Of the Left, coalition dynamics, electoral compulsions, caste factors...

Indrajit Gupta in an introspective interview.

On February 20, Indrajit Gupta, the 82-year-old stalwart of the Communist Party of India and the longest serving member of the Lok Sabha, died in Kolkata. Known for his wry wit and candid manner of speaking, Gupta had refused to move out of his spartan r esidence in New Delhi's Western Court even after he became Union Home Minister in the United Front (U.F.) government. It was here that he granted one of his last introspective interviews before cancer debilitated him. Following are excerpts from the hith erto-unpublished interview he granted to R. Shankar and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta:

For the first time in the history of India, we have seen three general elections in three years. Is our polity getting more fragmented?

Voters are confused, naturally. They are not accustomed to this kind of thing. They still tend to judge parties, not very accurately perhaps. But parties are splitting up and going here and there - so people are naturally very confused. My point is that you can't avoid a coalition, whether it is headed by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) or headed by the Congress(I). In that sense, it is one of these two parties that will be the major coalition leaders. If any coalition is to acquire a certain degree of stability, what needs to be done by that coalition and by the partners of that coalition is not being done. My point is that a coalition should not be dependent for its survival on outside support

If you look at the U.F, there were two distinct categories of outside support - the Congress(I), on the one hand, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party on the other. At no stage was there an apprehension that the CPI(M), the Forward Bloc or the RSP would pull down the government.

But why did we agree to accept this Congress support? Not that we had any illusions about it, but its president, Narasimha Rao, said on the floor of Parliament - he can't take back what he said there and he gave a solemn commitment - that this (U.F.) gov ernment, as long as it is secular, fights against communal forces and all that, we of the Congress will support it, we are not going to disturb it in any way, far less to pull it down.

Well, you can say that knowing these fellows for what they are, we should not have taken their word for it. Anyway, at that time, the situation was such that everybody said okay. In fact, the only fellow who kept on striking a jarring note every now and then was myself, for which they were allegedly angry with me.

Yes, you said chappals will be thrown at the Congress(I)...

...if they withdraw support. Yes. It was a wrong thing on my part to say that. And ultimately they withdrew support.

If you look back, by that time Narasimha Rao was no longer (Congress(I)) president, Sitaram Kesri had replaced him. What really motivated Sitaram Kesri to first replace H.D. Deve Gowda with Inder Gujral and then withdraw support?

The replacement of Deve Gowda was not entirely Sitaram Kesri's doing, though it was partly. Within the Front also there was a desire to replace Deve Gowda.

When you talk of a desire within the Front, I suppose that would have been after it became clear that the Deve Gowda government could not continue. Or was it prior to Sitaram Kesri's withdrawal of support?

Many factors were at work. Gowda was seen as autocratic. I mean, I was his Home Minister, damn it! He refused to speak to me. He never spoke to me, never consulted me. I can't say these things publicly, I couldn't say it then also, I had to keep quiet. B ut many people didn't like his way of functioning and he was very, very factional, which Gujral was not to that extent. Anyway, individual qualities or lack of qualities is a different matter.

But the Congress(I) seriously thought that the United Front was not giving it the due respect or recognition that it expected. After all, the survival of the U.F. government depended on the Congress(I).

Yes, they thought that that would be a weapon in their hands to extract some more concessions. What was it, did they want to join the government? Why didn't they say it - that we can only support a government in which we are also participating. They neve r said that and if they had said that...

But many of them privately nurtured such expectations.

They wanted to be Ministers, nothing else? What is their objective in life, these Congress fellows, except to become Ministers again?

If they had explicitly said that they wanted to join the government, what would have been the Front's response?

There would have been serious differences within the Front. Some people would have perhaps been in favour of taking them in.

The Congress(I) obviously needed what seemed to everybody a very flimsy excuse - the Jain Commission Report.

Which they had never read (laughs) and their guide had also never read. I can prove that.

They said remove the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) Ministers.

The whole idea about the DMK was that they were alleged to be hobnobbing with the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). (The Congress said) the LTTE are the people who have killed our leader, so how can we go on supporting a government in which these fellows are there? That was the excuse given. But they had not read the report. So we refused to get rid of the DMK. And now see where the DMK is. How can you count on these chaps? The DMK and the AIADMK (All India Anna Dravid Munnetra Kazhagam), even if you massacre the whole lot of them, they will never agree to be in one front. It is not only a question of coalition politics, but of the state of political morals and political principles and ideology. Where are they going? Where have they gone?

Can the Left absolve itself of part of the guilt for the complete collapse of ideology? After all, if you look at it from the layman's point of view, the Left has also been on virtually every side of the fence. At some point, you have been with the Ja n Sangh, at some point, with the Congress and at some other point, with the Janata Dal.

What you are saying is right. The most positive image that the Left has projected and has retained till now is that we are not corrupt. Even if we have hobnobbed some time or the other with people who are corrupt, we have never been accused of corruption . The CPI and the CPI(M) have not been mixed up in any of these big scams or scandals. Now people who are notoriously corrupt like Laloo (Prasad Yadav) in Bihar or Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu...

They are on your side.

They are not yet on our side. But we are trying to be on their side. So this question is being asked and in some way it will have to be answered. Certainly we are not joining hands with them to get a share in their corruption. That will have to be made q uite clear whether they like it or not. The point is that we have declared and publicly announced that our strategy is that the coalition headed by the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) should be opposed. Of course, you cannot hundred per cent avoid a tinge o f opportunism, I agree, because we (the Left) are a weak force considering the whole Indian polity.

The Left as it is at present is certainly not going to come to power. There is not even a ghost of a chance of that. We will continue to be a part of the Opposition. If you want to achieve the objective that you have declared, then you should try to adop t tactics that would avoid or minimise the division of anti-BJP votes to the extent possible. This strategy should be adopted in all States other than in those States where the BJP is still not a major factor at all, where we would continue to have our m ain conflict with the Congress.

Some people would suggest that it is because the Left has allowed short-term objectives to override long-term goals that it has not grown and has been restricted to areas where it is already strong. You think Laloo can defeat the BJP, so in Bihar the Left becomes his tail. In Uttar Pradesh, it is Mulayam. In Tamil Nadu, it was the DMK and now the AIADMK. The Left has not sufficiently tried to project itself as an alternative in its own right, as the BJP did even when it was quite a small force in man y parts of the country...

It's not so simple. There are many other complicating factors, one of the worst being casteism. The Left parties cannot indulge in caste politics. If we had done so, I think we would have been stronger and bigger than we are today. Latch yourself on to s ome caste or a couple of castes, especially in this northern belt, the Hindi belt, the cow belt. See a party like the Bahujan Samaj Party. A few years ago nobody had heard of the BSP. Twice it has held the chief ministership of Uttar Pradesh, the largest State in the country. That lady (Mayawati) became the Chief Minister twice only on the basis of latching on to Dalits and carrying on a vehement and virulent campaign against all others and by saying that only if Dalits are in power the problems of the poor in this country can be resolved.

A caste-ridden society and a bitter caste war is a very big inhibiting factor that has held the Left back. From the beginning, we never bothered about the caste factor. In the old days the Communists never bothered about this. We were all class-wallahs. Exploitation of one class by another class is okay. But exploitation of one caste by another caste was never a big factor in our minds. But in a Hindu society, I find this (the caste system) is the dominant thing - much more than class. We have a working class in the big industrial centres where we (the Communists) were the dominant force among the workers, particularly at the trade union level. Big strikes were taking place. We were leading those strikes. But when it came to elections, the same worker who was carrying a red flag on his shoulders in order to get a higher salary or a bonus, would look towards his own caste.

I don't think the Communists, the Marxists, in this country paid sufficient attention or made a proper study of this phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon which started one day. It has been there for one thousand years. And every educated fellow, the elite of our society, goes around saying that we are above caste. This is telling lies. Read the matrimonial columns in the papers. Yes, they don't indulge in crude forms of casteism - not allowing someone to drink out of the same glass - but will they allow a Dalit to come and sit at their table and eat with them? I doubt it very much. Of course, marriage is out of the question. This thing is so deeply rooted in our psyche, this Manusmriti, this Chaturvarna, to get out of it will take a thousand years.

Can't the Left do anything about it, like the caste system has been largely broken in some parts of the country?

Is there no casteism in Kerala? It may not be as aggressive as it is in the Hindi belt, where it is terrible. I am not a very optimistic fellow, I am cynical. I don't have easy solutions to these problems. That's why I am fed up with this Parliament and I don't want to come back to it. I don't want to contest at all any more, I don't feel inspired by what goes on there. But the party's always calculating on seats.

But you are the longest-serving member of the Lok Sabha.

But where has it brought us, I ask myself. Someone somewhere says, we respect you because you are the seniormost. After that, they go on shouting and screaming and not allowing anybody to speak, behaving like hooligans in the House. No sense of decorum i s there.