Patriots & Partisans

by Ramachandra Guha

  To this deep suspicion of diversity and pluralism, this tendency to think in black-and-white, this insistent (if ultimately unconvincing) claim that they are history’s inevitable winners, let me add one final characteristic of the Hindutva hate mailer—an utter lack of humour. The mails already quoted illustrate this in abundance, but consider also some responses to an essay I wrote criticizing the ministry for human resources development for proposing that the wife of the richest man in India be made a ‘brand ambassador’ for their adult literacy campaigns. I had pointed out that ‘if one is thinking of a name to motivate poor women or men to learn their letters, no name could be more spectacularly inappropriate than Nita Ambani’s. She is soon to be the resident of a 400,000 square feet house; she is already the recipient of a Boeing aircraft as a birthday gift. If this exhibitionism does not run contrary to our constitutional commitment to socialism and equality, I don’t know what does. As for our other national commitment to secularism and the scientific temper—which I presume the HRD Ministry shares—how does one square that with Mrs Ambani’s periodic visits to a southern hilltop to pray for, of all things, a cricket team?’

  The article was published in a paper that does not have an edition in Bangalore. Downloading it the morning it appeared, I noticed that the boys weaned on cow’s milk had come sniffing already. One mailer complained that ‘the “Southern Hilltop” the journalist so callously refers to here is the much-revered Lord Balaji’s temple. Where do these people get the nerve?? Will he say “People running to middle eastern desert” for Haj pilgrimage?? This is called “Proving one’s secular credentials” by putting down the most revered Lord in India.’ Another angrily asked: ‘Would Mr. Guha have taken a swipe at a Muslim person, worthy or worthless in her own right, for praying five times a day or for doing Haz? Why this step-motherly treatment for visiting temples?’

  Fortunately, these mailers had been put in their place by an Indian with a sense of proportion, who responded to their screeds as follows: ‘There we go again, just drag religious sentiments into it, and finish off with a Hindu-Muslim comparison to highlight a perceived bias. [Guha] was commenting on [Nita Ambani’s] visits to pray “for, of all things, a cricket team” … The point being she was praying not for literacy, not for end of poverty, not for benefit of fellow man, country or world but her commercial interests in a cricket franchise.’

  IV

  The number and intensity of Hindutva hate mails in my Inbox has varied over the past two decades. They have increased and become more abusive at particular moments—after the Gujarat riots of 2002, for example, or after the terror attack in Mumbai of 2008. Before the General Elections of 1999, 2004 and 2009 I also got a flood of mails warning me that I would be put in my place once the party of the faithful would be elected or re-elected to power. The mails fly thick and fast in times of political controversy, but they by no means dry up in quieter periods in-between. For the hard-core fundamentalist, the hunt for heretics is a full-time business.

  I shall end this essay by quoting five very special mails, that, in their individual and distinctive ways, illustrate the peculiarities and pathologies of the Homo Indicus Hindutvawadi.

  The first mail offers this apparently careful and close definition of Hinduism:

  A Hindu is someone who believes in the native and natural traditions of India. These traditions include a lifestyle that is compatible with the natural bounties and limits of India. A belief in the multiple facets of spirituality and tolerance of diverse concepts of god(s) (incl. that it is Man who created god(s) - not the other way around!). By this token some Moslems or Christians may be better Hindus than those who were born Hindus. But in general Hindus are the backbone of India and give it its true character. Minority communities, no matter how large, are the unfortunate remnants of past invasions. Westernized seculars like Ramachandra Guha are mere third rate stool pigeons who could not move to the richer West on their own but would say anything to harm the core of India for a few dollars as baksheesh!

  The definition was however undermined by the address of the writer (‘out west, United States’)—although, as a patriotic Hindu, perhaps he had demanded of his employer that he be paid in (saffron-coloured and lotus-shaped?) rupees.

