Swarn Kishore Singh
While almost the whole world is writing obituaries for their respective left, I wonder, is it really something to celebrate? Is left really so bad? The fact is that the obituaries and epitaphs are written very regretfully by most of the people with only few of them doing it with schadenfreude. Now the question is why the left is becoming irrelevant after every election. There is another question, i.e. which one is dying, left or leftism?
Well, if I have to answer to this question, I will surely say, leftism can’t die as long as the quest for betterment of society is alive. But yeah, left is leaving the political spectrum not only of India but globally and that is due to some very fundamental and intrinsic problems of leftists.
As far as post-mortem of the gradual demise of Indian left is considered; there are variety of reasons few of them being; the social disruptiveness of the leftists, hate for Indian Army, disrespect for Hindu values and traditions, disregard of our forefathers who fought for our independence, promotion of hate and victimhood, fake intellectual arrogance, escapism to perform, fetish for violence and eating away of political space by other political parties.
Firstly the social disruptiveness is one of the major reasons behind the decline in the graph of popularity of leftists. In today’s modern civilization, when everyone yearns for a calm and peaceful society, the disruptiveness which forms the forte of leftists is no longer a popular and acceptable thing to do. When a common person finds a guy holding a red flag hitting or harming someone for having a different or opposite political faith or ideology, is that very guy going to vote for the aggressor or the party which he belonged to. The answer is a simple “No”.
Then we have the most common hobby of leftists i.e. bashing of army. I wish to explain it with an instance to further simplify things. One of the founder member of CPI(M), VS Achuthanandan was at the receiving end of the wrath of the communists in 1962 for supporting Indian army which went so sour that it triggered his demotion from central politburo. During the Chinese aggression in 1962, when the whole country was donating blood for Indian soldiers and contributing in one way or the other towards the defense of sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country, VS Achuthanandan did the same by organizing a blood donation camp in a prison where he was detained. The organizing of blood donation camp for Indian army came under severe criticism from his party because supporting Indian Army in those moments of crisis was supposedly against the policy of his party. In the aftermath he was thrown out from the central committee to the branch committee i.e. from the highest tier to the lowest tier in the organization. The bête noire for Indian army goes on to the limit that leftist even support countries which are on daily basis killing our people whether they are army personnel or civilians.
Another issue is the disrespect for Hindu values and traditions, which is a very awful thing the leftist do with impunity. The society for whom you are striving to get better, the leftist smash the edifice on which our value system is standing tall. In December last year, former chief minister of Tripura and a staunch leftist Sh. Manik Sarkar was under attack when he visited a medical camp inaugurated in a ground which was located within the premises of a temple. This is the level of hatred of left towards the people who constitute the majority of India’s population. Leftists have an inherent disliking for anything that is directly or indirectly connected to Indian cultural heritage, they live in their romantic fancies driven by Karl Marx & Lenin writings. They follow Karl Marx’s statement in which he had said that “religion is opium of the people’. Leftists want people to follow this ideology and do every possible thing to deracinate people from their roots, which seem too high a task for us Indians. They denigrate the contributions made by Aryabhatta, Patanjali, Charak & Shushrut, and while as they glorify what was done by Muslims invaders and Britishers. Infact they don’t just denigrate our forefathers but even ridicule them, which is a hard to pill to digest for us Indians. They find their ideology as an excuse to lampoon the religious belief of Hindus. Take an instance of beef ban, which was very severely criticized by leftists in India. At various places, a lot of Hindu leftists arranged beef parties on streets just to prove their secular credentials. But in all these years of protests and banters, I fail to find a singular example wherein a Muslim leftist while trying to prove himself a secular would have had consumed pork or arranged a pork party. We, the people of India are now able to decode this selective outrage drama of leftists here. When in the name of freedom of speech, the leftists back a south Indian Kannada writer Prof. K.S. Bhagwan, who had said that he would tear and burn Bhagwad Gita to exhibit his disregard to Hinduism and its philosophies, the support was missing for Taslima Nasreen for authoring Lajja & Salman Rushdie for writing Satanic Verses, thereby proving that that the secular stance of leftists is synonymous to hypocrisy.
