Maoists make plain the Left's fallacy

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoists) has issued a document that denounces all the laws that have been enacted to empower those at the bottom of the social pyramid - on forest rights, food security, employment guarantee and land acquisition - as wily attempts by the ruling classes and imperialists to mislead the people and tempt them away from revolution, their only path to salvation. Why bother with such transparently ridiculous tripe from the polity's extreme margins? Because these sentiments, in their crude entirety or as disparate strands, still influence much of the public discourse in India, a telling result of which has been Delhi's Aam Aadmi Party government rejecting foreign direct investment in organised retail.

The Maoists might lack finesse but what they say is no different from what the mainstream communist parties and their intellectual fellow-travellers preach. The thesis that all development within the rubric of organising production called capitalism is inimical to the people and so should be opposed underlies opposition to the Posco project in Orissa. The protesters do not demand better terms of compensation, they just want to kill the project. Such opposition to industrialisation and social progress stems from the conviction that nothing that is doable or is being done can possibly be good for the people. This leads on to a politics of negativism, without any constructive alternatives to offer. This is precisely the trap in which the mainstream communist parties, the CPI and the CPI(M), find themselves.

Leave aside the capitalist growth of China, their own capitalist land reforms in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura should persuade the Communists at least to push the frontiers of reform before declaring it treason.