Communist Party of India’s senior leader in Rajya Sabha for two terms D Raja has just taken over as the new general secretary of the CPI following resignation of S. Sudhakar Reddy on health grounds. Raja is a known leader of the Party for more than three decades and he is most active among the CPI leaders in dealing with the Government and the opposition. His leadership of the CPI should help the Party in building a broad unity of the left and democratic secular forces to face the BJP challenge in a most difficult political period for the Left parties.
Raja himself admits the challenges before the Left and he has talked of giving a fresh look to the party policies to make the Left relevant again in the national politics and to play a prominent role through the trade unions and the peasants organizations in carrying on massive movements against the anti people economic policies of the Modi Government. The Left leaders admit that there has to be a long drawn battle and the left alone cannot discharge that responsibility. The Left will try to act as a catalyst in the movement but the Congress, the biggest opposition party and the other secular for4ces also have to take part in the anti-BJP struggle.
The post May 23 political situation is settling down in the country. The saffrons are reigning supreme and the non party seculars and liberals who argued hard before the 2019 Lok Sabha poll against the second coming of Narendra Modi, are lying low. It is BJP and Hindutva all the way in the Indian polity right now. The immediate fall out of the massive victory of the BJP is the leadership crisis in the principal opposition party the Congress and the split in the gathbandhan with the BSP supremo Mayawati announcing that the BSP will go alone now without any tie up with the Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav. SP has also responded by indicating that the party will go solo in the coming by polls to the eleven assembly constituencies in Uttar Pradesh in the coming month.
The situation is quite bad for the opposition. The defections in the Congress ranks are on the rise affecting adversely the party fortunes in Telangana and Gujarat. In Karnataka also, the Congress legislators have resigned leading to a, serious crisis to the Karnataka’s coalition government. By insisting on resigning from Presidentship, Rahul Gandhi has led to a series of resignation offers from state party presidents. There is a process of churning. Which way it will turn good or bad for the organisation, is not clear yet, but what is apparent that the opposition parties are now facing the BJP as a far more mature, stronger and well oiled political party with huge muscle power and massive financial resources which can not be matched by the combined opposition.
BJP in 2019 is a completely new BJP and its massive strengths have to be understood to work out any viable strategy to fight it at an equal level in both Parliament and outside with the focus on ensuring victory in the assembly elections during the next five years and finally in the Lok Sabha elections in 2024. The ten year gap in power at the centre for any political party in India is not a new thing. The BJP itself came to power in 2014 after remaining out of power for ten years since 2004. Before that the BJP was in power for a full term from 1999 and a short term in 1998. In 1996, BJP was in power only for 13 days. These are normal developments in parliamentary democracy but things have changed substantially after the 2019 elections.
BJP is now the biggest political party not only in India but in the entire democratic world where Parliamentary elections are held. Only in China, the Chinese Communist Party has more membership but China is principally one party state and it is not considered among the democracies. The next is the grassroots organization with the RSS having huge membership covering every corner of the country.BJP is now a pan India party in the true sense, replacing the Congress which is 134 year old and which led the freedom struggle when the BJP or even Jan Sangh was nowhere. The RSS was active in a limited manner through its social service activities. The Congress with its wobbly organizational structure, is presently no match to the militaristic organizational discipline of the BJP and RSS. The CPI and the CPI(M) had some organization strength in many states earlier but now, the strength is limited to a few states. As new CPI general secretary, D. Raja has to bring about a big revamp of organisation.
But now, the most important component of the present BJP is its financial muscle power.BJP spent more than Rs. 16, 000 crore in 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Some other estimates put the figure at more than Rs. 20,000 crore. In fact, the BJP does not depend on domestic sources for election expenses. BJP gets maximum from the Indian industrialists and the traders and this amount is more than 20 times the amount received by the Congress. But even if the BJP does not use its domestic resources, it is in a position to finance its entire Lok Sabha expenses through funds coming from its supporting base abroad.
In an RTI reply, the State Bank of India, the sole supplier of electoral bonds, has reported a surge of around 62 per cent in the sale of the instruments over the past one year – from Rs 1,056 crore in 2018 to Rs 1,716 crore in January and March this year. Separately, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a non-profit election research group, deep dived into tax declarations of various political parties to the Election Commission.
Its report shows funding through electoral bonds is skewed heavily towards national parties, with the BJP walking away with the lion’s share. Of the Rs 215 crore generated through the banking instruments in 2017-18, the ruling party secured Rs 210 crore and the opposition Congress Rs 5 crore, the ADR report shows.
The fund flows through electoral bonds have left regional political groups alarmed. “The root of all corruption in India is the nexus between unaccounted money and politics,” remarked JD(U) spokesman Pawan Varma, though JD(U) is in alliance with the BJP.
“Electoral bonds were introduced as a reform ideally to break up this nexus. But the biggest beneficiary of the scheme is the ruling party. If it’s a question of a level playing field, what happens to regional parties like us then?” he asked.
Anonymous donors can buy electoral bonds for up to Rs one crore from the SBI and deposit them in the bank accounts of political parties of their choice. The instruments do not identify donors and are exempt from tax. “It’s about who is financing,” said Trilochan Sastry, founder of the ADR. It is clear that the BJP is beneficiary to the extent of 90% of the electoral bonds.
The results of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections have come as a big shock to the Left movement of the country, especially to the two major communist parties of the country CPI and the CPI(M). In the 17th Lok Sabha, the CPI will have only two members while the CPI(M) will have three members- a total of five out of 542 elected members of the new Lok Sabha. Out of these five seats, only one seat from Kerala has been won by the CPI(M) on the basis of the Left block’s own strength, the other four seats from Tamil Nadu have been won courtesy the alliance with the DMK.
Thus in 2019 May – only a few years before the Communists of the country observe the centenary of establishment of the Communist Party in India following the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the Indian communists will be represented in the new Lok Sabha with five seats in number but with only one seat on the basis of their own strength. This will be the lowest number for the two communist parties in the history of parliamentary democracy in India since 1951-52’s first Lok Sabha election. In that elections, the CPI, which just came out of the ban by the Nehru Government and participated in the first Lok Sabha elections, got a total of 24 seats along with the PDF, the largest number after the Congress.
After twists and turns in the last 67 years since the first general elections in 1952, the Left is in a precarious position. The CPI and the CPI(M) have to jointly look for a new narrative to regain relevance in national politics. D. Raja of the CPI and Sitaram Yechury of the CPI(M) have got the responsibility to navigate the Left movement through turbulent waters in 2019 and the years ahead. (IPA Service)