Mainstreaming of the LeftRajiv DesaiTalk about topsy-turvy. Sitaram Yechury, the Left‚s acceptable face, meets with Mukesh Ambani, whose family if you accept the communist myth, manipulated the innocent government of India to emerge as the biggest capitalist enterprise in the country. Brinda Karat, the fire-spewing communist, appears on BBC‚s Hard Talk programme to defend her party‚s indefensible positions and does so by treating the interviewer, judging by her facial expressions, as some mlechcha upstart. Like a servant interviewing the memsahib! There‚s more: West Bengal‚s communist chief minister is obviously distressed by the shenanigans of the party‚s Delhi politburo which called a failed general strike a few weeks ago. The chief minister‚s concern is pragmatic; he is attempting to restore the state‚s former commercial and industrial pre-eminence. Meanwhile, the grad student revolutionaries of Delhi University are heaving, not to classic Marxist dogma, but to a modified version that includes elements of RSS chauvinism.Welcome to the byzantine world of Indian politics. The BJP came to power in 1999 screaming and shouting about ‚Ëœcultural nationalism‚; but in 2005 its major ideologue L.K. Advani, in an incredible act of sophistry, stated in Pakistan that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a misunderstood secularist. To wit, Jinnah riled communal passions to create Pakistan while he, Advani, undertook the blood-stained rath yatra of 1990, to catapult the BJP into six years of power as the lead actor of the unruly NDA coalition. Overwhelmed by the nostalgia of returning to Sindh, it dawned upon the BJP stalwart that he and Jinnah were birds of the same feather. They would both do anything to capture power, never mind ideals, values or norms. Pushes and pulls between the pragmatic wing that ran the government and the fundamentalist neanderthals of the RSS destroyed the BJP. In today‚s situation, the Left is likewise being pulled apart by the misbegotten grad student revolutionaries of Delhi and pragmatists in West Bengal. Kerala doesn‚t count because most politicians in the Left-led front and the Congress-led coalition are essentially power-grabbers who will embrace Marx, Jesus, the RSS or Islamic fundamentalists so long as they can harvest the loaves and fishes of office. Within the Left the fight is between the Charminar-smoking and chai-drinking layabouts who hang around dhabas and coffee houses, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, and the real activists who run the West Bengal government, hoping to revive the state‚s faded glory. I won‚t be surprised if Prakash Karat goes to China, as he has done in the recent past, and there, overwhelmed by China‚s progress, announces that Marx was actually a capitalist.The West Bengal chief minister would welcome such a pronouncement but Karat‚s chai-and-Charminar colleagues might take exception. Some elements in the motley Left Front already believe that Karat, Yechury and company are too liberal in their views. Regardless of whether Karat goes to China and makes the announcement, there is plenty of dissonance in the Left. Theorists in Delhi may convince gullible trade union leaders like M.K. Pandhe that India is on the verge of a Bolshevik revolution while communist ruled West Bengal continues to invite foreign investment and challenge dinosaur-like labour laws. You don‚t need to be a genius to recognise that the Left finds itself trapped in a huge conundrum. Unlike the BJP which took several years to discover the inherent contradiction of its ideology, the Left is all set to implode.So what would happen to the triumvirate that speaks for the Left in Delhi? Prakash Karat could be superannuated into an emeritus position as the ideologue much like Mikhail Suslov; his wife Brinda could go back to her wine-and-cheese ersatz intellectual circuit. Most important, Sitaram Yechury could become its Mikhail Gorbachev, who‚ll make the Left more relevant in India and challenge the Congress‚ knee-jerk and intellectually-bereft Left leanings. I know this sounds implausible. But then who would have forecast Sonia Gandhi would become India‚s most powerful politician or that Manmohan Singh would have acceded to premiership? Would anybody have believed in 2004 that Atal Behari Vajpayee would become a nonentity or L.K. Advani a laughing stock? At one time, it appeared that the future of India would be in the hands of regional satraps like Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati and Chandrababu Naidu. They can win a local election here and there but they no longer have a national presence.In the end, India‚s assimilative social culture has rubbed off on its politics. There‚s no place for extreme politics. While fringe players may have their day in the sun, they have no long-term future. In that sense, we have become a lot more like America than we imagine or acknowledge. Sure, there‚s the Klu Klux Klan, Christian fundamentalists, neo-Nazis, tree-hugging Greens, feminists and what have you, but America has a way of mainstreaming political movements. We are experiencing the same in India which is a clear sign that after 58 years, our political system has finally matured.(Rajiv Desai is chairman and chief executive of Comma, a Delhi-based public affairs consulting firm)