Now we reach the issue of disregard of our forefathers who fought valiantly for our freedom. For leftists only Karl Marx & Lenin are heroes, Bhagat Singh never finds a place in their speeches or functions. They even go to the extent of disrespecting our heroes like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Gurudev Rabindra Nath Thakur and others. This CPI had at one time addressed Subhash Chandra Bose with some of the most demeaning names such as a quisling, imperialist agent and Tojo’s dog (Hediki Tojo was Japanese Prime Minister from whom Bose had sought support). And Gurudev was called as a bourgeoisie poet and what not. And why would they exalt a poet who has authored Indian national anthem when they have Vladimir Msyskovski, a Russian poet. They disregard Maharana Pratap as a person who was merely fighting for recapturing his kingdom and the fights he fought, the struggles he went through are called an exercise to fulfill his fetish for powers as king. While they are disregarding our past heroes, can we even think of considering them as our present ones?
The leftist here in India have found a vote bank in manufacturing hate against Hindu upper caste and playing victimhood against them. While the fact remains the top leaders of leftist parties in India are themselves Hindu upper caste i.e. Brahmins. They have never allowed a Dalit to rise in the rank of their own parties. They themselves belong to elite background who use the vulnerabilities of our society as political weapons. Leftists use these differences to wedge between the different sections of society by manufacturing contests like Black vs. White, Brahmins vs. Dalits, Muslims vs. Baniyas and finally Rich vs. Poor. But finally this rhetoric has got exposed; the general masses have reached a conclusion that the current left ideology has been reduced to a level where the elites while sitting in five star hotels discuss the social vulnerabilities of the so-called proletariat to manufacture hate and division in a society to accelerate their political future in the country.
Then comes the fake intellectual arrogance of leftists; leftists consider anyone who can cram five to seven quotes of Lenin & might have read an essay about life of Karl Marx as intellectual. They live in a strange shell wherein they are their own epicenter and everything else revolves around them; rest everything is simply moronic for them. For them people who specialize in Ayurveda, Yoga, Sanskrit or even Mathematics are merely a bunch of benighted fools. The people who are having contradicting ideologies are plain stupid at the time when the ideas of their own greatness are very inflated ones. Anything that is disturbing their ideological inertia is resisted to an extent of resorting to violence. Also the left’s fetish for violence is not new, they have a history of long standing romance with terror and totalitarianism. After decaying of their love affair with epitome of communist killings machines like Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot etc. the radical left is rejuvenating its fantasies with violence by exploring its affinities with radical Islamic terrorism. Otherwise what is interest of Russia in Middle East & what is interest of China in Pakistan; the interest is that “the pot should keep on boiling”.
Next is the escapist modus operandi of leftist as per which they specialize in criticizing rather than performing. I remember very profoundly a very celebrated speech of a top communist leader, Sh. AB Bardhan in Gandhi Maidan, Patna in early 1990s; where he vehemently lambasted Bhartiya Janta Party for being anti-socialist and anti-poor. But few kilometers away started the state of West Bengal, which was governed by leftist parties since independence and was in state of utmost despair. This ergophobia of left has got exposed and people have started to decode what the left specializes in and that is too much of noise and hullabaloo.
Finally, the issue reaches a level where the choice is between left and leftism; the lofty proud prance with which the leftists used to take credit of reflecting the real issues faced by common and the poor people which they popularly call as proletariat has globally received successive thrashings during last decade and specifically last five years. Be it Prakash Karat, here in India, Jeremy Corbyn in UK, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Julia Gillard of Australia etc. they all are not just witness to the decline of left but a party to this debacle. Left is losing its sheen and it is due to the fact that their leaders are the one who personify arrogance. How can you represent the aspirations of the people with whom you don’t even connect properly? And subsequently the rightists have gradually taken over the core issues on which the left claimed monopoly. The issues which kept the leftists relevant such as fighting for the rights of factory workers, farmers, tribals have been slowly imbibed by the right wing. The struggle for farmers and workers used to be oxygen for left and in last one decade that supply has been curtailed thereby resulting into collapse of left. In the last decade the left is dying because other than secularism, they are running short of issues to keep the people of India interested in them.
Their scant relevance in the country is only because of a very tacit and implicit support from a significantly leftist section of media, who are keeping this ideology alive by giving more than necessary space to some disgruntled university students. And expecting them to keep left alive would be expecting too much from them, that too when the relevance of left among the electorate is diminishing day by day not only in India but globally. Nevertheless keeping book of reasons behind the slowly exit of left, it needs to be admitted that it is not at all good news for us. Leftism is supposed to be conscience of a political set up of any country and imagine what will be the destiny of a nation without a political conscience. Therefore while praying for health of leftism we better bid adieu to the left.
(The author is an advocate and a legal and political analyst)
feedbackexcelsior@gmail.com
Follow our WhatsApp channel