  My second example, coming also from a non-resident Indian, is notable for its capacious demonology, which included Muslims and Englishmen but privileged above all the Muslim-loving and English-loving renegade Hindu, Jawaharlal Nehru:

  Dear Mr. Guha,

  I have read some of your articles, the headings of your articles have nothing to do with body of your articles, every article is BJP/RSS and Hindu bashing.

  But if you care to answer two questions which are asked by large number of Indians, the questions are:-

  After British left India, all British invaders had left India, why Muslim invaders were not evicted? What right Nehru and Gandhi had to keep tens of millions of Muslims after giving them “homeland” (read Hindu land)?

  If there are 150 million Muslims in India then why Pakistan was created and if Pakistan was created then why there are 150 million Muslims in India?

  Are you denying that before British took over Hindus were not fighting to get rid of Muslims? It seems all the “historians” are on Saudi pay roll.

  When I come to India I talk to rickshaw wallas, rail coolies, waiters and other real Indians, all ask the same questions. They talk to me because they know I live overseas and I am not a danger to them like journalists and people like you who immediately declare Hindus “anti-Muslim”, “anti-secular”, “chauvinists” etc and also let police and Congress goons let on them …

  Nehru was a loafer, thug and a ruffian, he was only interested in Lady Mountbatten, can’t you see the damage done by Nehru? Kashmir, Tibet, Aksai Chin and decimation of Hindu society? About Gandhi, less said the better.

  But coming back to my two question, do you have the courage, guts, IQ to detach yourself from white skinned lady and answer truthfully, not your general doble-de-gook …

  The third example illustrates the hectoring and bullying typical of a certain strain of Hindutva. It was written from Maharashtra, after I had published an article in the Telegraph of Kolkata on the Maoist threat to Indian democracy. I here recalled a similar threat from the extreme right in the early days of Indian independence, and mentioned in passing that Gandhi’s murderer, Nathuram Godse, had once been a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. An angry mailer claimed that my article

  has nothing to do with facts and history also equating RSS with Maoist is sheer lie and hence court suit is inevitable against you if you doesn’t tenders straightaway apology to RSS.

  We have successfully countered such type of blasphemous propaganda against RSS through court battle … So I am hereby demanding immediate apology from you and The Telegraph for the report or be prepared for legal battle, In case legal battle starts it is sure that your career as journalist would end abruptly, so it is not in your personal interest hence better to tender apology and end the matter here before reaching to the Court premises.

  No apology was offered either by myself or the Telegraph—a libel suit is awaited.

  My fourth example illustrates the streak of paranoid triumphalism I spoke of earlier. After I had published a long essay explaining why, given the social and political fault lines within, India would not and should not become a superpower, a reader wrote in to say that ‘India is bound 2 be worldpower. Take my words. People like Mr Guha are agents of China and they also go to temple (though in the dark of night).’

  Of all the hate mails that, over the years, have popped into my Inbox, my personal favourite came from a man (with a resoundingly Brahmin name, as it happens) living in the town of Ghaziabad, in Uttar Pradesh. This, in one single sentence, encapsulated the sentiments of his fellow fanatics and ideologues. ‘It is suspected,’ said my correspondent, ‘that you are getting money through Hawala [the black market] from antiIndia forces or your mindset is communist or you are psycholo
gically weak requiring treatment or modern time “Asura” [demon] wishing to destroy motherland.’

  I think of myself as a patriot, who loves his country, and lives and works in it. I also think of myself as a moderate, middle-of-the-road, liberal democrat. But by the definitions of right-wing Hindus I was something else altogether. Since I found flaws in Hindutva thought, it was self-evident that I could not be a patriot. Since I criticized the practice of Hindu fundamentalist groups, I must be an extremist on the other side, that is to say, a Communist. Since I made these criticisms repeatedly, it was overwhelmingly likely that I was in the pay of foreign powers. And since I was published in a well-circulated Indian newspaper I was probably a demon in disguise, too. To be fair, the criticisms also allowed for a more benign interpretation of the words that appeared under my name—namely, that I was suffering from some kind of mental illness. If only I could see the right doctor, who would then prescribe me the correct medicines, the motherland would be saved.

