It is a case study in confusion. That is the only thing that emerges clearly from the draft ideological document that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has just released. All else betrays a complete lack of clarity on issues that the document pretends to clarify. The party remains wedded to socialism but cannot quite accept the fact that it has failed as an idea everywhere in the world. Hence the fanciful debate as to whether China can still be called a socialist country. The CPI(M), which has always been known as the pro-Beijing communist party in India, refuses to see what the whole world knows to be true — that Deng Xiaoping buried socialism in China under the market. The strange thing, however, is that the CPI(M) should continue to preoccupy itself with what the Chinese communist party is doing — or not doing — to socialism. The CPC or the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union never wasted its time splitting hairs on what the Indian communist parties were doing. The CPI(M)’s confusions are actually a legacy of the days when Indian communists looked up to either Moscow or Beijing to set their own agenda. The document shows how unsure the party still is about its role in Indian politics.

Two things seem to be at the root of the CPI(M)’s confusion. First, for all the evidence to the contrary, the party thinks that socialism can be a viable political system where the State would be led by the working class and the economy will be guided by central planning. This is the quintessential Marxist utopia, but Indian communists drew their inspiration also from Nehruvian socialism and leftwing politics in Britain in the period after World War II. The only way the CPI(M) can carve a future for itself is by dumping socialism as a political or economic ideology. Second, the Leninist organizational structure of the CPI(M) remains its worst enemy. Vladimir Lenin’s strategy and tactics succeeded in a specific political context in the Russia of the time. But to assume that a Leninist party would succeed in another country and in another time is to live in a make-believe world. Curiously, the CPI(M) document says that socialism can be revitalized in the 21st century only by strengthening the democratic rights and civil liberties of the people. Surely, a Leninist party is the last thing that the people need for democracy and basic freedoms.