Democracy and the Left

in South Asia
Arup Baisya

he historical background of the

rapid decline of the left, commensurate with the decline of organised labour due to the onslaught of the
neo-liberal policy drive, needs to be
relooked at dispassionately. In this context, Democratic Governance and Politics
of the Left in South Asia, edited by Subhoranjan Dasgupta, offers an interesting
account for readers who are eager to
remain within the realm of the Marxist
theory of praxis. The present volume
grew out of a conference held at the
Institute of Development Studies Kolkata
(IDSK) in November 2013 on the theme
of Politics of the Left and Democratic
Governance in South Asia.
From the Marxist point of view, the
state, whatever its form, inherently contains certain coercive apparatuses. So,
democracy would not thrive if it does
not go along with the process of withering away of the state. The social and economic prerequisites for strengthening
the process of withering away of the
state and the practice of democracy are
dialectically complementary.
Dialectics, conceived as the logic of
process, is not a method but a practice,
and a practice learned through practising. In this sense, dialectics must be
learned only by critical apprenticeship
within the same practice (Thompson
2010: 153).
Class Struggle
and Socialist Democracy
Dasgupta, in his article The Dialectical
Core in Rosa Luxemburgs Vision of
Democracy, delineates Luxemburgs critical apprenticeship of socialist practice.
The author draws the attention of the
readers to show how Luxemburg observed
the positives and negatives of the Bolshevik leadership, particularly of Lenin, from
the practising dialectical viewpoint, which
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

november 28, 2015

book reviewS
Democratic Governance and Politics of the Left
in South Asia edited by Subhoranjan Dasgupta; Delhi:
Aakar Books, 2015; pp v + 266, Rs 695.

was driven by the conceptualisation of

dictatorship of the proletariat as democracy in the socialist sense.
Dwelling on the question of liberal
democracy, Aijaz Ahmad interjects in
Thinking the Liberal in Liberal Democracy, for our epoch, then, we could
plausibly say: Democracy is the horizon of
all politics; liberal democracy, more attached to oligarchic concentration of power than to democratic dispersal of it, is the
negation of that horizon (p 29). Both liberal democratic and fascist states are variants of capitalist, technocratic and oligarchic states, and from this consideration,
Stalinist Russia also had this common fundamental structure of bureaucratic rule.
Triggered by the threat of privatisation
in this neo-liberal phase of capitalism, the
working-class struggle for power rests on
the enhancement of democratic control
over the labour process. So, Ahmads delineation of substantive democracy as
politics of resistance, and the basis of the
vast underbelly of the un-democracy of
liberal democracy as the existence of
wage slavery is quite insightful. Democracy as politics of resistance is a question
of continuous class struggle, which takes
its concrete form under a concrete historical situation. The movement that strives
to accumulate social power in the hands
of labour is revolutionary. The liberal
democracy also changes its character under such a revolutionary act.
But, Ahmad makes no distinction
between liberal democracies in the phase
of vibrant movement of organised labour
and after the dismantling of the structure of
organised labour. Procedural democracy
vol l no 48

had not evolved as a bourgeois project,

but was thrust upon the capitalists by mass
rebellion. His attempt to find a relation between liberal democracy, and building of
empire or imperial hegemony negated the
essence of Marxs optimism on universal
suffrage in the event of the 184850 working-class upheavals in France. Socialist democracy is a brand (Ahmads term)
characteristic of a workers state, which is
not a state at the same time and, thus, surpasses the traits of procedural democracy
that the working class thrust upon the
bourgeois state.
The Identity Question
and the Left
On the identity question, a lot of misconception and ambiguity has engulfed the
discourse of the mainstream left in India.
E M S Namboodiripad was the only mainstream left leader who recognised the importance of the Indian caste system, perhaps, because of his proximity to the antihigh-caste movements of lower castes in
Kerala, particularly of the Ezhavas. But,
he failed to provide any theoretical insight into this question from the viewpoint of the Marxist theory of praxis.
While ridiculing S A Danges suggestion that Brahmin was the commune
of the Aryan man and Yajna was the
mode of production, D D Kosambi cogently argued why neither primitive
communism nor slavery could be constructed on the basis of Danges sources
(Chattopadhyaya 2010). Kosambis prediction that caste will not disappear
with modern means of production any
more than the feudal ideology disappeared from Japanese society with modern machinery appears to be true even
in the present neo-liberal phase of capitalism in India (Kosambi 2010: 774).
Prabhat Patnaik, in his essay Democracy, Identity Politics and Class Politics,
emphasises that the question of identity
rights be brought into the overarching
framework of class politics for realisation of authentic democracy. Conceptually, the definition of class articulated
by Lenin includes such multitude of
sociocultural categories prevailing in
the Indian milieu: Classes are large
35

