People's Democracy

AS we go to press, Trinamul Congress leader, Mr. Ajit Panja, has thrown the gauntlet challenging the party chief Ms. Mamata Banerjee. Fearing the invocation of the anti-defection law in case he resigns, Mr. Panja is obviously hoping for disciplinary action against him so that he can split the party. Similar noises are being heard within the Congress camp as well over the Congress-Trinamul Congress alliance in West Bengal. Even in these parties, for whom opportunism is a central theme of their politics, the levels they are stooping to now is not being accepted by their following!

This is not surprising. Till recently, the Trinamul used the choicest of abuses to debunk the Congress in West Bengal. Even after forging an alliance with the Congress, the Trinamul continues to sit alongwith the NDA in the Lok Sabha. Only recently, the Trinamul had voted with Mr. Vajpayee and the NDA justifying the Balco sell-off and the Prime Minister’s statement that the destruction of the Babri Masjid was a reflection of "national sentiment". Yet, these parties are together. It is unprecedented in independent India’s history of parliamentary democracy that a railway minister who presents the rail budget will not be defending it during the debate because she has walked over to the opposition benches! Difficult to imagine greater heights of opportunism.

The publicly declared objective of this alliance is to defeat the Left Front. And this the Congress is willing to do by directly associating with a party that has refused to sever its links with the communal forces. So much for their commitment to secularism!

It is strange that the Congress, both in West Bengal and Kerala, is seeking to justify its compromises with communal outfits by outrageous suggestions that the growth of the communal forces in the past has been aided by the Left. Can there be a greater misrepresentation? The Left has been and continues to be the staunchest and the most consistent defender of the secular democratic foundations of the Indian Republic. The Congress party should realise that but for its opportunistic withdrawal of support, twice, to the United Front government formed in 1996, the BJP-led alliance could never have come to power. If the country had to be subjected to a BJP-led rule, with all its negative consequences, the onus of responsibility lies squarely with the Congress. If the publicly declared commitment to support a secular government in 1996 had been adhered to by the Congress, then the Lok Sabha elections would have been held now alongwith these state assembly elections. We would have been spared both the 1998 and 1999 mid-term elections as well as this BJP-led government. This is the simple truth.

That the Congress is adopting similar tactics in Kerala has been exposed by none other than Mr. Karunakaran himself, who revealed that a team of Congress leaders was discussing with the BJP in the state for a clandestine tie-up to defeat the LDF. Such an approach is nothing new in Kerala. A veteran BJP leader, the late K G Marar, had, in fact, detailed in his official biography, that the BJP and the Congress had struck a secret deal in the 1991 general elections. It is claimed that the LDF lost the assembly elections in 1991 as a result of this understanding. Such an understanding between these two continued even in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, particularly in Mr. Karunakaran’s constituency, Mukundapuram and in Thrissur.

The BJP has, till date, not won either an assembly or a parliamentary seat in Kerala. Eager to make its debut, the BJP is going in for clandestine deals. Despite such unscrupulous and unprincipled opportunism, the BJP could not, so far, enter the Kerala assembly. This time round, the results would be no different.

The people of Bengal and Kerala, steeled through their struggles and experiences are bound to reject these opportunistic alliances whose only motive is to capture power by hook or crook. They will never allow any legitimacy to the communal forces. The Congress has shown itself as being bereft of any policy or programmatic alternative to the Left. The pale Saffron approach adopted by the Congress in the nineties, which led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid amongst other consequences, had seriously undermined its credibility of upholding secularism in the country. The resultant desertion of its mass support has reduced the once powerful Congress to its pathetic state today. Such opportunism that it is indulging in in the forthcoming assembly elections will, once again, be rejected, more emphatically this time round, by the people in both West Bengal and Kerala.