A Red Scare In Delhi

From his fortress-like red sandstone headquarters near New Delhi's Connaught Place—a bustling commercial hub lined with McDonald's, foreign banks and boutiques—Prakash Karat, India's reigning communist ideologue, is fighting to kill his country's economic- and political-reform process. If Karat gets his way, India will turn its back on its recent much-touted modernization—which, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has led to 9 percent growth for four years now. Karat also hopes to undermine Singh's recent pro-Western foreign-policy overhaul—embodied in the pending U.S.-India nuclear deal—in favor of old, blinkered, nonaligned politics. These are precisely the kinds of positions that kept India a poor and marginal backwater for many years. Yet to the amazement and dismay of many Indians, they may soon become its policy once more.

That Karat—the feisty, British-educated 59-year-old general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI-M—has come to dominate New Delhi's agenda is remarkable, given that he has little national following, has never held elected public office and holds ideas that were already out of date 15 years ago, when most communist systems came crashing down. India's leftists, moreover, are widely reviled for their obstructionism on the national level and their violent misrule in West Bengal, the CPI-M's power base. Yet Karat (who was unavailable for comment) has nonetheless wielded outsize influence for more than three years. That's because the Congress Party-led coalition has just a razor-thin majority in Parliament, which has forced it to lean on Karat for support, turning him into a kingmaker and a potential spoiler.

Karat has played that role to the hilt. He and the left "have frustrated Singh at every turn," says a Western diplomat in New Delhi. As Singh himself complained in October, "It has become difficult at times for us to do what is manifestly obvious."

Singh's frustration is easy to understand, for it is obvious what New Delhi should be doing. If it hopes to continue growing, India needs more of the economic reforms Singh initiated as Finance minister in 1991. It needs a more dependable and cleaner power supply. And it must make common cause with the industrialized West, in order to carve out more influence on the world stage. The nuclear deal could deliver these last two things.

Yet Karat doesn't agree. In his view, liberalizing the economy and joining world trade would simply give Washington, the imperialist bogeyman, greater control over his country. As for the impending nuclear deal, never mind the argument—backed by a vast array of Indian scientists, energy experts and military leaders—that it represents Singh's crowning achievement, will end a three-decade-old ban on international nuclear-energy cooperation and will usher in a strategic alignment with America. Karat sees only danger. "History won't forgive us if we collaborate in tying our destiny to the United States in perpetuity," he declared in a speech this September.

Such views may not be popular anymore, but Karat nonetheless speaks from a position of strength. His power dates from 2004, when inconclusive general elections elevated the communists from obscurity. Although they have controlled West Bengal for 30 years and Kerala on and off, the left had never played a big part on the national stage. But three years ago Congress won just 147 out of 543 seats—barely besting the incumbent Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which got 139 seats. The four leftist parties took advantage of the weak opposition to score an unprecedented 62 seats. This forced Congress, under Singh and Sonia Gandhi, to come calling when they set out to cobble together a government. The communists agreed to support the 16-party coalition, but refused to accept a cabinet seat—a shrewd move that gave Karat and his associates the ability to bring down the government at any moment while freeing them from the responsibilities of ruling.