Minimum Marxism

The Indian Left needs a fresh discourse on ways to solve caste and communal conflicts and not to fall prey to identity politics

- Tanvir Aeijaz

'WHEN things do not go in the right direction, turn left', used to be the usual jeer against conservative right-wing fellows during our college days. Then it was believed that in Indian politics, the radical Left, or so to say the organised Left, would solve some of the key vexed questions of class, and further, the caste and communal disorders. But over the years, since Independence, its exceptional concern with the menacing growth of communalism on the one hand and the upfront defence of national unity on the other has relegated its core politics of the struggle for economic redistribution of resources and class battles.

With limited political and economic resources at their disposal, and the cultural-Hindutva gatekeepers restraining their initiatives and growth, the Left parties find themselves expending much of their energies fighting the communal politics of hate and fear and less on the questions of the protracted economic battles for the exploited and the oppressed. The Left parties now seem to be warped, in a sense of being besieged, with its own rearguard actions, a sort of forced retreat from its own class politics.

In 1925 at Kanpur, when M.N. Roy laid the foundation of the Communist Party of India (CPI), he extolled the mass movement of poor peasants and workers to liberate themselves from all kinds of exploitation. He had a firm conviction that the party would lead to, through popular upsurges and upheavals, a people's democratic state and that independent India would be free from landlordism and land given to the tiller. The autocracy would be abolished and key industries would be nationalised with a living wage.