BOOK REVIEW

groups of people differing from each

other by the place they occupy in the historically determined system of social
production (Lenin 1965: 421).
Patnaik considers caste, linguistics and
religious groups within the ambit of identity. However, the question of caste demands further elaboration. Patnaik cites
the Dalit question from the point of view
of class dynamics. He argues that if
democracy amounted merely to an
arrangement where the interests of different identity groups were reconciled by
mutual accommodation, effected either
through negotiations or through state intervention, then it would be necessarily
self-negating; first, because it works
against minority interests, and, second,
the whole exercise occurs within the
framework of an economy engaged in developing capitalism. On the contrary, class
politics is by that very fact a struggle
against the system itself, and the advance
towards realisation of authentic democracy is possible through the practice of class
politics. Thus, he cogently argues that
when there is class politics which does
not take up social issues of caste oppression, then that constitutes its weakness as

class politics; it is not because of any conformity with class politics (p 50).
But, he stops short of formulating a
concrete agenda of class politics. The
capitalist assimilates the social division
into the technical division of labour, and
thus, under capitalism, communal identities are protected and reproduced to
assist the incessant drive towards reduction of variable capital, to reduce the
cost of production. The identity cleavages, thus, redefined by the capitalist
system itself, leave ample space for obscurantist forces to rise as a threat to
parliamentary democracy.
Maidul Islam, in his essay Indian Muslims and the Radical Democratic Project,
tries to formulate a programme encompassing class and identity issues, particularly to incorporate the Indian Muslim in
the project of the radical democratic peoples movement against the neo-liberal
system. Citing relevant data, he rightly
asserts that Indian Muslims, by and large,
do not own the major means of production, and, apart from being persecuted by
majoritarian communalism and facing a
number of disadvantages, it makes the
community a natural ally of the left.

He, then, proceeds on the basis of

Ernesto Laclaus arguments to theorise
in favour of the paradigm shift, from the
working class to people as a universal
emancipatory category, for inclusion of
all diverse issues, ranging from identity
to ecology. This theoretical position is
problematic and bears the risk of revisionism. The form of basic conflict between mental and manual labour always
remains contingent to many other sets
of contradictions that exist in objective
reality in the sequence of multiple layers. Within this model of contradictions
and using the analytical tool of unity of
opposites, all these diverse movements
need to be incorporated in a comprehensive project visualised from the
working-class perspective.
Left in Power
and Left Organisation
Writing on the left practice in India and
the issue of democracy in The Left in India and the Issue of Democracy: A Theoretical Inquiry, Sobhanlal Dattagupta
asserts that the mismatch between electoral gain and political retreat constitutes the core of the left crisis in India.

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november 28, 2015

vol l no 48

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly

BOOK REVIEW

While dwelling on the historical origins

of Indian communism to explain the
growing marginalisation of the Indian
left, he holds the legacy of M N Roys
flawed idea on Indian communism largely responsible for its failure to emerge as
a hegemonic force. The dichotomy between capture of state power and capture of state apparatus had never been
addressed in the mainstream left circles,
and this accentuated the debacle of the
left in power in Indian state assemblies,
and so he emphasises on the need for an
alternative understanding of Marxism. In
this context, Leninist conception also
needs to be revisited beyond the content
of Lenins writing in What Is To Be Done?
(1902). But, how the left front in power
forgot about the importance of class
struggle and, thus, fell into the trap of
economism and empiricism needs further scrutiny.
The Stalinist approach of state repression was quite glaring in the Dandakaranya (Marichjhapi) episode in 1979.
The foundation for the ideological transition of the left front in Bengal, from
working-class politics towards rulingclass politics, was laid down during the
initial phase of the left rule. This was
when the iron fist of the party, which
considered itself as the epitome of all
knowledge, with empiricist arrogance
started muzzling the dissenting voices in
the name of organisational discipline,
bringing the activism of the toiling
masses to a standstill. The pragmatic
compromise with the neo-liberal order
under Jyoti Basus stewardship since
1994 was the turning point for the qualitative shift towards bourgeois-class politics, which set the stage for the downward slide from power. This phenomenon has been quite aptly analysed by
Prasenjit Bose in his contribution, The
Indian Left at a Time of Crisis.
In this context, the content of the
Interview with Manik Sarkar, conducted by Subhanil Chowdhury and Gorky
Chakraborty, does not reveal any new
dimension of left politics that may generate new passion and new forces
(Marxs phrase) in the Indian political
landscape. The counter-narrative of
neo-liberalism from the working-class
perspective cannot be articulated
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

