TO bite or not to bite, that was the question.  And by the time the Left watchdog overcame the Hamletian dilemma and decided to act, it had already lost its teeth. Out-flanked by the SP-Congress marriage of convenience on the issue of the nuclear deal, the Left Front no longer remained the sole arbiter of the UPA Government’s fate. The CPI(M)-led Left Front withdrew its support to the UPA Government – but only when that support had become superfluous. As a result, the gesture of withdrawal was not enough to stop the Nuke Deal in its tracks.

To strengthen the resistance of the people and the country to the growing imperialist offensive and the pro-imperialist treachery of the ruling classes, the anti-imperialist forces and especially the Left ranks must draw appropriate lessons from the most telling and educative experience of the UPA-Left alliance.

The CPI(M)-led Left provided crucial support to the UPA government since its inception to July 9, 2008. The alliance was initially sought to be justified in the name of the political compulsion of keeping the BJP out of power, and subsequently the Left leadership began claiming a series of additional gains including slowing down of neo-liberal reforms, passage of pro-people pro-poor legislations and even success in stopping the UPA from going ahead with the operationalisation of the nuclear deal! All these claims now stand exposed as empty self-deceptive boasts – unaffordably expensive illusions that have only allowed the Congress to have its way while allowing the CPI(M) to have its say! Over the last few years, the BJP has come to power in state after state, and it is now crystal clear that the operationalisation of the deal was never halted even as the CPI(M) kept exchanging notes with the government. Curiously enough, a CPI(M) parliamentarian bravely claimed in the course of the debate that it had given the Congress a debit card, but the Congress did not know its limits of withdrawal. The CPI(M) should realise that the Congress has cleverly emptied the entire parliamentary account of the CPI(M), leaving the latter with the stark choice of either lamenting or celebrating its new state of bankruptcy!

Forces like the SP, RJD and DMK that enabled the Congress to sail through the trust vote also provided a telling example of the utter futility of the CPI(M)’s theory and practice of the ‘secular front’. All these years the CPI(M) delinked ‘secularism’ from democracy and anti-imperialism and grounded its entire tactical line around the single-point agenda of somehow keeping the BJP out of power. The line has now boomeranged on the CPI(M) with the Congress and most of CPI(M)’s staunch allies – only the other day the CPI(M)’s Coimbatore Congress identified the SP as a friendly force and a key component of a third front – now accusing the CPI(M) of weakening the ‘secular’ cause! The allegations came not just from outside but also from within. While the maverick West Bengal minister Subhas Chakraborty, a known Jyoti Basu protégé and now member of the party’s West Bengal secretariat, accused the CPI(M) centre of deviating from the party line adopted in the recent Coimbatore Congress of the party, the defiant chuckle of Speaker Somnath Chatterjee kept mocking at the CPI(M)’s  tactical line through the two days of televised trust vote debate.

However much the CPI(M) may now fret and strut over the 'principled' withdrawal of support to the friendly government, that does not cut much ice any more. Given the way the Left leaders played the pause-go-halt game all these years, many people reasonably believe that the recent decision has been taken only out of pragmatic electoral considerations. The CPI(M), they feel, could hardly afford to go to polls as an ally of a ruling party that presides over the steepest price spiral in recent history. A pretext was needed for pulling out of the second tier of the government, and that has now been found. No serious, long-term anti-imperialism was involved here, no real change of track.

The lessons for the Left are therefore clear enough. Secularism and anti-imperialism must be treated as inseparable aspects of any minimum democratic programme. Any opportunist delinking of different aspects of a democratic programme to suit immediate parliamentary needs can only prove fatal and counter-productive for the Left movement. It has also been established beyond doubt that any Left party that attaches topmost priority to the task of running stable governments within a bourgeois system, delinking those governments from the agenda of people’s movement and any kind of Left orientation in the name of adjusting with limitations imposed by a globalising state; that starts taking pride in becoming responsible and efficient parties of governance even going to the extent of perpetrating state terror and mass killings to uphold the banner of bourgeois efficiency and responsibility cannot master the language and role of a democratic opposition.