Critique
Journal of Socialist Theory
ISSN: 0301-7605 (Print) 1748-8605 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcso20
The Indian left and the Indian National Congress
Party: what is to be done?
Murzban Jal
To cite this article: Murzban Jal (2019) The Indian left and the Indian National Congress Party:
what is to be done?, Critique, 47:1, 39-61
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2018.1554757
Published online: 07 Jan 2019.
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Critique, 2019
Vol. 47, No. 1, 39–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2018.1554757
The Indian left and the Indian National
Congress Party: what is to be done?
Murzban Jal
With the routing of both the Left and the Congress in election after election, there are
murmurs that there is pressure for the two to unite to take on the ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in the 2014 National Elections. These views
echo the line of the General Secretary Sitaram Yechury of the Stalinist Communist
Party of India (Marxist), a view that seems to echo the old revisionist S.A. Dange line
of the former united Communist Party of India, which talked of a collaboration with
the Indian National Congress and total abandonment of the idea of the Indian
Revolution. This essay claims that the Left needs to go back to its philosophical roots
and rediscover themselves rather than getting involved in the tactical maneuvers of
parliamentary politics, tactics that are increasing becoming devoid of ethics. It also
claims that the Left in this philosophic discovery totally transcends Stalinism of all
sorts, which is stated not merely as a deviation or an accident, but a counterrevolution
against the Bolshevik Revolution specifically and Marxism in general. In this
philosophical rediscovery, the essay also asserts that liberalism and Gandhism are alien
trends to Marxism and cannot be considered otherwise. Instead, one needs to go to
Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar for a radical critique of the Indian rightwing project.
Keywords: Marxism; Stalinism; Indian Revolution; Gandhi; Liberalism; Phule;
Ambedkar
In civil disobedience there should be no excitement.
M.K. Gandhi.
The leader and prophet of this bourgeoisie is Gandhi. A fake leader and a false
prophet! Gandhi and his compeers have developed a theory that India’s position
will constantly improve, that her liberties will continually be enlarged, and that
India will become a dominion on the road of peaceful reforms.
Leon Trotsky.
Reached the conclusion that in the given circumstances, Comintern as a leading
centre for communist parties is a hindrance for the independent development of
© 2019 Critique
M. Jal
40
communist parties and the fulfillment of their specific tasks. To prepare a document
for the closure of this centre.
Georgi Dimitrov.
Introduction: on phantasmagorical socialism
By the ‘Indian Left’ one means the conglomeration of Left parties comprising mainly
the Communist Party of India (CPI), the Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI(M),
along with smaller Left parties like the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India (RSP).
The CPI(M) was part of the CPI and split in 1964. There are also smaller splinter
groups called the ‘Naxalites’, which split from the CPI(M) in 1967 which call themselves the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), of which one is the Communist Party of India (Maoist) which is a party banned by the Indian state. While all Left
parties follow the parliamentary line, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) follows
the line of armed resistance against the Indian state. By and large despite their differences in strategies, they have shared platform in the sense that they derive their inspiration from what was once the Soviet Union and from Maoist China.
The main crux of their political programme is based on the ‘stages’ theory where
they identify the Indian Revolution either as the National Democratic Revolution
(CPI’s version), the People’s Democratic Revolution’ (CPI(M)’s version), or the
New Democratic Revolution (the Maoist version). The idea of a bloc of four classes
(national bourgeoisie, middle class, peasantry and the proletariat) is part of their
understanding of classes in India. The questions of the caste system and the Asiatic
mode of production are totally absent from their political understanding of the
country.
The differences within the Left Front partners, especially between the CPI and the
CPI(M), right from the split in 1964, was on the understanding of the Indian state.
