A Centennial Obituary

A leading Indian commentator, moving away from his habitual area of foreign policy and diplomacy, has argued that at 100, Indian communism has an unfinished business and that it is too early to write its obituary. Such false perspectives emerge when one migrates from one’s field of expertise and tries to loiter in areas which are beyond one’s scope of study. The Communist Party of India (CPI)’s obituary has already been written; it awaits publication.

The CPI has nothing more to offer to India; it has no narrative, no vision, no roadmap, no alternative thought. It is completely out of sync with the spirit and essence of a new India. India’s civilisational rise remains beyond its comprehension and grasp. It has been unable and unwilling to connect to Bharat’s civilisational roots, and has failed to usher in a generational change and renewal in its ranks. Its advocacy remains of a failed system - both political and cultural.

Indian communism continues to be driven by the Bolshevik mindset – which saw no sacredness in traditionality. Author Lesley Chamberlain describes this mindset when she writes that “Bolsheviks were changing the streets, the institutions, the university, the language. They didn’t understand the sacredness of traditional life.” Indian communism aped the Bolsheviks in trying to destroy and poison the sacred roots of civilisational India. Recall their intense opposition to the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya and then their rejection of the invite for its “Prana-Pratishtha” and the manner in which it insulted the emotions of the majority of Indians. It showed how disconnected Indian communism continues to remain from the Indian mainstream psyche.

The recent arrest of A Padmakumar, former CPI MLA and Marxist leader and N Vasu, former CPIM leader, both former presidents of the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), in the Sabarimala Temple gold theft case, indicates the rot that has set in the ranks of Indian communism and their lack of respect for deeply sacred Hindu symbols. Once thought to be a movement of frugal party “whole-timers”, Indian communism is afflicted with ills of what it had once derisively described as petty-bourgeoisie and reactionaries.

Even in its espousal of federalism and secularism, Indian communism comes across as hypocritical. While speaking of secularism, they perennially side with the most rabid Islamic elements. They aligned with the Muslim League and Jinnah in their demand for Pakistan in the pre-independence era, and emerged as a political ally of the Muslim League in Kerala, post-independence. While some revolutionaries turned communists, Indian communism broadly rejected the revolutionary legacy of Indian nationalists. The CPI sided and actively aided the British in suppressing the Quit India movement. It desisted from undertaking any famine relief effort during the British-engineered Bengal Famine of 1943, which devastated the province.

Post-independence, Indian communism and its wide and penetrative eco-system made efforts to suppress the legacies of revolutionary nationalists. While it championed land reforms once upon a time, the Left Front of Indian communism in West Bengal and Kerala, for instance, became the vehicle for cronyism and patron of land sharks, who kept the parties and their leaders well-oiled.

The CPIM had a problem with the execution of Afzal Guru, one of the prime accused in the 2001 Parliament attack. Indian communists joined a host of international forums and agencies that expressed dismay at the hanging of a terrorist and terror conspirator.

While espousing federalism, the CPI, for instance, has always sided with Maoists and their political outfit, CPI (Maoist). While the Modi government is in the midst of a decisive final drive against Maoists, whose politics of violence has claimed thousands of innocent lives, the CPI opposes the drive and terms it an “inhuman policy of killing and annihilation.”

The CPI bats for an outfit and ideology which believes in decimating the Indian state, in fragmenting India, in a “liberated zone” devoid of judicial writ and constitutional rights. The CPI bats for Maoists who believe in the complete annihilation of civilisational India and celebrate whenever Indian forces are killed. The CPI speaks for Maoists who have mounted some of the deadliest attacks on Indian forces, and has always been ready to invite external forces and elements to destabilise India. Indian communism has faithfully sided with these degenerative elements.

Indian communism refuses to see the signpost when it ignores the fact that over 700 Naxal youth joined the Bastar Olympics this year. 3,91,000 youth have participated in this flagship and wildly popular event. These youth have rejected Naxalism and wish to mould, transform and empower their lives by joining the national mainstream. Bastar, once the symbol and epicentre of “Red Terror”, is now in the throes of an unprecedented and multi-dimensional development cycle. Indian communism has no use for such an initiative, its politics thrived by aerating the earlier era of conflict, violence and deprivation.

By persistently trying to link India’s internal challenges to global currents, Indian communism played a dubious game of weakening the Indian narrative globally. In the case of Kashmir and Article 370, in the case of the drive against Maoists, on India’s stand on the integrality of its borders, on the CAA, on Pakistan-sponsored terror, for instance, Indian communism globally amplified a negative narrative and tried to push the Indian Republic on its back foot.

These deliberately manipulative positions have made the communist (left) in India increasingly irrelevant. It will never be able to climb out of this trench. To think that a few socialist inroads in governments in other countries will infuse a new energy and direction to Indian communism is a puerile and thoughtless proposition that does not base itself on sound foundations of global history and politics.

Comparing the CPI and the RSS on their centenary year is in itself incongruous and abnormal. Comparing the desiccated CPI and the ever-expanding BJP would have been the right approach. But those who fail to discern the RSS as a non-political entity do so because they possess little knowledge of its structure, philosophy and worldview. To them, the RSS remains an incomprehensible entity. The CPI is a political entity, whereas the RSS was and continues to remain a socio-cultural formation. The CPI now stands on crutches and breathes with difficulty. Having consistently espoused irreligiosity, having mocked the believers and their rituals. Their darts of derision were especially aimed at Hindus and the Sanatani.

Primarily founded in a foreign country, with a goal set by a foreign ideology with a foreign intent, in its decades of growth and survival, the CPI used other means to pursue this foreign goal. All its activism in the field of literature, theatre and cinema, its capacity to spawn wide networks of interested artists and thinkers was the result of protective patronage from the Soviet Union. The USSR’s collapse led to the gradual evaporation of that patronage. The CPI in itself had no inherent strength or creativity.

The CPI actively endorsed the Indira-Congress-imposed Emergency, arrests and incarcerations. Socialist leader Pramila Dandavate, who was jailed during the Emergency, rightly referred to the CPI as the “Chamcha Party of India”, India’s stooge party, doing Indira Gandhi’s bidding. A recant can be cited from the CPI’s own rank, from that rare communist, Hiren Mukherjee, who writes in his memoirs of Parliament, that the CPI had to pay the “price of their ‘original sin’, namely, of having supported the emergency…What was called, insinuatingly, the ‘non-CPI opposition’ could at least claim that they had virtually disassociated themselves from the emergency parliament’s performance and were therefore somehow untainted by the excesses that came to earn the anger and anathema of the people.” It was an epochal betrayal of the Indian Republic that the CPI was guilty of. It will continue to bear the taint till its final gasping throes.

The CPI is beyond redemption today. It can never become the shaper of India in the 21st century. Such a hope is bound to be chimerical. On its centenary, with its anchor washed away, its rudder broken, the CPI ship is in its final sinking swirl. Let the obituary be published, let the requiem be sung, let the funeral cortège begin, for the bell tolls for the dead!

Views expressed are personal. The writer is a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC), BJP, and the Chairman of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation