CALCUTTA, 15 December 2004 — When Jyoti Basu or Harkishen Singh Surjeet call on India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the premier comes out of his office to welcome them. Ushering them in, he remains on his feet until they sit down. The two old men get the same royal treatment when they visit Sonia Gandhi, supreme leader of the ruling Congress Party who suddenly appointed Manmohan as PM in a masterstroke that stunned even her worst critics. True, both of them are touching 90. But the incredible respect they seem to command in the corridors of power has very little to do with their age. The two are the most senior leaders of the left — as Communists or Marxists are known in India — whose support is vital for the survival of Manmohan Singh’s Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) national government which ousted Atal Behari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition in the April-May general elections.
Interestingly, relations between the Congress — which ruled India virtually without a break until 1996 — and the Communists were frosty since independence as ideologically they are poles part. But the Reds threw their considerable weight behind the Congress Party earlier this year to stop their common enemy — the right-wing, sectarian BJP — from recapturing power.
Indian Communists are not merely propping up the UPA regime. They also have the moral high ground by refusing ministerial posts in the federal government. Calculated sacrifice, analysts say, has given the Red brigade a halo in a country where politicians go to any lengths to grab government portfolios and milk them. Manmohan described the Communists as his “conscience” even at the height of a highly embarrassing public row between his government and them over the presence of experts from World Bank, Asian Development Bank and management consultants McKinsey in the Planning Commission which prepares India’s economic development blueprints known as Five-Year Plans.
Communists accuse the Congress of regularly deviating from the Common Minimum Program, or CMP, hammered out by the two sides. The Congress accuses Communists of exercising power without responsibility. Barely had the foreign experts’ crisis been defused by capitulation that the Communists kicked up a fuss over US Ambassador David C. Mulford’s offer of FBI assistance to the chief ministers of Assam and Nagaland where explosions allegedly triggered by separatist guerrillas killed scores of people.
Wearing their Marxism on their sleeve, Communists are also exerting pressure on the new government to distance itself from the USA and Israel — two of the BJP’s staunchest allies — and further cement ties with China. They also want New Delhi to make peace with nuclear rival Pakistan. They are very critical of rising defense expenditure which, according to them, deprives the poorest of the poor in both countries of food, drinking water, medicare and education.
But economic reforms are the biggest bone of contention between Congress and Communists with diametrically opposed views. There are daily clashes over privatization, raising caps on foreign direct investment in various sectors like aviation, insurance, telecom and petroleum, sale of profit-making government firms, closure of state-sector companies and interest rates on small savings and employees’ provident fund. The Communists forced the closure of the Privatization Ministry — one of the showpieces of Atal Behari’s reformist regime. They are committed to slowing down the reforms program and privatization processes. They want Manmohan’s government to improve living standards, particularly healthcare facilities, of the country’s poor rural voters who felt left out of India’s economic “miracle” and were instrumental in booting out the BJP. On the other hand, Congress — which started reforms long before the BJP came to power — has pledged to continue reforms which are India-specific whether the Communists like it or not. But to buy peace, the UPA has offered to hike substantially budgetary allocations for social sectors like health, primary education and rural employment championed by the Marxists if they stop objecting to unlimited foreign investment in the field of aviation, insurance, telecom and petroleum.
Communists see themselves as kingmakers having won 62 seats in the April-May general elections and emerging as the third-largest group in India’s 545-member national Parliament after the Congress and BJP eclipsing a wide array of centrist regional outfits. Never before had Marxist outfits won so many seats. There were only 42 Communist MPs in the last Parliament. Their previous highest was 51 in 1991.
Significantly, the 62 seats have come from just six states that underlines the limited influence of Communists. And their traditional bastions — Bengal, Kerala and Tripura — account for as many as 59 seats. The CPI-M first captured power in West Bengal in 1977. Since then it has won six successive state elections. The main reason for its success was its land-reform program, which established the rights of landless laborers and farmers over the land they tilled, turning West Bengal’s rural population of around 65 million into a vote-bank impenetrable by any other political party.
Jyoti Basu, held in such high esteem by Manmohan and Sonia, was chief minister of West Bengal from 1977 to 2000 setting a record as India’s longest-serving provincial ruler. He voluntarily stepped down after grooming a successor. Many felt that he was “the best prime minister India never had”. But today Manmohan is in a Catch-22 situation. Should he bow down to Communists’ demands at every step or call their bluff?
As things stand now, Both Congress and Communists need each other though communists are likely to see themselves and act as the principal opposition.