While the CPI said that the Indian state was the ‘organ of the national bourgeoisie
as a whole’, the CPI(M) held ‘the present state was the organ of the class rule of the
bourgeoisie and the landlords, led by the big bourgeoisie’. For the CPI(M):
Ours is a democratic revolution in an entirely new epoch of world history, where the
proletariat and its political party is destined to assume its leadership and not leave it
to the bourgeois class to betray it in the middle … Hence it not the old-type bourgeois-led democratic revolution but a new type of People’s Democratic Revolution,
organised and under the hegemony of the working class.1
The CPI and the CPI(M) have disagreed since 1964 on the question of the relation
with the liberal democratic Congress party. Because of its total subjugation by the dictates of the Soviet Union, the CPI supported the Congress (including the draconian
emergency of 1975–77) claiming that it was a progressive anti-imperialist party.
1
‘Draft Programme of the CPI(M)’, 1964. See also Praful Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment. Challenges Confronting the Indian Left (Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2015), p. 57.
Critique
41
The CPI(M) was totally opposed to the Congress because it characterised the organisation as a monopolist party. Its opposition to Congress even led to side with a religious-communal party—the Muslim League in Kerala in the 1965 Assembly elections.
Because of the strange ideology that parliamentary politics involves (‘the enemy’s
enemy is our friend’)—and because the Indian Left never understood that Marxism
is essentially not merely anti-parliament, but anti-state—it was inevitable that they collapsed into a form of revisionism with no way out.
The Indian Left forgot that the state is the ‘national war engine of capital against
labour’.2 It forgot that ‘the preliminary condition for every real people’s revolution’
is ‘to smash it’ (i.e. to smash the state).3 In this amnesia, they also forgot that ‘all revolutions perfected this machine (i.e. the state) instead of smashing it’.4
That is why we insist that parliamentary politics makes strange bed fellows. The
logic of parliamentary politics is to maintain the rule of capital. It is only Friedrich
Nietzsche’s superman, who after the careful study of how man becomes superman,
could also study how—by some mysterious force—even the bourgeois parliament
could evolve into a workers’ democracy. Man never became superman. Would the
bourgeois parliament ever become the dictatorship of the proletariat?
In this essay we are talking of the crisis of not only the Left in India, but a crisis of
secular democracy itself since the BJP won with a full mandate. For the BJP, the final
goal is to construct a Hindu nation (‘Hindu Rashtra’). Not only is this not acceptable to
the Indian left, it is unacceptable to all other bourgeois parties. But because the Indian
Left played the games designed by the bourgeoisie and since the bourgeoisie wanted
fascism, the Left was made redundant.
In this essay, we mean by the ‘Indian Left’ the Parliamentary Left led by the CPI(M).
This bloc of Left parties is called the ‘Left Front’. This was once in power in three states:
West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. In West Bengal, the Left Front ruled for thirty four
long years (1977–2011); in Tripura they were just ousted after an uninterrupted twenty
five year rule (1993–2018). In Kerala they are still in power. However, it must be
pointed out that the Left in India, despite their revisionist outlook, has its mass political fronts and mass support. But along with this huge base, the Indian Left also has
what we might brand—in the style of E.P. Thomson and Praful Bidwal—a ‘poverty
of theory’.5
This poverty of theory rules out the possibility of ever being able to expound
genuine socialism. Their socialism would be a phantasmagorical socialism, or what
one can call after Lenin a ‘sentimental socialism’.6 In response, the BJP’s view of
2
Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France’, in Marx and Engels. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1975), p. 287.
3
Karl Marx, ‘To L. Kugelmann in Hanover’, London, April 12, 1871, ibid., p. 670.
4
Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, ibid., p. 169.
5
E.P. Thomson, The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin Press, 1995); Praful Bidwai, op. cit.., pp. 61–64.
6
V.I. Lenin, ‘Gold Now and after the Complete Victory of Socialism’, in V.I. Lenin. Selected Works (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 651.
M. Jal
42
capitalism would turn out to be real capitalism. The conflict would thus be between
phantasmagorical socialism and real capitalism. Real capitalism turned out to be the
victor.
To understand how real capitalism won that victory, we need not only to study the
rise of the industrial bourgeoisie in India. Additionally, we must examine the counterrevolutionary roles of Stalin and Gandhi in this triumph of real capitalism.
