🧵Indian Marxists have always been anti-India & anti-Hindu. Yet on some issues they have become allies of Hindu nationalists.
1. They reject the very concept of India as a national unit & only accept its unity & integrity to the extent that they consider it strategically useful.
1. They reject the very concept of India as a national unit & only accept its unity & integrity to the extent that they consider it strategically useful.
2. In an interview in Le Monde, Romila Thapar cheerfully predicted that India won’t be able to stay together. CPM Politburo member Sitaram Yechury calls India a “multinational country” with “many nationalities”.
3. CPM leaders Jyoti Basu and Ashok Mitra have declared that if the BJP were to come to power, West Bengal would secede from India, and that “India was never the solution” anyway.
4. In every conflict they have stood on anti-Hindu & usually also on anti-Indian side:
> betraying Quit India activists to the British in 1942
> supporting Pakistan scheme in 1945-47
> supporting separatist Razakar militia in Hyderabad state in 1948
> siding with China in 1961-62
> betraying Quit India activists to the British in 1942
> supporting Pakistan scheme in 1945-47
> supporting separatist Razakar militia in Hyderabad state in 1948
> siding with China in 1961-62
> supporting the Muslim claim in the Ayodhya controversy.
5. While in other Third World countries, Marxists have supported cultural anti-colonialism & encouraged national pride, Indian Marxists are generally opposed to anti-colonial developments in the cultural sphere.
5. While in other Third World countries, Marxists have supported cultural anti-colonialism & encouraged national pride, Indian Marxists are generally opposed to anti-colonial developments in the cultural sphere.
6. After the Soviet implosion, many an Indian Marxist or Left-talking opportunist has switched to free-market liberalism but remained as determined a Macaulayite and secularist, at least in the first stage.
7. The intense polarization for and against Hindutva in the early 1990s is partly due to a regrouping of Leftist forces on the cultural front after they found that their fortunes on the socio-economic front were down: “Deprived of the old legitimacy which the non-existent but ...
... effectively advertised success of the Soviet Union and China conferred on them, leftist intellectuals must now hang on desperately to Nehru. Secularism and not socialism has to be their battle cry.”
8. The effect on international opinion is that “the ‘secularist’ and ‘anti-Hindu-communalist’ platform assures them the support of not only the Muslims at home and abroad but, interestingly enough, of a lot of people in the West.”
9. At the academic level, at least, this is very much the situation: Indian Marxists are welcomed in American seminars as privileged commentators on “Hindu communalism”.
10. It is ironic as well as disturbing that a movement that still swears by Lenin and Stalin, is hailed in Western universities as the guardian of a civil polity against the encroaching barbarism of Hindu revivalism.
11. Yet, Indian Marxists sometimes become the allies of the Hindu nationalists. When non-Marxist secularists compromised with Islamist forces on Shah Bano & Salman Rushdie issues, hard Marxists stood firm in their rejection of religious politics, so that along with the...
... Hindu nationalists, they opposed the Government’s concessions to the Islamists.
12. Even though Marxist intellectuals are very much part of the “English-speaking elite”, working-class party cadres in West Bengal have promoted Bengali medium education instead of English.
12. Even though Marxist intellectuals are very much part of the “English-speaking elite”, working-class party cadres in West Bengal have promoted Bengali medium education instead of English.
13. On the economic front too, Marxists & Hindutva activists have made common cause in recent years, especially in agitations against multinationals & GATT/WTO treaty. This trend is paralleled by Marxist-nationalist ad hoc alliances against globalization in Russia, Europe, & US.
Source: Decolonizing The Hindu Mind by Koenraad Elst (pp. 63-66).
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