Ganga and the Rivulet

It will be useful to pursue the Indian communists a little further before we look at the meeting between Subhas Bose and Doctorji that could not take place. While the RSS is observing its centenary in 2025-2026, Indian communist parties, the CPI and CPIM are facing an acute existential crisis. They would have completely evaporated had it not been for a persistent tribe in the media and the academia who still offer their decrepit ideology some space and limelight.

The communist parties’ disconnection from the cultural essence of the Indian people and civilisation, led to their eventual and permanent decline. Their infatuation with foreign tropes and frameworks led them to wrongly analyse India’s civilisational march and evolution. Their aversion and opposition to India’s religious, cultural and adhyatmik continuum, their attempt to deconstruct these with foreign intellectual tools and lenses such as class struggle, alienation, and revolutionary praxis, distorted their study and understanding of Indian society.

In 2010, former CPIM leader and Member of Parliament from Alappuzha, KS Manoj, a Latin Catholic doctor, quit the party citing lack of freedom to practice one’s own religion. In an open letter to then CPIM general secretary Prakash Karat, Manoj pointed out that “majority of Communists across the world are getting more freedom on religion, whereas the CPM has been trying to restrict religious freedom, a basic human right.” He called upon Karat to initiate a larger discussion on the party’s hindering of religious freedom of members. Manoj had then argued that “as an atheistic force, the CPM could not exist in India” and that religious rituals and ceremonies were “part of our culture and customs; just like hoisting the red flag, floral tribute to martyrs’ tomb, commemoration of martyrs etc conducted along with party functions.” Manoj pointed out that “more than 99 per cent of the party members are believers and they like to perform religious rituals unless it is forbidden by the party.” He was derisively dismissed by then CPIM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan as a “half priest.”

The realisation that this has not worked has now dawned. But a reversal is a near impossible task for the communist parties, disconnected as they are and remain, from the masses and their cultural and religious psyche. It has fallen to comrade Prakash Karat’s lot to make the confession and call for a revision.

In an interview in April 2025, on the eve of the 24th party congress in Madurai, Karat observed, perhaps grudgingly, that there “is an increase in religiosity in society. Over the last 20-30 years” and that it could not be ignored. Karat argued that the way to bring in one’s ideological and political appeal was by “connecting with those who are increasingly religious.” He accepted that a “large number of CPIM members are believers” and that the “party constitution has no provision which says you have to be an atheist. Some Communist parties had it earlier, but they too have dropped it. If believers in the party work among the people and take up their issues, the people will respect them irrespective of them belonging to a party which doesn’t believe in religion.” Having dismissed KS Manoj, comrade Karat had to now eat crow on the same issue. On the verge of political extinction, communist parties have decided to revisit their derisive, denigratory, derogatory, dismissive and deprecatory approach towards religion. In the Indian context their derision was always reserved for Hindus and for the fundamentals of Sanatana Dharma.

But comrade Karat had another angst, he lamented that communist parties could not equal the RSS, and could not counter it. “The RSS works in the cultural and social spheres, and many areas”, Karat rued, but “where are we? Are we doing similar work? Similar means not what they do, but to counter them.” The lament comes from a deeper frustration emerging from the realisation that the politics of communism in India has been rejected and has failed, and is incapable of reinvention. The parallel itself is false, the RSS is not a political body or movement, while the CPIM is a political entity. However, communists themselves are to be blamed for their plight. They forsook their original philosophical moorings and turned to violent centralism and totalitarianism.

This contradiction of their ideological fundamentals by violent communist regimes and deviationist leaders is best described by P Parameswaran, pracharak, profound and prolific thinker, in his classical treatise, “Marx and Vivekananda: a comparative study.” In his inimitable analytical style, Parameswaran observes that, “the tragedy of the situation is that Marx and Engels, who were the least dogmatic, were taken over by rigid dogmatists. Their guidelines were converted into commands. The width of their vision gave way to narrow pragmatism. The high sense of morals and ethics which Marx and Engels possessed, was replaced by the sense of the expedient and the immediately profitable. Marx and Engels were succeeded by Lenin and Stalin and Mao, at whose hands their glorious prophecies of a free human society turned into monolithic totalitarian states. Nowhere has the saying ‘letter killeth’ proved more true than in the case of Marx’s vision of the future.”

The Communist Party of India is in itself of doubtful parentage and date. One group continues to claim that it was formed in Tashkent in October 1920, while another group claims that it was born in Kanpur in 1925. In his seminal biography of MN Roy, “In Freedom’s Quest”, historian and philosopher Sibnarayan Ray (1921-2008) tells us that on “17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was founded in Tashkent” with seven members, of which Roy was the leading face. Five days after the founding, Roy wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan, that “it is hereby testified that the Communist Party of India has been organised here in accordance with the principles of the Third International.” Documents from the archives of the Russian Federation, compiled in “Indo-Russian Relations: 1917-1947” by historians Shobhanlal Datta Gupta, Hari Vasudevan, and Purabi Roy, reveal a letter, most likely from Roy, dated 4th October 1920, Tashkent, to one comrade Suritz, which spoke of the time being “ripe for the formation of a Communist Party in India” and that a “country with such a growing proletarian movement must have the political direction of a Communist Party.” The time, date and manner of its birth thus has still not been sorted out by the CPI’s leadership, even a hundred years after the so-called event.

Meanwhile, devoid of cadres, lacking political and intellectual direction, with a depleting rank of leaders and workers, communist parties have been reduced to emitting hollow slogans of saving India from the menace of “fascism” and the “RSS” and “BJP.” The RSS has grown in strength and continues to spread and expand across the length and breadth of India. Even in adversity the RSS grew in strength and resilience. In the last one hundred years, its history has been one of expansion and of continuous growth.

Philosopher leader Deendayal Upadhyaya, RSS pracharak, handpicked by Sri Guruji Golwalkar to be one of the founding pillars of Bharatiya Jana Sangh under Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee in 1951, pithily describes Doctorji’s vision in founding the RSS. Addressing Swayamsevaks at the Sangh Shiksha Varg, in Varanasi, a few months before independence, Upadhyaya recalled Doctorji’s vision and skill in forming the RSS. “Doctor Sahib’s”, as Upadhyaya addressed Doctorji, “efforts, right from his childhood, were directed at the ideal that was dear to him. He held the ideal of the nation’s uplift close to his heart. He never worried about difficulties that he encountered. When he founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1925, he dedicated himself totally to it. He dedicated his entire life to this ideal. Enduring innumerable hardships, his life was akin to a lamp that burns for long and extinguishes itself but illuminates the world.” Upadhyaya likened Hedgewar to the Himalayas, which stand unshakable “amidst adversity of any kind or degree” and “just as the Himalayan glaciers melt and flow to the earth in the form of the holy Ganga, Doctor Sahib created another Ganga in the form of the Sangh, even as his own life was consumed in the process…”

While some shallow rivulets have long dried up and others struggle to flow, that perennially mighty Ganga flows on unhampered, uninterrupted, watering the civilisational roots of India even after a hundred years.

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