The Fall and Fall of Left...

The politician who has suffered a greater loss of face in the elections than anyone else is Prakash Karat. The manner in which the voters have busted his grandiose dreams shows that he hadn't a clue of the conditions at ground level. Driven by his dogma, he had bulldozed his way through a subservient politburo without realising that he was leading not only his own party, but the entire Left group into a dead end. The latter, too, was seemingly so mesmerised by Big Brother that it had no inkling of the approaching calamity.

Karat's journey towards disaster began with his championing the anti-imperialist cause which, he thought, had a wide measure of public support. Surrounded by like-minded 'followers', he presumed that opposition to America as in the days of the Vietnam War and castigation of neo-liberalism were sure-fire recipes for political success. He evidently had no idea that India had changed meantime and that he was 20 or 30 years behind time, as Rahul Gandhi later pointed out. Perhaps vaguely aware that the Left by itself would not have the requisite numbers to pose a serious challenge to the two national parties, Karat turned to some of the country's most unreliable politicos. He should have anticipated their fickleness when the Samajwadi Party, an old friend of the CPM from the days of Karat's predecessor as party general secretary, Harkishen Singh Surjeet, joining hands with the Congress on the eve of the trust vote in Parliament. Karat ignored Surjeet's earlier acceptance of the Congress as a lesser evil than the BJP. Though adept at stitching together unwieldy alliances, Surjeet's broad objective was to keep the BJP at bay. He would have been appalled by the sight of the Marxists voting along with the BJP against the government on the nuclear deal. Karat, however, had no such compunctions. To him, anti-Americanism was all. Since the government, according to him, was selling out the country to the Great Satan, his first objective was to pull it down even if it meant supping with the devil. His lack of foresight was also evident from the fact that he apparently never considered what would happen if the government really fell. Since Mayawati was waiting eagerly in the wings, he evidently thought that a replacement for the prime minister was at hand. But he never bothered about the consequences of helping someone into the prime minister's chair who had no experience of running a country of India's size and complexity and whose party had hardly any presence outside UP.

In the event, it was the Left that "lost its voice", as Amartya Sen said. Now, it has lost it altogether because of the steep drop in its numbers from 61 MPs to 24. What this dramatic fall means is that the comrades will not have the kind of clout they enjoyed at the Centre for four years from 2004. Karat's singular achievement, therefore, has been to take the Left down from the highest point it ever achieved to one of the lowest in recent years.