The Left, by contrast, is at least engaging seriously with programme- and policy-related issues, rather than personalities. It acknowledges that something went seriously wrong with its strategy and tactics, which caused its Lok Sabha tally to drop by 61 percent to just 24, its lowest-ever score. It has admitted to some mistakes, for instance, in managing its relations with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.

This is welcome. But the Left is fighting shy of a rigorously logical and ruthlessly clinical analysis of its electoral rout. Going by the first post-election meeting of the central committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the four Left parties—including the CPI, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Forward Bloc—will be reluctant to go the whole length in dissecting their weaknesses and drawing the right lessons.

Yet, unless the Left rethinks its approaches on some fundamental issues, and revises its strategies, it cannot recover from the rout and rejuvenate itself. India's Left parties, the largest current deriving from the Communist International tradition in today's world barring China, are at a fork in history: Either they change and re-establish an organic relationship with the working people, or they'll become irrelevant and perish, like many other Communist parties.

The Left has been grappling with four major questions after the elections. First, to what extent can its rout be attributed to the decision to withdraw support to the UPA over the India-United States nuclear deal? Second, was it right to adopt a stand of “equidistance” from the Congress and the BJP and create and project the motley Third Front as the alternative?

Third, to what extent were “tactical mistakes” like allying with Abdul Nasser Madhani's People's Democratic Party in Kerala, or coercive land acquisition and mishandling of the Rizwanur Rehman suicide case in West Bengal, responsible for the Left's dismal performance? And most vitally, did structural factors related to the Left's ideology, strategy and policies contribute substantially to its defeat? What are these, and how can it deal with them?

The CPI(M) central committee fudged the answers to three of the four questions. It didn't engage in a robust, passionate debate or sharp and candid analysis, but virtually endorsed the line of general secretary Prakash Karat. In effect, it said it didn't err on any major issue of ideology, policy or strategy. Its mistakes were minor and don't warrant a radical shift of stance. The CC rejected or diluted the criticisms made by state leaders and emphasised state-specific factors for the CPI(M)'s poor showing in West Bengal and Kerala. This outcome doesn't quite airbrush the gravity of the CPI(M)'s rout. But it does minimise it.

Many state CPI(M) leaders, and CPI general secretary AB Bardhan, questioned the wisdom of trying to topple the UPA on the nuclear deal after the government deplorably reneged on its promise not to push it through without agreement in the UPA-Left joint committee. But the CC said the move was “consistent with the Left's stand” of opposing a strategic alliance with the US; the party was near-unanimous on this.

However, the issue isn't consistency or lack of it, but the wisdom of withdrawing support on a foreign policy-security issue which isn't of grave importance to most people, and whose complexity many don't even understand. The nuclear deal, as this Column has repeatedly argued since 2005, is indeed a bad bargain. It legitimises nuclear weapons and detracts from the worthy objective of nuclear disarmament. It's part of an unbalanced India-US strategic alliance. And it promotes environmentally unfriendly and costly power generation.

The Left criticised the deal primarily because it would take India into the US strategic camp. But secondly, it also argued like the BJP that it would restrict India's nuclear weapons programme. (In reality, the deal will allow India to stockpile an additional 40 bombs annually.)

The preserving-nuclear-autonomy argument has limited appeal. The US isn't the world's most popular country in India. But people don't bring down governments on foreign policy issues. The Left should have realised this when its attempts to mobilise opinion against the Iraq war and the big 2007 India-US military exercises evoked a lukewarm response.

There's no evidence that the UPA's contradictory stand on the deal won the Left any sympathy. Yet, the CC said it's “of the firm opinion that withdrawal of support to the UPA … was correct … and necessary. There was no other option …”. The CPI(M) also wrongly thought its former ally Mulayam Singh Yadav wouldn't switch sides and support the UPA.

On the “tactical mistakes” question, the CPI(M) concedes what its allies have long been saying: namely, it was unprincipled, opportunistic and stupid to make a deal with the PDP in Kerala, which nearly wrecked the Left Democratic Front. But the CC makes no criticism of the deal's rationale, which falsely contrasted the “secular” PDP to the “communal” Muslim League.

The committee is deafeningly silent on the root-causes of the Singur and Nandigram disasters and on CPI(M) cadres' mindless violence against innocent people. It attributes its West Bengal debacle to “local factors” and “political, governmental and organisational reasons” related to the Left Front “shortcomings” and “certain wrong trends and practices…”. These, it says, were rooted in “the failure of the government to properly implement various measures directly concerning the lives of the people. The apprehension about land acquisition …contributed to alienation amongst some sections of the peasantry.”

The CC doesn't mention the larger ideological and policy framework within which the Front operated, which caused the “shortcomings” and “wrong” trends. This framework is fundamentally neoliberal and pro-Big Business and derives from a mechanistic, warped understanding of “stages of historical development”, which regards industrialisation at any cost as the sole way forward for society. The “apprehensions” about land acquisition weren't imaginary. An official acquisition notice was issued in Nandigram.

The CPI(M) has followed reckless pro-private capital and predatory land acquisition policies. Its Left allies have by and large tailed it. They set aside their reservations when the crunch comes, as with the Left Front's industrialisation strategy. This is based on offering private investors undeserved subsidies and crony-capitalist deals. The Front offered Tata Motors incentives running into half the project's cost! And it's still wooing the Selim group which is a front for Indonesia's super-corrupt Suharto family.

This strategy is disastrous and dispossesses the poor. The Left can win the abiding support of the underprivileged only through a pro-poor agenda of radical social transformation, not mere management of capitalism. The CPI(M) shows fundamental strategic confusion on this.

The sole major issue on which the CC concedes its error is its creation of the Third Front—a ragtag combination of regional and caste-based parties tainted by association with the BJP and anti-people policies. This derived from “equidistance” from the Congress and the BJP, which took the focus away from the BJP as a Right-wing threat to democracy. But the CC is silent on this and still defends the “third alternative” idea. It contends the Third Front contributed to the BJP's defeat, but concedes that “it should not have extended the call for building such a front” to forming “an alternative government”.

In reality, Third Front sponsorship resulted in alienating many secular voters from the Left as well as the Congress. It also put off many Muslims in West Bengal who were already alienated by the Sachar Committee's disclosures about their status. Worse, the Left's zealous endorsement of the Front's opportunistic leaders lowered its moral stature—its greatest asset.

The Left doesn't acknowledge that its election rout is part of a much greater crisis: a crisis of ideological clarity, of political strategy, of social and economic policy. The Left is unable to relate to parts of its core-constituency because it no longer comes through as a force of intransigent opposition to capitalism with all its inequalities and brutalities. The Left is far too deeply immersed in parliamentary politics to be concerned about the gut-level issues of the dispossessed. The CPI(M) hasn't shown a way out of the crisis. One can only hope the CPI's National Council meeting in early July does better than this.

The Left can recover and revitalise itself only if it undertakes thorough rethinking to gain ideological clarity, political vision and an alternative radical perspective. Simultaneously, it must return to its real moorings by mobilising people on a charter of demands that puts the poor at its centre and defends and extends their rights. If it fails to do this, it will face growing marginalisation, isolation and irrelevance. That isn't a fate to be wished for. The Left is an important and healthy influence on Indian democracy. It must rejuvenate itself. (IPA Service)