Stalin and Gandhi
Georgi Dimitrov’s 1943 statement quoted in the beginning of this essay says everything about the Stalinist renouncement of internationalism. Gandhi’s statement is
also revealing in the way it renounces revolutionary action against British colonialism.7 Both also mean the death of any prospect of the revolutionary transformation
of society. Since the Indian Left has not freed itself from the ‘Stalin question’ and
relied more on the ghost of Stalin and less on the reality of Marx, it is necessary to
make a brief examination of Stalin himself to reveal the bankruptcy of the Established
Left in India and why it has embraced Stalinism so completely.
Thus, it is necessary to point out that Stalin not merely feared international revolutions, he did everything in his power to crush all of them, whether in China or in
Europe—not to mention the mass murder of the old Bolsheviks. Nor did he fight
the fascists. This is manufactured myth, whose mythmakers included not only the Stalinists, but also Winston Churchill.
Since the Established Left wants to have a Popular Front against the BJP—claiming
that it is a fascist party—one must also note the political futility of the Indian Stalinists.
Remember that Stalin first flirted with fascism; then totally withdrew from the struggle
against it. To borrow a term from Fidel Castro, Stalin’s policy on the Second Imperialist World War was ‘totally erroneous’.8 The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not an act
of great genius that sprang from the wise head of Stalin, but a ‘terrible mistake’.9 And
when the Nazis mobilised all their forces in June 1941 to attack the Soviet Union,
Stalin ‘acted like an ostrich sticking his head in the sand’.10
The political practice of Stalinism—besides being analogous to a psychotic ostrich—
is really the Stalin school of falsification. Yet one does not need a Khrushchev to expose
the entire falsity of the Stalinist programme of authoritarian state capitalism. Leon
Trotsky was right about this school of falsification. But he never related this Stalinist
politics and culture of lies with that of the industrial production lies in Nazi Germany.
It must be further noted that Stalinism was not merely the revolution betrayed.
It was a counterrevolution avant la lettre. Trotsky was wrong here. The
7
M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Crime of Chauri Chaura’, 16 February 1922, in Rudrangshu Mukherjee (ed.) The
Penguin Gandhi Reader (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 152.
8
Fidel Castro, Fidel. Face to face with Castro. A Conversation with Tomás Borge, transl. Mary Todd (New
Delhi: Peoples’ Publishing House, 1994), p. 37.
9
Ibid., p. 42.
10
Ibid.
Critique
43
counterrevolutionary theory was based on the idea of socialist commodity production,
‘a special kind of commodity production’, to quote Stalin—‘commodity production
without capitalists.’11 The Indian Left has as its model not the Marxism of Marx,
but the revisionism of Stalin. Its goal is the construction of a state capitalist society.
Its fight with the BJP is only about the type of capitalism that each wants to impose.
When we reflect on the Indian Left’s attempt to create a so-called anti-fascist front
against the BJP, it must be noted that not only did Stalin renounce revolutionary communism, he went on to revise the entire theoretical legacy of Marx. For Stalin, one had
to ‘discard certain other concepts taken from Marx’s Capital’.12 Stalin here is talking of
Marx’s theory of value and commodity production. Again, this has never been thought
through by the Indian left. Stalin concludes in his authoritarian manner: ‘We could
tolerate this incongruity for a certain period, but the time has come to put an end
to it.’13 What Stalin means is that one should not tolerate debates on the nature of
capitalism and socialism. One should ‘put an end to’ all debates. For Stalin and Stalinism all debates have henceforth ended. But not only was Stalin the classic revisionist,
he was also a collaborator which resulted in the disasters like the Kuomintang massacre on 12 April 1927, itself followed a year later by the slaughter of three million
Chinese communists by the same organisation.
