New Delhi, 3rd April, 2007 .
Condemning the killing of 14 people on March 14 by the Police and C.P.M. cadres in Nandigram in East Medinipur district of West Bengal, a life-time Communist supporter in an article in the daily Pioneer a few days ago had recalled how in the 1960s Milovan Djilas of Yugoslavia had written about the "New Class" emerging in the Communist system. This book had come years after Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito had revolted against the Stalinist Soviet Union and had carved out a separate path for his country without wholly renouncing Communism.
However, with due respect to the intellectual, one would venture to suggest that the situation in India today with respect to the Communist movement, their spheres of influence, and their ideological confusion suggest that it is ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI's "The Grand Failure: The birth and Death of Communism in the twentieth Century" which truly portrays the situation in India with respect to whatever remains of the Communist movement in India.
It the quotations from the book, written in 1988, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, one will find striking prognostications this former Security Adviser to the Carter Administration in the United States having been the Director of the National Security Council, had made.
But first a number of straws in the wind. In Nandigram, the CPI-M supporters and cadres along with members of their families have been ousted from a number of villages in the Nandigram Block and they are unable to re-enter their homes. This is quite a role reversal, as it were, because it have been the CPI-M cadres who have been indulging in this act against those violating the party diktats in matters such as casting votes in elections.
Second, almost the total disappearance of the two Communist parties from States such as Bihar , Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra in particular as also Madhya Pradesh. The most dramatic "disappearing act" has been performed by the Leftist in Punjab, where in the recent State Assembly elections, 58 of the 59 candidates had lost their security deposits. Only one could save it. No question of any Communist being elected in Punjab where the tally in the past had reached even the double –digit figure of 15.
One feels that this historical lesson has to be learnt by all political parties of India, both the ruling and opposition parties. It has to be realized that in spite of the critical support to the ruling party at the Centre, the parties which represent the Left, have no future to look forward to. India will opt only for parliamentary democracy, not communism of any variety.