  Postscript: They say a writer is known by the enemies he makes. As this book was going to press, I was alerted to an attack on me on the website of the chief minister of Gujarat, Mr Narendra Modi. ‘Ramachandra Guha’s impotent anger,’ wrote Mr Modi’s website,

  is typical of a snobbish but vacuous intellectual who simply cannot tolerate a person from humble background attaining greatness by the dint of his own hard work, learning and persistence. But Ramachandra Guha, after more than 40 years of Dynasty history writing remains where he is while Narendra Modi has continues to scale up. Which is why Modi can speak about and implement well-considered policies on topics as diverse as governance, economy, environment, industry, infrastructure, solar energy, IT, and tourism while Guha is simply unable to look beyond the walls of 10 Janpath. ( http://www.narendramodi.in/the-will-of-the-people-always-triumphs/ accessed 9th July 2012).

  The attention was unexpected but not unwelcome, this notwithstanding the farrago of innuendoes, half-truths and outright falsehoods it conveyed. I have been a historian for a mere twenty-five years, and a political historian for only the last ten of those years. I have never entered 10 Janpath, nor met any of its occupants. Not that I would be permitted entry. For, I am a long-standing critic of the Congress party’s First Family, and have (as a later essay in this book, ‘In Nehru’s House: A Story of Scholarship and Sycophancy’, explains), suffered professionally because of this.

  By my count I have, in the past decade, written two articles critical of Mr Modi (one for his handling of the 2002 riots and the other for an architectural monstrosity he has commissioned in Mahatma Gandhi’s name), and at least seven or eight that detail the damaging effects on politics and public life caused by the culture of sycophancy and dynastic rule introduced by Indira Gandhi. On the other hand, I am an admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru, which is perhaps what sticks in the throat of Mr Modi’s acolytes and cheerleaders, who, in their perfervid fantasies, presume their leader to be greater than Nehru and in the same league as the Mahatma himself. I shall let history, and a future generation of historians, be the judge of that.

  Chapter Four

  The Past and Future of the Indian Left

  ~

  There was a great Marxist named Lenin

  Who did two or three million men in.

  That’s a lot to have done in,

  But where he did one in,

  That great Marxist Stalin did ten in.

  —Robert Conquest

  I

  In elections held in the summer of 2011, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) lost power in the state of Kerala, and, more damagingly, in West Bengal, where it had ruled for thirty-four years at a stretch. These defeats call for a detached, dispassionate analysis of the place of the party in the history of modern India. In what manner, and to what extent, did politicians committed in theory to the construction of a one-party state reconcile themselves in practice to bourgeois democracy? What were the sources of the CPI(M)’s electoral appeal in Kerala and West Bengal? How were its policies constrained or enabled by its ideology of Marxism-Leninism? How should this ideology be rethought or reworked in the light of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the manifest attachment of the people of India to multi-party democracy? How might the CPI(M) restore and reinvent itself after these electoral reversals in Kerala and West Bengal?

  In seeking to answer these questions, I shall start with the analysis of a printed text. This is apposite, since Marxists are as much in thrall to the printed word, or Word, as are fundamentalist Muslims or Christians. True, their God had more than one Messenger, and these messengers wrote multiple Holy Books. Withal, like Christianity and Islam, Marxism is a faith whose practice is very heavily determined by its texts. Thus Communists the world over justify their actions on the basis of this or that passage in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin or Mao.

