Rarely has there been such furore over something that is so little understood. Singur, north of Calcutta, and then Nandigram, located in Purbo Medinapur District of West Bengal, have become the fault lines in a number of explanatory narratives. For some, they represent the face of Left Front – mainly Communist Party of India (Marxist) – 'terror'. For others, wilful misunderstandings seem to have opened the door to the far right (the Trinamul Congress) and the far left (the Maoists and the Socialist Unity Centre of India). Rigid positions have made it impossible to hold a dialogue between those who either critically or uncritically defend the Left Front government, and those who oppose it vehemently. Rancour has become the order of the day.
From the perspective of the broad left movement, this is unfortunate. It is for this reason that I signed a statement, along with Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Walden Bello and others, to urge reconciliation among the left, since, as the declaration urged, "this is not the time for division when the basis for division no longer appears to exist." But perhaps the basis for division is more foundational than we had assumed. The rupture, the casus, is so deep that it is impossible to lay out the facts without challenge. Indeed, there are few basic facts that are currently agreed upon by both sides of the Indian left, let alone the capitalist media or the rightwing parties. As such, in the current context there is almost no hope that agreement could be forged on how to move forward.
But what is the basis of this rupture? Singur-Nandigram is the conjuncture of a long-standing structural gulf within the Indian left. In the past, this tear was sutured mainly by expediency. The pestilential breath of Hindutva that spread across North India during the 1980s and 1990s suspended genuine debate within the broad left. Instead, all hands joined together to form a secular chain around the Bharatiya Janata Party; those hands only tightened as the Sangh Parivar consolidated power, first in the states and then in New Delhi. But, as Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Prabhat Patnaik wrote in a recent essay, "With the perceived decline in the strength of the communal fascist forces, a certain fracturing of the anti-communal coalition was inevitable and has happened." That the BJP retains power in Gujarat, home of its genocidal campaign, is not sufficient to keep the anti-communal coalition together. Some would believe that Manmohan Singh on the kursi (seat) is insurance enough against the rise of Hindutva on the national stage.
Limits of PSPC
The structural gulf, of course, predates the current crisis. Two decades ago, two historic global experiments floundered and then collapsed. With the overwhelming debt crisis and the rapid growth of the power of finance capital, both the Third World project (the process led by the Non-Aligned Movement to create, among other things, a new international economic order) and the USSR-led socialist experiment dissolved. A triumphant capitalism overwhelmed not only institutions that had been built for a different world, but also the main ideological foundations of that world. Marxism and dependency theory, the sciences of socialism and Third World nationalism, seemed anachronistic in this new era. As the political scientist Vivek Chibber put it, not only did Marxism decline in Indian studies, but also "the very meaning of Left critique [changed]. Class is just being pushed out of the progressive milieu."