it was under his watch as the general secretary from 2015 onwards that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the CPI (M) atrophied in West Bengal. In the assembly elections which were held in 2021, the CPI (M) did not even win one assembly seat in the state where it enjoyed an uninterrupted rule between 1977 and 2011. It was this loss of ground and, by extension, parliamentary strength in West Bengal, that prevented Yechury from enjoying the same realpolitik clout; notwithstanding the similar goodwill he enjoyed, as the former CPI (M) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet who is best known as the key architect of Indian version of cordon sanitaire political tactics to keep the BJP out of power.
What explains this contradiction in Sitaram Yechury’s political life?
The point of asking this question is not to criticise a person who cannot defend himself anymore. It is also not to vent pent-up subjective grudges vis-à-vis the departed politician. Necessary disclosure: this author was a leader of the CPI (M)’s student wing when he studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University and was expelled after rebelling against a position of the party of which Comrade Yechury was a leading proponent.
Political differences, especially sans an organisational context, should never be allowed to reach ad hominem levels if objectivity in argument has to be preserved. And, in any case, this author, along with generations of JNU students has seen first-hand Yechury’s characteristic charisma and political wit to know why he is being remembered so fondly by a whole lot of people including journalists and politicians even outside the fold of the left.
Yechury’s political evolution, and with him his party’s trajectory, is symptomatic of a larger and much older debate within India’s communist movement, namely the relation between communist and bourgeois politics in Indian democracy.
Two of its most important manifestations in the Indian communist movement are directly related to the CPI (M). The first led to the formation of the CPI (M) after a split from the (undivided) Communist Party of India in 1964 when a bunch of senior (but not top) leaders forced a split criticising the CPI’s line for being too soft on the Congress party. This, by the way, was also a rebellion against the official line of the Soviet Union. The CPI (M) started as a faction but soon outgrew the mother ship in popular support thanks to its mastery in mixing militant praxis of class struggle with electoral politics.
Leaders of Yechury’s generation joined the communist movement at precisely this moment of great ideological churning within the left.
The second key moment came in 1996 when the BJP ended up as the single largest party after the Lok Sabha elections but did not have a majority to form a government at the centre. With the Congress even more short of a majority and having lost goodwill after presiding over the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, the anti-BJP group asked Jyoti Basu; who had been the chief minister of West Bengal from 1977 onwards, to come and take over the prime ministership and lead the United Front government.
This was nothing short of a revolutionary offer where a communist was being asked to take over the leadership of the world’s largest democracy. The Polit Bureau of the CPI (M), with Surjeet as the general secretary, wanted to lap up the offer but was overruled by the Central Committee after being persuaded, among others, by Surjeet’s young colleague Prakash Karat, another student leader from JNU who headed the JNU Students’ Union and later CPI (M) and before Yechury. Karat’s, and subsequently, CPI (M)’s justification for refusing the offer was that communists were not strong enough to have a decisive influence on policies in such a coalition government.
While the debate was settled officially, its fires continued to simmer, with seed fuel (to paraphrase seed funding) from none other than Basu himself who called the decision a historic blunder. These fires would be resurrected in the inner party debate between Yechury and Karat, some of it openly and some of it through proxies, over questions of supporting the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and the Congress on key issues in government and elections.
Episodes such as the Indo-US Nuclear Deal, CPI (M)’s support to Pranab Mukherjee in the 2012 presidential election and its alliance with the Congress in West Bengal are some of the important instances in these seemingly disconnected but ideologically linked inner-party debate. The ultimate irony of this entire process was that while Yechury eventually won all of the party’s inner battles, his party’s difficulties in the struggles outside only increased with time.
Would things have been very different for communist politics and CPI (M) in India had the party debate been settled against the Sitaram Yechury line? The easiest answer, like all counterfactual questions, is that it is difficult to say. The more complicated and perhaps the answer that’s closer to the truth is that this debate is accorded more importance than it deserves in the long-term decline of communists in Indian politics.
What really weakened the Left in India did not even trigger a wider debate within the ranks in time. The trinity, which is perhaps the most important for the stalling and eventual demise of the communist advances in democratic politics in India is as follows. First is the rise of subaltern caste politics which overwhelmed class-based mobilisation in large parts of north India. A lot of first- and second-generation communist leaders were completely blindsided by it. Second is the demise of the Soviet Union and with it the ideological bulwark of global socialism. And, finally, economic reforms unleashed a new economic dynamism in India, which despite its failure to address the fundamental structural transformation problem, has led to a large fall in poverty and ushered broad-based upward mobility even among the middle and lower middle classes.
Chronologically speaking, these three factors fructified almost one after the other, inflicting a triple whammy on the communist political project in India. For communist politics in the classical sense of the term, engaging with these questions is tantamount to walking on a razor while balancing its political existence and relevance. Accepting these criticisms fully would negate the need for communist politics and rejecting them in toto would render the politics divorced from reality. To expect an individual, in this case, Yechury, to find answers or solutions to these systemic questions is not just unfair but also unreal.
To his credit, Yechury joined left politics out of ideological conviction rather than material deprivation. As someone who studied economics at St Stephen’s College and then JNU and was an excellent student, the world must have offered many more attractive and rewarding opportunities to him than becoming a full-time activist of a communist party. It is easy to criticise or disagree with Yechury and a lot of his contemporaries in progressive politics today. But it is even more important to remember and appreciate the fact that some of them decided to forego all elite privileges and embrace mass politics despite the uncertainties it posed before them in the hope of changing the world for the better.
The same thing cannot be said about the privileged younger generation today for whom progressive politics is increasingly becoming an exercise in finding microscopic but woke contradictions rather than engaging with macro issues and the state of the masses at large.
In his post-dinner meetings in JNU – this author attended a lot of them and chaired a few as well – Yechury would often paraphrase a sentence from Karl Marx’s introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. “…material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”, he would say in characteristic chutzpah befitting a veteran politician, trying to convince batch after batch of students that their “ideas” were “the” material force of history. It is likely that he remained deeply cynical despite this external optimism given the reverses communists faced in the five decades he spent in active politics.
Always ready to narrate or take a joke about himself, Comrade Yechury would have appreciated another of Ghalib’s couplets which capture the predicament communist politics faced and will continue to face in today’s times.
“ham ko maʿlūm hai jannat kī ḥaqīqat lekin
dil ke ḳhvush rakhne ko ġhālib yih ḳhayāl achchhā hai
(we know the reality of paradise,
but to keep the heart happy, Ghalib, this is a good idea)
Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa
