After everything else has been lost, there is the United States of America. This seems to be the only reason why the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the other left parties clutch, with some desperation, at their anti-Americanism. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the exposure of the sham called socialism and the turn of China to market capitalism meant that the Left had nothing to rally around except attacking the US. Within India, the CPI(M) has accepted economic reforms, and has, in fact, begun to practice it in West Bengal. Thus the CPI(M) has very little left of the ideological issues on which it thrived for many decades. But the US is still there as the Left’s last whipping boy. This visceral anti-Americanism is evident from the position the Left has adopted on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Very significantly, in rejecting the nuclear agreement, the left parties have seen it as an integral part of a “burgeoning strategic alliance’’ with the US. What worries the Left, led by the CPI(M), is India’s increasing cosiness with the US. And the US, by definition, is the embodiment of all that is evil in international affairs.

It is important to understand this plight of the Left, especially that of the CPI(M). What is conventionally known as left politics gained its power and rhetoric in a particular context. This context was provided by the Cold War, which divided the world into hostile blocs, separated by an apparently impenetrable iron curtain. The two blocs were typified by the anti-communist witch-hunt in the US, and the construction of the US as an ogre by communists. Comrades in India accepted this division, and an anti-US rhetoric became part of the Left’s ideological tool-kit. The CPI(M) has heaped abuse on the US and its government whenever it has had the slightest opportunity. Bereft of everything else, anti-Americanism has remained its ideological staple. The Left discovers a conspiracy hatched in Washington or Langley even when there is no evidence to think thus. It is, therefore, difficult for the Left today to make a complete turnaround and accept a landmark agreement that India has signed with the US on an issue of some strategic consequence. The Left and the CPI(M) have changed, and on many areas they have indeed changed radically, but old habits die hard. As left politics becomes irrelevant, the Left clings to vestiges of its own ideological past.