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Communism in India: Events, Processes and Ideologies. By Chakrabarty Bidyut . New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. 336p. $78.00.
Book Reviews: Comparative Politics
In this book, author Bidyut Chakrabarty attempts to portray the development of communist parties in India from the 1950s until the present. Communism in India is thematically organized into two parts: parliamentary communist parties and violent revolutionary communist parties and movements. Using such a classification, Chakrabarty covers the post-colonial histories of most communist parties in India, from the original Communist Party of India established in 1925 to the various Maoist parties that originated in the late 1960s. Furthermore, the historical studies of the parliamentary communist parties are organized geographically, divided into state-level studies of the three major communist-dominated states of Tripura, Kerala, and West Bengal (the last receiving a two-chapter long evaluation).
Following the introductory chapter, the histories of parliamentary communist parties contained in Chapters 1 through 4 are the book's key contributions to the study of post-colonial Indian politics. Avoiding a historiography centered on prominent leaders, Chakrabarty presents a three-dimensional history of the communist parties in these states, from the perspectives of party ideology, party as popular movement, and party in government. By doing so, the book reveals the variations that have arisen within communist parties, most notably the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPIM), across different states. In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explains why the CPIM in Tripura and communist-led coalitions in Kerala achieve and retain power by utilizing extant socio-cultural cleavages, specifically inter-ethnic conflict in the former and inter-religious competition in the latter, thereby demonstrating the strategies that communist parties have used to adapt to the exigencies of electoral politics.
In contrast, the three-decade long rule of the CPIM-led Left Bloc coalition in West Bengal testifies to the frittering away of the communist parties' goodwill. Chakrabarty follows a creative strategy by using Chapter 3 to focus on the Left Bloc's last landslide victory in the 2006 state...