Dishonest intellectuals of Bolshevism

Tarun Vijay

21 Nov 2007
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/T_Vijay_Dishonest_Bolshevik_intellectuals/articleshow/2558113.cms

In the year of the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which inspired millions across the world as a hope for peasants and workers and exploited-classes, and which soon turned into a monstrous state totalitarianism defeating the very purpose it was claiming to serve in its initial stage, we saw Nandigram massacre and its justification by the pale shadows of Stalinism. It is also a statement on the seriousness and analytical minds governing the media and political debate that hardly any in-depth study has been done or commissioned to re-evaluate Bolshevism and its impact on the Indian society and polity. Trivia rules Delhi and immediate concerns of winning an election dominate political activities with bubbles of protests or justification for massacres like the one that occurred at Nandigram, creating headlines and filling editorial scrap books. Violence and physical eliminations form an essential part of the Communist ideology and though the Bolshevik Revolution promised the rule of the proletariat, bread and equal economic growth, land to the peasants and grass-root democracy through multi-party Soviets to the Russians who were sick of high prices, non-governance with a rude and anti-people bureaucracy, soon, the entire party apparatus was turned to control administration and be a tool to serve leaders beginning a new regime of subjugation and dictatorial state policies. Lenin's rise, the history of the Mensheviks and the Right and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the end of the Trotsky era in the course of the Revolution need to be revisited in the light of a what we see as an enormous dishonesty of the Left-wing intellectuals demonstrated so 'bravely' in Kolkata recently bemoaning the Marxist government's anti-people policies. Hardly anything has changed since the first red revolution took place in 1917. There is no doubt that the Bolsheviks' organisational flexibility, openness, and responsiveness to popular aspirations, as well as their extensive, carefully-nurtured connections to factory workers, soldiers of the Petrograd garrison and Baltic Fleet sailors gave birth to an enormous magnetic attraction and raised hopes of immediate peace. Exactly the same happened in India too. The October Revolution was quintessentially the intellectuals' accession to power. Creating well-defined socio-economic groups, the Leftist intellectuals promoted a statist system as 'the ideology of the new ruling caste', and the Soviet system was 'nothing other than the construction of a new class domination over the producers, the establishment of a new socialist power over them', the plans for which having been 'elaborated and prepared during several decades by the leaders of the socialist democracy'. What it turned our ultimately was a complete reversal of the promises and the brute rule of the moneyed party Commissars followed with a force. Falsification of history, gossip presented as state documents, deceit, deception and intellectual dishonesty marked with a stylised political demagogy became the hallmark of the Bolshevik 'revolutionaries' who were enjoying the fruits of a mass uprising, hijacking the Russian Revolution to become the new ruling elite. West Bengal has witnessed the same historical phenomenon with a difference that India has a large population with the continuity of Hindu civilisational flow that powers their silent yet powerful resistance to un-Indian attitudes in its own way. So the Marxists have never been able to increase their influence directly and have found just a few corners using their skill of maneuvering state power through the back door and terror tactics. Those who claimed any kind of intellectualism at the Kolkata rally to denounce the CPM's atrocious barbarity at Nandigram have further compromised the reputation of their residual ruins of Bolshevism. Their angst and disenchantment with the party they loved so much all their life is not because of the Nandigram massacre but because of the media outcry over what had become a thoroughly-indefensible episode. It stunned them suddenly to come to the roads with a singularly private mission to safeguard their personal positions, however falsely though, in a society that's civil enough in spite of a long Marxist rule, due to the influence of reformers like Vivekananda and Ishwar Chand Vidyasagar.
These Left intellectuals with a stiff upper lip and a typical 'rebellious' brand value showcasing a set of symbolism in their exterior postures never felt agonised over any number of barbarities perpetrated by the Marxist goons from Bihar to Bengal and Kerala to Maharashtra. When the teachers were hacked to death before students in a class room by SFI goons, they kept reciting poems of revolutionary love in Mukta Dhara auditoriums. When Nepal's Maoists were getting protection by JNU's jhola-chhap Left extremist groups they were happy in donning highly beneficial positions in akademis and literary circles. When Kashmiri Hindus were raped, maimed, killed and their temples razed, the same intellectuals condemned them for spreading 'rumours' and sang songs of peace and international brotherhood to earn free tickets to Soviet Russia and Beijing. Now, just to steal the thunder and outdo the genuine voices of pain and anguish emerging out of Nandigram, these intellectuals have tried to overwhelm them with their own noises of moral turbulence over what was always a hallmark of their ideological patrons. If bullets and sickles were physical on the Nandigram people, they had the same brutalising effect through academic dishonesty. Nandigram was bruised both ways. West Bengal has seen the most hateful ideological apartheid practised in India under these worthy intellectuals. It was in their Communist regime that Ramakrishna Mission had to declare itself a non-Hindu institution in order to save its educational centres, schools and colleges from the assaults of CPM's unions. With a dismal land distribution and industrial growth rate, farmers, labourers and industrial workers have faced the worst situation due to Marxist monopoly over state policies and programmes. The way they 'win' state Assembly elections through guns and goons is an open secret. From the days of 'China's Chairman is our Chairman' and betraying the nation in 1962, supporting the Emergency in 1975 and aligning with forces who ruthlessly eliminated their co-ideological travellers, Naxals, during Siddhartha Shankar Ray's Congress regime in the 70's, Marxist intellectuals had no qualms denouncing Taslima Nasreen and demanding not to extend her visa, just because she had espoused the cause of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh and depicted graphically the sorry state of Muslim women under the yoke of Islamic rule. These intellectuals who feel 'sad' at the government's handling of Nandigram are not ashamed of the fact that they had supported a totalitarian ideology for the last several decades that justified the division of motherland and welcomed the unfriendly Muslim infiltrators from Bangladesh. They never denounced the jihad and taught Marx and Lenin in the text books denouncing Gandhi, Vivekananda and Subhash Chandra Bose. As if Russian and Chinese Communist leaders were more Indian than those who espoused the cause of Indian nationalism, Independence and spiritual wealth. When the Communist mouthpiece depicted Subhash Chandra Bose as lackey of Tojo and hurled abuses on Gandhi and Nehru, no Marxist intellectual felt anything bad about it. They support the continuation of Annexure 370, separating Kashmir from the rest of the country, never ever sympathised with the victims of jihadi or Maoist violence in Jammu &, Kashmir, Telengana, Bihar, Chattisgarh and Jharkhand. In fact when an extremist fringe of the Communist tradition won hands down in JNU defeating official CPM candidates, it shocked the leadership. The competition to emerge as sole spokesperson of the Left stream is so strong that it can only accelerate the killing spree amongst them. Leftist poets and writers are angry that the West Bengal government is not acting according to the ideological moors and they would like to form the real Left which is pure and follows the line of thought propounded by Stalin, Lenin and Mao. Their world view and inspirations are still across the border and nothing within this motherland that gave birth to them, inspires them. They kept mum when the Soviet tanks entered Hungary and Afghanistan because 'they were brotherly actions of fraternal comrades'. They never protested when Pakistan occupied illegally two-thirds of Kashmir and China refused visas to our Arunachali citizens. Poverty, subjugation, deprivation and darkness of a static social milieu help them to write and earn. In fact more the deprivation, more their revolutionary zeal is fuelled and a strong poetry emerges out of it. Like political maneuvering, the Left intellectualism, too, thrives in backwardness and not in finding and guiding solutions to remove it. Hence, take a pause, the Left intellectuals' 'sadness' shouldn't be taken as their willingness to purge their ideology of the un-Indian traits too. Marxism is dead. Long live the 'bourgeoisie' intellectualism.