Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

If the CPI-M wishes to impact nationwide, it can do so only in association with the Congress

The political economy of Manmohanomics, there might have been grounds for an apprehension of ideological incompatibility. Now we can be more sanguine. For while the methods and goals of Communism can never be those of the Congress -- and vice versa -- the question in their evolving a working relationship is not whether the one view or the other will prevail in an electoral outcome where they have no need of each other, but whether they can evolve a compatibility when the failure of the electorate to give either party a mandate to rule on its own imposes on both an ineluctable compulsion to work together.

I profoundly believe that what the Communists call 'objective conditions' do exist to impart credibility and viability to a Congress-Communist relationship. And I believe that this arises not in spite of but because of Manmohanomics. Let me explain:

The political economy of Manmohanomics comprises two parts. What can be done by the market is being increasingly left to the market, thus progressively diminishing the responsibility of the state in finding budgetary resources for investment in the modern sector of the economy. The Communists, of course, complain that this means abandoning the commanding heights of the economy to private capital, domestic and, worse, international.

The only significant Communist country left in the world. -- the People's Republic of China -- has been doing the same ever since Deng Xiaoping decreed that it did not matter whether a cat was black or white so long as it caught mice. The flines of the CPI-M can be persuaded to acquiesce in the same theology even if their knees will jerk from time to time.

The other --- and, by far, the more important -- part of Manmohanomics is that what cannot be done by the market must be done by the State. Here, in principle, the Communists need have no great difficulty in swallowing the ideological wish-bone. For, in a developing country like ours, what cannot be done by the market is much larger than what can. After all, only some 200 million Indians occupy the marketplace. The rest live largely outside it.

Were the State to concentrate its energies and resources on these 700 million, we might actually achieve something in terms of poverty eradication and human resource development. And it is the experience of Communism in West Bengal the holds the most important lessons for what we next need to do: The completion of land reforms and the institution of real Panchayati Raj.

Both parts are integral to the process of Manmohanomics. Unfortunately, in the period 1991-96, so much attention was lavished on the first part of the agenda that he second went by default. That is why the single-greatest achievement of the Rao regime -- the economic reforms -- proved such a damp squib at the polls. True, no one voted against the Congress because of the reforms; but no one voted for the Congress because of reforms either.

I know this is not the CPI-M view, but if instead of scoring debating points they were to ask themselves whether the bulk of the national agenda does not still lie in the hands of the State, they could not but tell themselves it does. Moreover, it is an agenda which the CPI-M more than any other party has successfully pursued in one-and-a-half states of the Union: West Bengal for two decades (full marks) and Tripura from time to time (half marks). Add Kerala, if you want (I don't because the impact of the Communists in Kerala has been no more than marginal and never as sustained as in WB) -- but you still get only three states of the Union, of which only one can qualify as large.

If, therefore, the CPI-M wishes to impact nationwide, at least in respect of that part of its programme that impinges on the vast majority of our populace, it can do so only in association with the one party that is capable of giving it a sustained national presence -- the Indian National Congress. The task in the run-up to the next millennium is not capturing the commanding heights of the economy but capturing the commanding heights of the polity. That -- not crying over split milk -- is what Comrade Jyoti Basu should be doing.