Prasenjit Bose and his Resignation

                Seldom has the CPI(M) allowed its members to resign. The party, as a rule, expels those who present a letter of resignation. Prasenjit Bose, whom the media has described as the young face of the party has met with the same fate. Well. Though it militates against the spirit of freedom in a political democracy, membership in the CPI(M) is indeed a matter of choice and those who chose to be a member of the party are also condemned to accept the reality. The concept of choice, after all, is an abstraction and it is best if one agrees to that contention.

                Prasenjit Bose’s exit from the party and his open letter in that regard, however, raise a few questions. That he decided to quit the party in protest against the decision to support Pranab Mukherjee in the forthcoming presidential polls is simply unconvincing even while conceding to him the right to say so. From all that he has stated in this regard, it appears that Pranab Mukherjee as an individual is indeed behind all that has gone wrong with the nation, its sovereignty and the economy.

                The young Bose makes it appear that it was Pranab who single-handedly conspired to push India into the WTO at Marrakesh in March 1993; that it was Pranab who crafted the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement; that it was Pranab who is squarely responsible for the piling stocks of grains in the midst of starvation; that it was Pranab who allowed the 2G airwaves to be sold to some carpetbaggers for a song; that with Pranab as President, the nation will slip into an abyss!

                Such an argument, indeed, is un-marxist in the first place. And least expected from someone like Prasenjit Bose. He was not any one of those bleary-eyed-woolly-headed young man who walked into AKG Bhawan one fine day to be its member. This young man was known to speak the language of class and familiar with the basic understanding that Pranab Mukherjee did act in a particular way   because he belonged to the Congress; and that the Congress as a party represented the interests of a certain class or classes; the bourgeois-landlord combine as is held by the CPI(M).

                The fact is Prasenjit Bose is not naive as it appears.  He had no issues with the CPI(M) having propped up the Congress-led UPA. And if that is not ridiculous enough, Prasenjit also holds a brief for the decision then, in 2007, to support Pratibha Patil. And worse is that he peddles the story that the Congress conceded the vice-president’s position to the Left. One is reminded of Ettukaali Mamoonju,  a character immortalised by Malayalam writer,  Vaikom Mohammed Basheer.  Ettukaali Mamoonju, in one of Basheer’s frames owns up the responsibility for a cow conceiving!

                Even if one takes Prasenjit’s tale as true – a quid pro quo between the Left and the Congress to have Ansari as vice-president in exchange for its support to Patil as president – it was incumbent upon him to call it crass and bereft of a class understanding. Prasenjit simply condones all that and even attributes a sense of achievement to that. Ansari, he holds, was a candidate of the Left and celebrates that as achievement. 

                Similarly, Prasenjit holds the police atrocities in Singur and the indiscriminate attempts to deprive the peasantry of its land in Nandigram as mistakes. He refuses to see them as deviations from the party’s ideological commitment and as instances where the CPI(M)-led State Government adopted the Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation agenda. Prasenjit Bose, even while holding Pranab Mukherjee guilty of defending the scams such as the 2G spectrum allocation, does not even squeak  about why the CPI(M) failed to raise it in the open (and restricted itself to merely writing a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh) even when its leaders were informed by those in the unions in the Telecom department of the loot.

                He is convinced, even now, that all that the CPI(M) did to ensure the survival of the Congress-led UPA government until 2008 was perfectly in order from a class perspective even if Pranab Mukherjee was running the show and even if it meant Manmohan Singh pursuing a pro-capital, pro-US agenda. And that the revolutionary agenda, according to him, is compromised with the party supporting Pranab Mukherjee as President of the Republic. Well. It is worthwhile to inform this erstwhile young face of the CPI(M) that his party had done such things in the past too.

                The CPI(M) worked for Indira Gandhi’s presidential nominee and ensured his victory too. That was V.V.Giri, an independent candidate who defeated the official Congress nominee N.Sanjeeva Reddy in the presidential elections of 1969. Giri was Indira Gandhi’s candidate and he masqueraded as an independent. He was also an anti-communist trade unionist. Prasenjit Bose seems have been ignorant of his own party’s history when he joined them.