Senior leaders of the Left parties at the CPI national congress at SK Memorial Hall in Patna on Wednesday. Picture by Nagendra Kumar Singh

Patna, March 28: All major Left parties, in a rare show of “camaraderie”, today gathered on a platform and gave a clarion call to launch a united war against the Congress and the BJP.

The leaders of the Left parties accused the Congress and the BJP of being “hand in gloves with imperialist forces” and “guarding the interests of the mafiosi and the corrupt” at the cost of common peasantry and middle-class.

The general secretaries of the CPM, the Forward Bloc, the CPI-ML (Liberation) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party, Prakash Karat, Debabrata Biswas, Dipankar Bhattacharya and Abani Roy respectively, responded to CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan’s invitation to attend the 21st congress of the country’s oldest communist party.

The Left leaders not only gathered on a dais, but they spoke in one language on the issues “bedevilling India”. Karat said: “The cries of the capitalists’ triumph that echoed around the world after the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago have now fallen silent in the wake of the global capitalist crisis, threatening the survival of the common people and working class. Socialism is and can be the only alternative to the rapacious system of neo-liberal capitalism.”

Bardhan, Roy, Bhattacharya and Biswas concurred, arguing that Left cadres from all streams and across the country, including Bengal, Kerala, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and north-eastern states had gathered at one place at a time when the country was in a “neck deep crisis” engineered by the mafia elements and looters under the “tutelage” of the BJP and the Congress.

The Left leaders cautiously refrained from attacking the regional satraps, including Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and his Bengal counterpart, Mamata Banerjee. Except CPI-ML (Liberation) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya who said Left activists were under attack from the “feudal-communal (read JD-U-BJP) nexus” in Bihar, most of the Left leaders advocated for efforts to “disengage” the regional parties from both the BJP and the Congress.

In his inaugural address, Bardhan said: “Our party congress is taking place at a critical time. Employment growth rate is less than 0.1 per cent since 2004-05. Agriculture land is rapidly getting converted into non-agriculture uses, affecting agriculture and food security. As a result, over 2.5 lakh farmers have committed suicide while the Mafiosi —land mafia, mining mafia, sand mafia — are proliferating under the patronage of the BJP and the Congress.”

Bhattacharya advocated for the “powerful communist resurgence, ensuring a greater unity among all communist and Left forces to counter the neo-liberal and mafia elements increasing their control over the country’s land, forests and mineral resources with the support of the BJP and the Congress.”

Ever since their poll debacle in Bengal last year, today was perhaps the first time that all major Left parties gathered on a platform. But the fact remains that the Left parties — mainly the CPI and the CPM on one side and the CPI ML-Liberation on other — fought a pitched battle in Bihar in the 1980s and 1990s, weakening each other.

“Jab barh aati hai to admi aur saanp ek nav par sawar hota hai (The man and the serpent board the same boat to save their life during deluge),” said a Left leader from Odisha, indicating that the debacle of the Left forces, particularly in their bastion of Bengal, have compelled them to burry their hatchet and work in tandem in the run-up to the next Lok Sabha elections.