PROGRESSIVE eyes were riveted on the scintillating victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the US Senate, while celebrating other races that threw up landmark wins for the resurgent left in both Houses of Congress. Just then, a reactionary pushback was making bold strides within the Democratic Party. There’s a word of caution here for far-flung democracies, including South Asia.
The lesson seems particularly relevant to India, where a decade-old right-wing government is being challenged on the streets amid hopes for a positive change.
El-Sayed’s victory was sweeter as it mocked the Zionist lobby, which had spent an insane amount of money to try and defeat the vehemently proPalestine candidate. Worse, El-Sayed’s Democratic rival in the primaries switched sides to back his Republican rival. The joyous news was that James Talarico yanked Texas from its decades-old Republican hold as Annie Andrews took South Carolina, the fiefdom of a rabid Zionist warmonger, the late Lindsey Graham. Adam Hamilton flipped the Republican seat in Kansas, and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota became the first Native American woman to be elected to the Senate. Unsurprisingly, Alexandria OcasioCortez and Ilhan Omar retained their seats in the House to the chagrin of Republican xenophobes.
Is the left-progressive elation a transient bubble waiting to burst? Those who have witnessed the halcyon days of progressive politics in South Asia Z.A. Bhutto’s PPP, pre-emergency Indira Gandhi’s Congress, the left radicalism of Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in Sri Lanka keeping the welfare state of Sirimavo Bandaranaike on its toes, the socialist populism of Mujibur Rahman, and the idealism infused by Nepal’s communist parties after the collapse of the right-leaning monarchy in their country would recognise the reactionary pushback being witnessed within the Democratic Party in the US all too well.
It so happens that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are both deeply linked with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Schumer is positioning himself as the Senate majority leader while Jeffries fancies his chances as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Democrat socialists who helped flip the House and Senate from the Republicans are strongly opposing both men but with faint hopes of success. The idea was essen-tially honed in the UK. We can have a Tony Blairled Labour with the leftists in the party critiquing him with incremental effect, if at all.
As AIPAC allies, neither Schumer nor Jeffries had opposed Joe Biden’s arms supplies to Israel during the war in Gaza. It’s a forceful critique of this duplicitous Democratic policy that has contributed substantially to the socialist bloc leading the amazing victory in both Houses of Congress. Both institutional leaders, Schumer and Jeffries, repeatedly took active steps to protect and sustain the flow of US weapons ship-ments, even as the Democratic Party’s progressive wing pushed to cut them off.
During multiple critical legislative pushes, Schumer consistently voted against amendments brought by progressive senators attempting to block or condition offensive weapons transfers to Israel. Both leaders separate their disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu from their institutional commitment to the Israeli military.
They maintain that the US-Israel defence relationship must remain robust, ensuring that the supply of weapons continues regardless of internal party pressure over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Their politics may not be too different in this regard from Israel’s opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot’s, whose contempt for Netanyahu is as legendary as his zeal to destroy the lives of Palestinians in Gaza.
The quandary is widespread. Rahul Gandhi, for example, can be likened to the progressive socialist bloc in the Democratic Party. Like the US Democrats and UK Labour, his party leadership remained heavily dependent on corporate funding. Its senior leaders and elite technocrats have resisted moving back to a left-populist stance. For years, Congress watchers say, the party was effectively trapped in a ‘no-man’sland’too market-friendly to appeal to the radical left, too secular to win back religious nationalists, and too stained by legacy corruption scan-dals to win over the aspirational youth.
Recognising that chasing the corporate-centrist consensus resulted in near-extinction, Rahul Gandhi is attempting a significant leftpopulist pivot to break the unpopularity loop.
Through massive nationwide foot marches like the Unite India March, he seeks to recast Congress as a grassroots movement against crony capitalism, corporate monopolies, and right-wing social polarisation. The Gandhi messaging has explicitly pivoted towards aggressive anti-corporate rhetoric, demanding a national caste census, advocating for wealth redistribution, and focusing heavily on rural distress and massive youth unemployment.
By directly challenging the corporate and religious alliances that define the ruling establishment, Rahul is trying to shed the legacy of 1991.
Yet, internal friction between generational leaders means that climbing out of their unpopular mode remains an uphill structural battle. Would Rahul be able to buck the trend observed in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka most prominently? Benazir Bhutto’s politics mirrored that of Western centre-left leaders of her era, such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. She repositioned the PPP into a ‘Third Way’ social democratic party.
Instead of the state owning the means of production to guarantee ‘roti, kapra aur makaan’, she believed a free-market economy should generate wealth, while the state’s role was merely to provide a social safety net for the poorest. Thus, Benazir is said to have reassured the Pakistani elite, Washington, and international financial institutions that a return of the PPP did not mean a return to her father’s economics.
As with the JVP, which finds itself kowtowing to the IMF despite years of hostility to it, Rahul Gandhi’s regional satraps remain in cahoots with the very business tycoons he calls out as toxic. There’s a redeeming feature here, though.
Rahul shares with the leftist Democrats who roundly defeated Donald Trump their sharp critique of Zionism. Sadly, the Marxist-Leninist JVP hides behind diplomatic verbiage. It could learn from another JVP Jewish Voice for Peace that calls out Israel’s actions in Gaza as gruesome genocide. The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
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