The Centre’s Left Conundrum | Shubham Sharma, Satyanand Vatsa

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargava has written a thought-provoking article [1] for The Hindu. Commenting on the term centrism, she writes that it is a term scornfully invented by the Left for those ‘morally dubious’ folks who ‘in the face of right-wing assault on democracy’ choose to sit on the fence. This is a minimalist way to define centrist politics. In politics, no concept or phenomenon is bereft of a political-economic anchorage. Centrism too has it. For us, centrism in the modern sense refers to a political posture that is committed to the continuation of capitalism. It is against the total overhaul of the system for both good and worse, and in times of systemic crises, it chooses to side, give way, or cower before a horrendous alternative which despite its horrible political outcomes, does not challenge the economic system. The best example of this is the centrist facilitation of Nazism in Europe and neo-liberalism worldwide.

Centrism in History

Our principal complaint against Bhargava is that despite being a student of history, she fails to historicize the phenomenon of centrism. We will try to fill this gap. After the First World War, when Germany was hit hard by the Treaty of Versailles politically, the centrists assumed power under what was called the Weimar Republic. Instead of taking the problem head-on, the first job that the centrist Weimar took was to mutilate the most ‘progressive’ and ‘radical’ elements of German politics—the communists. All historians agree to the fact that it was the communists who could have taken on the Nazi stormtroopers on the streets and posed a challenge to the freikorps. Despite this, the centrists gave orders to annihilate the Spartakusbund. Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by the freikorps. Later, in 1928, when the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) did well in the elections, German big business called the government ‘an instrument of trade union interests.’ The centrists caved into their demands and paved the way for Heinrich Brunning of the German Centre Party. On the eve of the 1929 Great Depression, Brunning chose to attack trade unions through strict deflationary measures and dismantled the welfarist state which was built on the temporary successes of the Dawes Plan. This ripened the conditions of a Nazi breakthrough onto the national scene. Thanks to the ‘centrist’ Brunning’s policies, the Nazis increased their vote share from 18.3 in 1930 to 37.4 percent in 1932. In such a situation when political centrism was on the verge of a political death, it was the left (Social Democrats and Communists combined) who remained in a position to pose a formidable challenge to Hitler. The SPD and the Communist Party held 221 seats in the Parliament with 37.3 percent of the vote.

When the enfant terrible of Nazism was born, centrist Western European politicians chose to nurse the baby through ‘political appeasement’. In Britain, instead of collaborating with organized labour in a drive to rearm the country, the centrists chose to bow before the City-Bank-Treasury nexus. The latter opposed any such drive towards rearming that would involve state intervention in the economy. The liberal-centrist British politician Lord Philip Kerr Lothian made Britain’s priorities clear when he declared that “Of the two evils threatening Europe—German aggression and communism…communism is the worst evil.”

On the contrary, the internationalist revolutionary left always called for a joint front between the social democrats and the communists against fascism. Observing the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Leon Trotsky, as early as 1930, had warned against the threat of fascism and labelled it as the ‘sharpest razor’ in the hands of the ‘class enemy’. On the colonial question, in 1920 Lenin had adopted the political line of communists joining hands with the progressive sections of the anti-colonial national bourgeoisie in the colonies for waging ‘revolutionary liberation struggles.’ Unfortunately, India saw the complete fruition of this political schema only after the Dutt-Bradley thesis of 1936. This was a period when communists and radicals joined hands within and outside the Indian National Congress and posed a democratic challenge to Gandhi’s leadership. Subhas Chandra Bose’s victory as the President of the Congress in 1938 was a culmination of the Left’s consolidation within the Congress. Interestingly, Subhas Bose proudly made the distinction between Left, Right, and Centre. Instead of coalescing around the centre and risking the ire of Bhargava in the future, Subhas Bose identified himself with the Left. He counted Nehru among his comrades on the Left and described him in his book The Indian Struggle as ‘‘while his (Nehru’s) brain is with the Left-wingers, his heart is with Mahatma Gandhi.’’

As we conclude this section on history, we would like to add that the biggest blow that Nazism had to face was at the hands of Red Russia. With 2.5 crore deaths, the workers and peasants of Russia stopped the death march of fascism and saved the world from complete destruction.

Centrism and Neoliberalism

Although neoliberalism, which most economists of the Left see as a form of modern imperialism, was initiated by the right, it was taken forward by the centrists. For instance, in Britain, Thatcher initiated neoliberalism. Niel Kinnock and Tony Blair took it forward. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had initially supported Blair whilst opposing a split in the Labour Party. Within a year, Hobsbawm declared Blair to be ‘Thatcher in Trousers’!