Here is Stalin’s rational for the treacherous collaboration that led to this butchery of
communists:
Chiang Kai-shek is submitting to discipline. The Kuomintang is a bloc, a sort of
revolutionary parliament, with the Right, the Left, and the Communists. Why
make a coup d’etat? Why drive away the Right when we have the majority and
when the Right listens to us? … At present, we need the Right. It has capable
people, who still direct the army and lead it against the imperialists. Chiang Kaishek has perhaps no sympathy for the revolution, but he is leading the army and
cannot do otherwise than lead it against the imperialists. Beside this, the people
of the Right have relations with the General Chang Tso-lin [the Manchurian
warlord] and understand very well how to demoralise them and to induce them
to pass over to the side of the revolution, bag and baggage, without striking a
blow. Also, they have connections with the rich merchants and can raise money
from them. So, they must be utilised to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and
then flung away.14
Note the perspectives of Stalin. Use the reactionaries, squeeze them dry and then
throw them away! Besides this empty rhetoric, Stalin also stood for Alexander Martynov’s Menshevik bloc of four classes, a view that was essential for Stalinist revisionist
politics. It was adopted by the Chinese Left after Mao came onto the scene of Chinese
history. The Stalinists refuse to see the reality of history and Stalin’s infamous role in
11
J.V. Stalin, ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’, J.V. Stalin. Selected Writings, Vol. II (Calcutta:
National Book Agency, 1976), p. 299.
12
Ibid., p. 300.
13
Ibid.
14
See Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (California: Stanford University Press, 1961),
p. 162. Also see my In the Name of Marx (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2018), p. 87.
M. Jal
44
the massacre of the Chinese communists. Was the massacre an accident or was it part
of the anti-communist ideology of not only the Kuomintang, but also of Stalin himself?
Why was Stalin opposed to the formation of the Chinese soviets? Consider Stalin’s
rhetoric: ‘There is no struggle against tsarism in China. Since we are not heading
directly for an October, we should not call for the formation of the soviets.’15
Remember that after the massacre, Stalin said: ‘The line adopted was the only
correct line.’16
It must be noted that it was not simply a political reflex of Stalin and the Stalinist
bureaucrats who emerged as the NEP-men from the New Economic Policy (NEP). No
doubt, these layers feared the revolution and were terrified that any international revolution would displace this bureaucracy and end its material privileges. The purpose of
this bureaucracy was to preserve state capitalism in the Soviet Union. It was not for the
management of international revolutions, but the management of the
counterrevolutions.
The history of the young revolutionary movement in Russia at the beginning of the
twentieth century is instructive. On one side, you will see Lenin and the Bolshevik line;
on the other, the line of Martynov, Dan and the Menshevik bloc. So, was Stalin a secret
Menshevik? Are not the Indian Leftists that follow the non-Marxist ideas of the bloc of
four classes, stages theory and a socialism that is possible only through the triumph of
capitalism also Mensheviks? Is there something that could be called MenshevikStalinism?
Note further that when on 9 February 1951, when the leaders of the CPI—S.A.
Dange, C. Rajeswara Rao, Ajoy Ghosh and M. Basuapunnaiah—met Stalin to seek
‘advice’, Stalin did not talk of socialism. Instead he talked of the affirmative action
for ‘private property of the peasantry’.17 His final word of advice was, ‘We do not consider that India stands before the socialist revolution’.18
The worst was at the 1946 peak of the Telengana armed peasant movement in the
Southern reaches of India. Stalin ordered the Left leaders to call off the armed struggle,
surrender arms to the bourgeois state and asked the General Secretary of the CPI
(Rajeswara Rao) to personally supervise the disarming of the revolutionaries.19 If
Stalin could say that he did not consider that India stands on ready for the socialist
revolution, then do not the Left also say so even now in the twenty first century?
Then isn’t the conflict between the Indian Left and the BJP merely a fight on the
nature of capitalism and capitalist governance? Is the Left’s critique of the BJP
merely not addressing the key questions of the Indian Revolution itself?
In a different version of class collaboration, Gandhi stood for reconciliation with the
colonial bourgeoisie. But in addition to this, he also stood for the suppression of the
15
See Leon Trotsky, ‘On the Slogan of Soviets in China’, in The Hidden Dynamics of Chinese Revolution.
