Mukunda Raj Kattel

On 3 March 2016, a little known student from Bihar delivered a fiery ‘azadi speech’ at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) auditorium. It was a moment as defining for Kanhaiya Kumar as for the mainstream left struggling to breathe under the weight of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. Just released from the Tihar jail, in which he was held for 20 days on charges of sedition, which remain unsubstantiated as of today, Kumar addressed his jubilant friends that Indian people needed azadi (freedom) in India: azadi from poverty, from hunger, from violence against women, from caste-based discrimination and from the divisive ideology embraced by the ruling party.

“We are not seeking azadi ‘from’ India,” he thundered, “We want azadi ‘in’ India.” During the speech, Kumar asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was believed to instigate the former’s arrest, to listen carefully to what azadi he was speaking of and to take note that he would keep fighting for it no matter where it would lead. In 2019, Kumar was a Communist Party of India (CPI) candidate for the Lok Sabha elections from Begusarai, the constituency once considered to be the ‘Leningrad of Bihar.’ Kumar lost to a BJP candidate but continued his unrelenting critic of the right-wing government.

Kumar also continued his tireless advocacy of the unity of the left and other opposition parties in India to collectively fight the BJP to stop it from tearing the ‘idea of India,’ an idea made of up pluralism, secularism and socialism.

End of ideology?

The thirty-four-year-old political firebrand of the left defected to the Congress Party on 28 September 2021. What triggered Kumar’s defection remains unknown. To CPI General Secretary D. Raja, it was Kumar expelling “himself from the party” out of “personal ambitions and aspirations” and having “no faith in communist ideology and working-class ideology.” Other sources suggest Kumar’s increasing popularity within the party and beyond had irked the CPI leadership for some time and this might have caused Kumar’s defection. Kumar is also tight-lipped on his defection.

He has, however, made it very clear why he joined the Congress Party: to protect the party that has given the freedom to the Indian people from colonial forces and to strengthen it so that it can protect the hopes and aspirations of the Indian people from the bellicose Hindutwa of the ruling BJP.

D. Raja’s comment that Kumar has no faith in ideology reminds me of the ‘end of ideology’ debate of the mid-1950s. Following the death of Joseph Stalin, then supremo of the Soviet Union, his successors moderated the Stalinist-era of domestic repression and pursued the politics of peaceful collaboration with the West, which was already into the practice of collaborative politics and mixed economy. To some Western intellectuals, the Soviet Union joining hands with the West marked the end of ideology, the era of inward-suppression, destruction and militarism institutionalised under the banner of communism.

Kumar’s defection, too, marks the end of the variant of the ideology that covers up leadership inertia, denies the equality of voices and opportunities and creates a class of rulers and subjects inside the party that brags of building a classless society. D. Raja has been in the CPI leadership for the last 25 years, if the information I have is any indication, and is, as such, privy, and party, to the left movement that has degenerated to time pass and arm-chair activism. Yet, instead of paving the way for new ideas and enthusiasm to flow into the party, he hangs onto the elusive ‘ideology’ in defence of his position. Given a choice to protect the lifeless ‘ideology’ and the lives dying in the street, one would pick the latter.

The situation in other South Asian countries, too, is worrying. The left in Bangladesh is almost written off as a bunch of no-hopers. According to a noted observer, the Bangla left has already sunk without trace. It is not seen among the masses of the people nor among those who take to the streets to express their pains and discontents. In Sri Lanka, there is no left, remarks an author. Only ‘leftovers’ are found hopping from one place to another to protect their interests. They are too preoccupied to think of the people at large, let alone act on their behalf.

In Nepal, the last bastion of the left politics in South Asia, the left has performed extraordinarily well in election. Post-election, however, it has miserably failed to deliver due largely to its failure to check the leadership’s disdain for good governance and the excessive penchant for personality cult. Should the current style of leadership continue, Nepal’s left risks being reduced to a motionless banner as in India and elsewhere.

Is the left obsolete?

The left in South Asia is in crisis. The root of the crisis lies in detest for egalitarianism – the kernel of the ideology of the left – within the circle of the left leadership. It does not mean, however, that the egalitarian ideology is obsolete. It is still the only viable alternative to the divisive and demeaning ideology of neoliberalism and the Hindutva, to speak in the South Asian context.

For the left to remain an alternative force in South Asia, it should, first, overhaul its organisational leadership. Being too long in power – by means of internal splits, purges and cliquism – the leadership is too inert and inept to think beyond itself and its loyalists. Second, the doctrinaire devotion within the left should soon give way to the freedom of imagination and the freedom to think anew and amok. Fundamentalist adherence to socialism (and communism) does not explain and solve the problems triggered by the time of Mark Zuckerberg.

Third, the left should identify itself with the people in the street and be the champion of their everyday needs and expectations. Corporate-style branding and idolisation of leadership, which some left leaders are aggressively engaged in, only widens the gap with the people. What people need is not the logo, but ideas that resonate with their lives.

The writings on the wall are loud and clear. Should the left fail to read them just now, it will not be too late to read the entire South Asian left in the past tense.

(A PhD on human rights and peace, Kattel is a senior research fellow at Policy Research Institute. kattelmr@gmail.com)