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Will Rahul and Yechury pair up to be the opposition against Modi?

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Jyoti Malhotra
Jyoti MalhotraApr 21, 2015 | 15:02

Will Rahul and Yechury pair up to be the opposition against Modi?

Rahul Gandhi has returned home to India and to Parliament to accuse the Narendra Modi-led government of ignoring “67 per cent of the country’s farmers and labourers” at the expense of the corporate world, raising the question whether the young Congress leader is planning to steer his party towards a sharp left ideological turn.

Political line

Certainly, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has just completed an overhaul of its political line at the 21st party congress in Vishakhapatnam, will be cheering. The CPM elected Sitaram Yechury as its new general secretary, putting him in charge of the party for the next nine years. But it also ordered him to join hands with the broadest mobilisation of forces so as to put the steam back into the faltering struggle against the “neo-economic policies” of both the Congress and the BJP.

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Incomprehensible jargon that smells like the naphthalene balls of an outdated era? The truth is that if the anti-BJP parties come together on issues that matter to a large segment of the population, for example farmer suicides and rural distress, they may just shake the powerful citadel that the BJP built less than a year ago.

The stage in fact seems to be getting ready for a new reckoning. With elections in Bihar later this year becoming a new yardstick of opposition unity, the immediate baptism by fire will certainly revolve around stalling the passage of the rejuvenated Land Acquisition Bill in the Rajya Sabha. Just like in the pre-recess Budget session, all the opposition parties in the Upper House are gearing up to reject the Bill and give a full dose of comeuppance to the BJP.

So what gives? At the Vishakhapatnam CPM session, senior party leaders including the previous general secretary Prakash Karat were insistent that a mobilisation of progressive and secular forces could not include the Congress, because it was the progenitor of the economic policies that pushed the working class into a downward spiral. Basically, it was no better than the BJP.

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Forked tongue

The Congress cannot speak with forked tongue, these leaders said, on the one hand marching with the left and other parties to Rashtrapati Bhavan as they all protested the Land Bill, and on the other supporting the BJP-led government on the insurance bill which upped the entry of foreign players into this lucrative business.

However, several other delegates, especially in north Indian states like Punjab and Bihar, pointed out that if the CPM had to stay relevant it needed to not only focus on implementing programmes on the ground but also carefully join hands with like-minded political forces.

The Bihar unit of the CPM remains circumspect about the new political phenomenon called the Samajwadi Janata Dal, and although a pre-poll alliance is ruled out, they don’t mind at least talking about issues and programmes together.

This is a far cry from 2008, when the CPM pulled support from the Congress-led UPA over the India-US nuclear deal, an event that contributed to its sharp political decline. The party lost West Bengal after 34 years in 2011 and has been reduced to a mere nine MPs in the current Lok Sabha. Certainly, it is now looking for friends and allies to pull it out of its current rut.

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Enter Sitaram Yechury, who last week, variously, called for a “new deal” for the poor, a “new future” for the CPM and “new alternatives” to the pushy corporatisation of India. Manik Sarkar, the chief minister of Tripura and a Yechury supporter, said it was equally important to focus on “people on the other side of the coin”.

In the rough and tumble of parliamentary politics, Yechury’s advantage is that he knows everyone. The Congress leader Sonia Gandhi and he are chums. Arch political enemy from the Trinamool Congress Derek O' Brien and he dissolved their differences to fight the good fight on the Land Bill. Satish Mishra of the Bahujan Samaj Party and he often confer on the best way to take the struggle forward.

Pro-poor

The CPM, under Yechury, could well become the informal core of a broad-based pro-poor coalition in which the reinvented Congress under Rahul Gandhi could play a key role. Moreover, the party’s revamped political line prevents Yechury from allying with caste-based political parties and other so-called Third Front groupings, but it hardly stops him from schmoozing with them.

At the party congress, delegates were sure of one thing: In a changing India, the party cannot afford to anymore adopt a superior, patronising air that it has been so good at for some time, behaving as if Papa knows best. The party has to go to the people, not the other way around, pointed out Kerala CPM leader MA Baby.

If the Congress party’s new look – farmers’ rights instead of “animal spirits” once favoured by Dr Manmohan Singh – carry the day, the importance of the left can only grow. Today’s fight around protecting the farmer’s right to his “do bigha zameen” could extend to other issues, like “ghar wapsi” as well as righting distorted history books. Does this mean the BJP-led government, even as it prepares to complete a year in power, may have helped relaunch an opposition unity of sorts? Certainly the pot is boiling again with all kinds of interesting possibilities. That may be enough for now.

Last updated: April 21, 2015 | 15:02
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