Writings and Speeches of Leon Trotsky on China (1925–1940) (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2009), p. 137.
16
Leon Trotsky, ‘The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin’, ibid., p. 155.
17
See Bidwai, op. cit., p. 58.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid., p. 59.
Critique
45
agrarian revolution, the sabotaging of the democratic anti-caste movement of B.R.
Ambedkar and the crushing of every revolutionary uprising with his threat to go on
his phantasmagorical fast-unto-death. The biographies of Gandhi do not explore
these questions. Kathryn Tidrick’s Gandhi. A Political and Spiritual Life was met
with what Perry Anderson calls ‘a deafening silence’.20 This willfull ignorance
blocks wider knowledge about the truth of Gandhi and his political project.
Anderson grasps the ‘inner soul’ of Gandhi very precisely. Gandhi was a
cross between a Jain-infected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy,
the world of Madame Blavatsky, Theosophy, planchette and the Esoteric Christian
Union. The two were not connected as garbled ideas from the former—karma, reincarnation, ascetic self-perfection, fusion of the soul with the divine—found occult
form in the latter. Little acquainted with the Hindu canon itself in his early years,
Gandhi reshaped it through the medium of Western spiritualisms of the period.
His one aim in life, he decided, was to attain moksha: that state of perfection in
which the cycle of rebirth comes to an end and the soul accedes to ultimate
union with God. ‘I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is moksha,’ he
wrote, ‘in this very existence.’ The path towards it was ‘crucifixion of the flesh’,
without which it was impossible to ‘see God face to face’ and become one with
him. But if such perfection could be attained, the divine would walk on earth, for
‘there is no point in trying to know the difference between a perfect man and
God.’ Then there would be no limit to his command of his countrymen: ‘When I
am a perfect being, I have simply to say the word and the nation will listen.’ Crucifixion of the flesh, in this conception, meant far more than the vegetarian prohibitions prescribed by his caste background. Not in food, but sex lay the overriding
danger to liberation of the soul. The violence of Gandhi’s revulsion against carnal
intercourse of any kind mingled Christian fears of sin with Hindu phobias of pollution. Celibacy was not just a duty for the dedicated few. It was enjoined on all
who would truly serve their country. ‘A man who is unchaste loses stamina,
becomes emasculated and cowardly. He whose mind is given over to animal passions is not capable of any great effort.’ If a married couple gratified these, it was
still ‘an animal indulgence’ that, ‘except for perpetuating the race, is strictly prohibited’. At the height of political mobilisation, in 1920, even conjugal union was
impermissible: all Indians must forgo sexual relations, as ‘a temporary necessity
in the present stage of national evolution’. Complete continence—brahmacharya
—was of such transcendent importance that an involuntary ejaculation at the age
of 65 was matter for an anguished public communiqué. At 77, testing himself by
sleeping nude with his great-niece, he wrote: ‘Even if only one brahmachari of
my conception comes into being, the world will be redeemed.’ If his conception
were to be universally adopted, the logical result would be ‘not extinction of the
human species, but the transference of it to a higher plane’.21
What did this transference to the higher plane meant for Gandhi? To understand this
one should know that the central idea of Gandhi was not non-violence, it was moksha.
For the uninitiated, moksha is the release of the soul from the cycle of birth and death;
it is when the soul finally unites with God. The figure of Christ and the Christian
20
21
Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2012), p. 18.
Ibid., p. 19.
M. Jal
46
notion of suffering appear in this. If Christ had the cross only in the last moments,
Gandhi carries it with him perpetually. But there is another, deeper meaning to
moksha—going beyond good and evil. This is a transition that only the fascist can
master. This relation between the two interpretations of moksha—the spiritual and
the supersession of good and evil—is central in understanding the relation between
Indian liberalism and fascism. The idea that there is an essential difference between
Indian liberalism and fascism is itself a myth.