In India, neoliberalism, which is the root cause of economic misery and facilitator of the rise of Hindutva, was adopted by centrist forces. The beginning of the reform process itself was flawed and risky. A model of debt-dependent consumerism for the upper class was initiated. Imports of luxuries led to an external debt of 80 billion USD in 1991. A severe balance of payments crisis enveloped India. Austerity measures were adopted at the behest of the International Monetary Fund. The New Economic Policy (NEP) inaugurated by the Congress in 1991 was not the outcome of a wide internal debate within parliament, or among the press or general public. It was a fait accompli brought about by a narrow circle of top politicians and high-level bureaucrats in conjunction with key decision-makers within the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

Socially speaking, the pragmatism of VP Singh to introduce quotas for the backward classes was resisted by big business and the middle classes. They rallied solidly behind the forces of Hindutva. Whilst all this went on, centrist politics remained nothing but a mute spectator.

Throughout this period spending on health and education remained dismally low. The agrarian distress hit India hard during this period. From 2000 till 2014, almost 200,000 peasants committed suicide. Casualization and informalization of the economy weakened trade unions which led to the stagnation of real wages of both the organised and unorganised workers. The high rate of labour productivity in this period along with depressed wages meant that a greater share of the economic surplus in output went to the capitalists. This explains the increase in income inequality even in the midst of impressive rates of GDP growth.

It is not just that neoliberal policies adopted by the centre increased income inequality. A marked increase in the incidence of absolute poverty was also witnessed in this period. Take for instance the nutritional norm. Poverty is defined in India as a person’s inability to access 2,200 calories per person in rural India and 2,100 in urban India. During the centrist rule, the proportion of the rural population that was poor by this criterion went up from 69.5 per cent in 2004—05 to 76 per cent in 2009, and for urban India, the figures for the corresponding years were an increase from 64.5 per cent to 73 per cent. The per capita net availability of food grains dipped from 180 kilograms per year by the end of the 1980s to around 162 kilograms by 2011-12. Nutritional deprivation had reached sub-Saharan levels.

Christophe Jaffrelot notes in his book Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy that the inauguration of neoliberalism led to the growth of a mass of unemployed youth between the early 2000s and mid-2010s. Plagued by countless frustration, ‘these angry young men, condemned to idleness, came both from a low caste neo-middle class without enough education to find a good job and an upper-caste lower middle class were quick to blame their decline on positive discrimination and appeasement of Muslims…these were the types of profiles that the Sangh Parivar recruited, in particular through Bajrang Dal, with the dual aim of broadening its social base, and going after Muslims to sustain the polarization of society by stepping up low-intensity riots.’ The centrists failed to provide a counter-imagination to these youngsters who quickly transmogrified into foot soldiers of Hindutva.

Centrism’s lurch towards Leftism

Bhargava is wrong to assert that the Left is practising a form of ‘political purism’. Even before the INDIA alliance became a political reality, Sitaram Yechury, general secretary of the CPI(M) was the first to call for political unity. As early as 2017, quoting Leon Trotsky, he had said that the ‘opposition must march separately but strike together.’ This is what precisely unfolded in the 2024 elections. In 2018, the CPI (ML) general secretary, Dipankar Bhattacharya called for a broad-based opposition unity to defeat the RSS-BJP. In Bihar, the CPI(ML) buried the decades-old hatchet with the RJD and became the most trusted and successful ally of the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance). Therefore, when Bhargava writes that ‘centrists are being castigated by the Left’, she is hunting imaginary phantoms that do not exit.

On the contrary, it is the centre that has lurched positively towards the Left. Under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership, the Congress manifesto has provided a radical blueprint for India’s socio-economic future which matches that of democratic socialists in Europe and North America. The Left in India has been applaudingly welcoming of it.

Bhargava is right to point out the electoral decline of the Left. Despite the decline, the strength of the student movement, trade unions, and peasant fronts have been markers of the Left’s strength on the streets. One of the biggest victims of Hindutva, Umar Khalid, who is awaiting a fair trial for over four years, belongs to the Left.

Bhargava underestimates the ideological threat that the Left poses to the forces of Hindutva. When the JL Nehru government banned the RSS in the aftermath of Gandhiji’s murder, Golwalkar in a letter to Nehru wrote, ‘‘During this period the RSS having been disbanded, the intelligent youth are rapidly falling into the snares of communism…the one effective check of the RSS no longer exists. The Communists had always considered the RSS as their main obstacle…News of their progress is alarming.’’

Finally, our reckoning with Bhargava’s centrism comes to an end. We sincerely hope to see her in our camp. The Left camp. The revolutionary camp.

(Authors: Shubham Sharma, PhD (Pursuing) University of Connecticut, Dept of Political Science, USA; Satyanand Vatsa, PhD, Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi)