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| Left Politics In Bengal Monobina Gupta Orient Blackswan; Rs 195; Pp 272 |
There are broadly two kinds of former communists — those who are expelled from the party or are made to leave it due to differences with party bureaucrats, and those who get disillusioned with the very
ideology of communism. The latter community isn’t much visible in India, though there are plenty of them in America. However, there are quite a few of the former kind in India who, after being shown the door by the party, have claimed to be morally superior to the its bosses, if not ‘better communists’. Some of them have ended up forming leftist-sounding fringe parties. Others have written ponderous and self-justifying books.
Monobina Gupta, author of this somewhat dishevelled but timely book on the CPI(M), is too low-profile a person to resort to bombast. It’s only in one place in this slim volume that she claims having joined the party in the early 1980s. But considering the absence of any reference to her subsequent status in the party, it may be presumed that she dropped off at some stage. Interestingly, the book offers no clue to what drove her to quit. That could have made it an interesting first-hand account of the ‘cuckoo’s nest’. Gupta focuses on the rot that set in the CPI(M) after it became the ‘ruling’ party in Bengal.
Full review here Hindustan Times
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