New direction for the Left

BABY HINTS AT "OUT-OF-THE-BOX SOLUTIONS" FOR PARTY'S GROWTH IN HINDI BELT

- K G NARENDRANATH

IT IS NOT UNUSUAL for the Left to use "the tools of capitalism as a temporary retreat," says Mariam Alexander Baby, the newly chosen general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He was drawing parallels between Kerala's Left Democratic Front (LDF) government embracing a set of "right-wing policies" and the New Economic Policy adopted by "Bolshevik Russia" in 1921.

"It (the LDF government's policies) is not rightward deviation... Kerala is not a sovereign state. It is a resource-scarce provincial government working under an overarching capitalist framework," Baby, who turned 71 just a day before assuming the top post of his party, tells FE.

Even the EMS Namboodiripad-led government (1957-1959), the first one of unified Kerala, did not have the delusion of presiding over a socialist or communist dispensation, he recalls. It roped in private investors, and a marked example was that of Gwalior Rayons (later renamed as Grasim) unit set up by G D Birla.

Baby, who is the second person from the CPI(M)'s still-strong Kerala unit after stalwart communist theorist EMS to head the party, makes no bones about the seemingly precipitous decline of his party over the last one and a half decades. He admits that "out-of-the-box solutions" might be needed for its revival.