  It was the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre who first drew attention to the parallels between a professedly secular belief system and a religious doctrine. In a book called Marxism and Christianity (originally published in 1953, and reissued in an expanded edition fifteen years later), MacIntyre observed that ‘creedal uniformity, as in religion, often seems to be valued by Marxists for its own sake’. He further pointed out that this secular creed, like its religious counterpart, endowed its adherents with an emancipatory role denied to individuals who believed in more humdrum ideologies. To quote MacIntyre, ‘both Marxism and Christianity rescue individual lives from the insignificance of finitude … by showing the individual that he has or can have some role in a world-historical drama’. In this, Marxism and Christianity are akin to one another, and to Islam, whose devoted or dogmatic adherents likewise believe that their life, and death, find meaning and fulfilment in a pleasure-filled and enemy-free Utopia.

  II

  The text I shall here subject to scrutiny—the technical term may be ‘exegesis’—was written not by Marx or Lenin, but by a desi deity so to say. One of the most influential of all Indian Marxists, his name was Balchandra Triambak Ranadive. He was known as ‘BTR’, these initials whispered with respect, or might we say reverence, by party members past and present.

  The text that I am going to resurrect was written in 1978, a year after a Left Front government dominated by the CPI(M) came to power in the large and crucial state of West Bengal. It took the shape of an extended review of a book by the Spanish Communist Santiago Carrillo entitled Eurocommunism and the State. The review was published over thirty-three closely printed pages of Social Scientist, a Marxist monthly edited by scholars associated with the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Here, Ranadive attacked Carrillo as a renegade, the last in a shameful line of ‘revisionists’ who had abandoned the path of revolution in favour of the softer option of reform.

  The Indian Communist charged his erstwhile comrade with six heresies in particular:

  First, Carrillo thought that, at least in western Europe, socialists and Communists could now come to power via the ballot box rather than through armed revolution. In Ranadive’s paraphrase, ‘the central point of Carrillo’s book is that there is absolutely no need for a revolution in the developed capitalist countries … According to him socialism can be achieved peacefully, without violating any of the rules of bourgeois democracy …’

  Second, Carrillo claimed that Communist parties did not necessarily possess a monopoly on the truth. The Spanish Communist party, wrote Carrillo, ‘no longer regards itself as the only representative of the working class, of the working people and the forces of culture. It recognizes, in theory and practice, that other parties which are socialist in tendency can also be representative of particular sections of the working population …’

  Third, Carrillo held that private enterprise had a role to play in economic growth, albeit in alliance with the state. As the Spaniard put it, ‘the democratic road to socialism presupposes a process of economic transformation different from what we might regard as the classical model [of Marxism]. That is to say it presupposes the long-term co-existence of public a
nd private forms of property.’

  Fourth, Carrillo argued that in the Cold War, Europeans should keep their distance from the Americans and the Soviets alike. As he wrote, ‘our aim is a Europe independent of the USSR and the United States, a Europe of the peoples, orientated towards socialism, in which our country will preserve its own individuality’.

  Fifth, Carrillo believed that Marx, Engels and Lenin were not infallible, and that their views were open to correction with the passage of time and the evidence of history.

  Sixth, Carrillo believed that the Communist party was not infallible either, that at least in non-political matters individuals should feel free to follow their own conscience. In the Spaniard’s formulation, ‘outside collective political tasks, each [party] member is master of his own fate, as regards everything affecting his preferences, intellectual or artistic inclinations, and his personal relations’. Significantly, he added: ‘In the field of research in the sciences of every kind, including the humanities, different schools may co-exist within [the party] and they should all have the possibility of untrammelled confrontation in its cultural bodies and publications.’

  Reading Carrillo through the quotes provided by Ranadive, one cannot help but admire his honesty, his overdue but nonetheless brave recognition that the bloody history of his country (and continent) mandated a radical revision of the Communist idea. But B.T. Ranadive saw it very differently. He spoke with contempt of Carrillo’s faith in those ‘miserable parliamentary elections’, and with even more disdain of Carrillo’s independence with regard to the Cold War. ‘Can any Communist,’ he fumed, ‘put the enemy of mankind, the gendarme of world reaction, American imperialism, on the same footing as Soviet Russia?’