Book Review | Can Left Rise Again? A Saucy View
The book and its author do keep the flag flying for those who believe the world should be a far more just and equitable place than it is today
Remember ‘religion is the opium of the masses’ or ‘political power grows out of the barrel of the gun’ or ‘revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall’? If political movements were as powerful as the slogans they generated, then the Left would still be ruling half the world. And Saira Shah Halim, with Comrades and Comebacks — her debut non-fiction that’s making waves in in red space — could rightfully claim a place in the pantheon of Communist catchphrase composers like Marx, Mao and Che.
My personal favourite line from the book: Revolution, like good biriyani, cannot be rushed. (p. 283)
Punchlines like this that pepper Halim’s book in language that you would bump into in a college canteen make reading Comrades and Comebacks a breeze. It is the tale of the entire Left in India and a little beyond made simple and meaningful — not for members of the Politburo perhaps — but for anyone who wants to know something about the political philosophy that has challenged all-powerful capitalism for over a century and refuses to obligingly wither away and die.
Halim, whose father-in-law was and whose husband is closely associated with the CPI(M), is also thespian Nasiruddin Shah’s niece and makes no secret of her romance with the Left that blossomed with her first-hand brush with Left politics in 2022. That year, she contested an Assembly byelection from Kolkata on a CPI(M) ticket, dislodged the BJP from the runners up rank and also yanked up the CPI(M)’s vote share to 30 per cent from a miserable five.
But her spectacles are not completely rose-tinted. With a certain hard-nosed pragmatism, she says she is no apologist for the Left and suggests the Communists take lessons from Mamata Banerjee, their bete noir in West Bengal. Recalling the Singur and Nandigram movements that pitted farmers against the CPI(M), Halim writes, “If Mamata Banerjee could position herself as more Left than the Left, it’s a wake-up call. The Left needs to reclaim its narrative…”
Yet, yawning gaps remain in Halim’s overview of the Left. Not a word, for example, on how militant Left trade unions drove capital from West Bengal, how the Left government failed to promote industry till it was too late, how its no-English-in-primary-school policy hurt students and how the excesses of the cadre raj eventually led to its downfall. Nor has Halim shed light on controversial decisions by the CPI(M) in recent years like the one that Jyoti Basu called a historic blunder and pulling out of Manmohan Singh’s UPA government over the nuclear deal with the United States.
These gaps leave Comrades and Comebacks open to the charge of being the kindest book on the Left at a time the relevance of its political philosophy is being questioned globally and capitalism remains ascendant. But the book and its author do keep the flag flying for those who believe the world should be a far more just and equitable place than it is today. In this age of the sceptic, that takes courage.
Comrades and Comebacks
By Saira Shah Halim
Penguin
pp. 302; Rs 699