november 28, 2015

through the carrot-and-stick policy for

dealing with extremism based on identity questions, and through striving for
survival of welfarism within the neoliberal policy drive. Some readers may
form an optimistic view on the quality of
governance, especially on the educational front, but this is not a model of a
pro-poor regime interacting with efficacious citizenry or, a virtuous cycle (in
the words of Jean Drze and Amartya
Sen).
The other three articles, written by
Ravi Kumar (Reimagining Democracy:
Radicalizing Dialogue and Dissent as an
Organizational Practice within the Indian
Left), Anindya Sekhar Purkayastha and
Dhritiman Chakraborty (From Antagonism to Agonism in the Republic of Hunger: Towards an Indian Democratie-avenir) and Ritwika Biswas (Ideas and
Praxis of Socialism: The Left in West
Bengal 194777), on this whole gamut
of issues are also worth engaging with.
Left Practice in South Asia
With most of its neighbours, India shares a
common legacy of colonial rule and antiimperialist struggle, though the British influence in Nepal was the least. Six different essays have been included in this volume to discuss left practice in Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Nepal. Srinivasan Ramani
describes the rise to power of the Maoists
in the wave of support for republicanism
that swept Nepal into ending the
2,000-year-old monarchy. He argues that
in the fight for constitutional democracy
and for resolving the vexed issues of integration/rehabilitation of the Peoples Liberation Army and federal restructuring,
Maoists could have averted their subsequent electoral decline if they had emphasised rebuilding of alternate structures
that altered the power relations in rural
areas. But, the cause of the rapid moral degeneration of a section of Maoists during
their short stint in power needs to be reviewed too in the light of the near absence
of an emancipated proletarian core.
Drawing historical similarities between the predominantly middle-class
composition of communist parties of
India and Bangladesh, Badruddin Umar,
in Left in Bangladesh: Past and Present,
asserts that the communist character of
vol l no 48

the main left forces in Bangladesh has

already been liquidated due to their
submission to bourgeois politics. On the
contrary, delineating the process of capitalist transformation in the agricultural
sector in rural Bangladesh in the neoliberal phase, and the concomitant rise
of class struggle along with the other
context-based movements, like the protection of natural resources, Meghna
Guhathakurta, in Democracy and Statecraft in a Neo-Liberal World: Narratives
and Counter-narratives in Bangladesh,
describes Bangladesh as left-of-centre
under the pressure of these movements
and due to sharing of power with the left.
Under the dynamics of growing proletarianisation, she draws our attention to
the possibility of renegotiation of the
process of building broad-based national
consensus during the Liberation War, as
the development by the people of a
counter-narrative to the neo-liberal paradigm. Analysing the objective reality
in Pakistan post the 2013 elections in
Pakistan: Transition to Democracy and
Challenges before the Left, Mathew
Joseph C reposes his faith on the Awami
Workers Party (AWP), a conglomerate of
three main left parties that can take
lessons from the weaknesses of left politics and build a resistance movement for
the stabilisation of the democratic process in Pakistan, ensuring their growth.
The present volume may be thought of
as an attempt to understand and grapple
with contemporary problems in mainstream left politics. The essays in this
volume present a rich fare. They should
prove to be valuable in examining the
relevance of the question of democracy
for left resurgence in South Asia anew.
Arup Baisya (swabhiman.ngo@gmail.com) is a
social activist based in Silchar, Assam.

References
Chattopadhyaya, Brajadulal (2010): Remembering Kosambi (190766), editorial note, The
Oxford India Kosambi, D D Kosambi, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kosambi, D D (2010): The Oxford India Kosambi,
Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (ed), New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Lenin, V (1965): A Great Beginning: Heroism of the
Workers in the Rear, Collected Works, Volume
29, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Thompson, E P (2010): The Poverty of Theory, New
Delhi: Aakar Books.

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