Go back to JNU

EDITORIAL

As the dust settles on the opposition’s misadventure with the trust vote, one image that rears its head as you watch the Communists is that of King Canute. Like the king of England of yore, who tried to stop the sea but couldn’t, the CPI(M) general secretary, Prakash Karat, too, tried hard to stem the tide of support to Manmohan Singh, his government and the nuclear deal, and failed. And it is not just the government that he couldn’t stop. The CPI(M) — indeed, the entire Left — has endeavoured to place India in the kind of Stalinist cage that people elsewhere have escaped from, except, perhaps, in West Bengal. But even there, democratic governance works to put society in a gilded cage, as events have proved in Singur and Nandigram, where CPI(M) and its supporters yesterday have turned adversaries today. King Canute had greater wisdom than is credited with in legend. He was only trying to prove to his courtiers that he didn’t have unlimited power, certainly not the power to hold back the rising waves. That wisdom bypasses Karat & Co completely. That should not come as a surprise to anyone though. Karat and several others in A K Gopalan Bhavan come from a school of Stalinist thought that has had the effect of only contracting the Communists’ sphere of influence and confining them to West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala. At the grassroots level in the rest of India, they do not matter at all politically. Their control on trade unions is also diminishing. What has set Communism in India on this path of terminal decline? The answer may lie in Jawaharlal Nehru University, that temple of liberal thought, which has spawned some of the most illiberal people who run the Communist establishment in the country. From the classroom to the politburo, their progress has been swift. That in between lies the whole of India with all its problems is too minor a detail for them to care for, or is beyond their ability or willingness to grasp. So, unlike the era of Jyoti Basu, when leaders rose through the ranks one step at a time, beginning at the very bottom in politics or trade unions or farmer movements. It’s time to send Karat and his comrades back to JNU.