After the fall of the Soviet Union, the politics of the world took a drastic turn for the worse. Hopelessness in the communist camp was at its extreme.

Many staunch Marxists were deeply wounded and most of them while believing in its truth wondered what and where things went wrong. Denial or defence, it was the moment of despair and splitting of self, and as RD Laing says, “without understanding despair one cannot understand schizophrenia”. In an alienated world, “where could one go and scream” was an existential question.

After the stunning silence of a few years, the ice started melting. The World Socialist Forum was the first to challenge the new world disorder. Translation of Lenin’s book and biography of Che Guevara broke the thick silence.

When Abul Fazal—a highly learned Marxist and Pakistan’s last consul general in the USSR, ambassador in many Eastern European countries and Cuba –wrote a review of Che Guevara, one of my books, he told me he wasn’t expecting anyone to write about Marxism anymore. For the time being, he thought, Marxism had become a thing of the past. Such was the depressing state of spirit. But we knew that in “its hopelessness the dialectical theory would find its truth”.

The countries of the Global South went through an identical shock. The incident at Tiananmen Square sent waves of tremor through China. The students protest to advance bourgeois norms were crushed. The frequent visits of Milton Friedman and Henry Kissinger to China, the opening of its markets to the Western capitalism fuelled further fire about the demise of socialism. The official permission to purchase private property was the beginning of class antagonism.

Amid such a dismal outlook, the Left Front victory in Indian elections became a shimmering hope. The Communist Party (ML) was offered the premiership. If the latter had accepted it, it would have been a great, albeit a temporary, boast to the receding wave of socialism in the world.

The opportunity was wasted. Later Jyoti Basu, the founder of CPI (ML), regretted the party decision. But history has no time for repenting and rueing. That was the beginning of the end of the Communist Parties in India which for long had followed the........

© Business Recorder