The Left is thus caught not merely between two myths—that of Stalin and Gandhi—
it is caught between the two mythical souls of Stalinism and Gandhism. Like Faust they
can only bemoan that, ‘Two souls, alas, are housed in my breast, And each will wrestle
for the mastery there.’22
The Left was once not only critical of Gandhi in the struggle for independence (he
did not want an independent peasants’ and workers’ programme) but also (rightly)
because that he stood for the interests of the landlords and capitalists, Now—for
reasons that need scientific explanation—they have become supporters of Gandhism.
The response of Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj and Nivedita Menon’s to Anderson’s The Indian Ideology is startlingly revealing. After all, why should the Left take
a ‘liberal turn’ when liberalism is totally inimical to Marxism? This is the crux of
the problem.
Fascism trembles in the face of revolutionary Marxism. It can only harass the liberals. And when the Left turns its back on its revolutionary essence and moves rightwards towards the liberalism, it is inevitable that fascism will be victorious. The
notion of a ‘Left-liberal’ is meaningless. The ‘Left-liberal’ is an invention of the American and West European elites after 1917: it was a political bulwark against radical sections of the intelligentsia moving in the direction of revolutionary Marxism.
One needs thus to delegitimise these myths. Just as Stalin did not fight the fascists,
Gandhi did not fight the British colonial forces. The British had to create a prophet, a
ghost of a leader who appears to fight colonialism. In this prophetic spectral story, the
struggle against colonialism did not entail the agrarian revolution and the nationalisation of industries, banks and trusts. It meant the consolidation of the native elites in a
collaborationist relationship with the colonial elites. The prophet—not the masses—
would make the financial colonial oligarchy voluntarily leave India.
While these ideologies (Stalinism and Gandhism) are reflections on recent history,
the financial colonial oligarchy which ruled large parts of the world at that time has
been replaced by faceless global conglomerates. The main purpose of the global
accumulation of capital is to create wars and overthrow democratic governments.
Wars and the overthrowing of democracies are the latest commodities for sale.
What is being said is that these issues of Stalinism and Gandhism that we outlined
so far are not in any way academic questions. They are real, burning contemporary
22
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust, Part One, transl. Philip Wayne (London: Penguin, 1949), p. 67.
Critique
47
issues. Fascism and the overthrow of democracies are now the ‘in-things’, necessary
parts of the global fetishism of commodities. It is now fashionable to be a fascist.
But fascism is not merely a fashion. It is a violent dictatorship that replaces all forms
of democracies with authoritarian governance. Fascism has arrived, and the Indian followers of Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini and General Zia are not interested in knowing
what the falsification of history really means. Just as Hitler destroyed Germany and
Europe, Khomeini destroyed Iran and Zia destroyed Pakistan; the Indian fascists
are going to do the same with India.
In certain quarters, the idea is raised that the Left should ally with Congress, and
others to save democracy from fascism.23 While democracy is truly under siege and
threatened by a brutal form of politics, we must understand what fascism is and
how it should be fought. But one also must understand what Stalinism and Gandhism
are. After all, one cannot fight fascism with the ghosts of democracy.
One should also understand that the
Indian bourgeoisie is incapable of leading a revolutionary struggle. They are closely
bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism. They tremble for their own
property. They stand in fear of the masses. They seek compromises with British
imperialism no matter what the price and lull the Indian masses with hopes of
reforms from above.24
Revolution without a revolution
There is no doubt that India is not merely witnessing a form of modern authoritarianism—the type championed by Putin, Trump and Erdogan—but an authoritarianism
that is built on a violent racist-fascistic idea of a mythical ‘Aryan race’, in perpetual
war with the Semites (implying the Muslims). This reactionary concept has been borrowed from capitalist Europe’s ideas of race and eugenics by Indian communalfascism. That this myth of racial nationalism has created havoc in Europe since
1922, havoc that destroyed both the communist movement specifically and democracy
in general, should be borne in mind.
The question remains: ‘What is to be done?’ The naive answer is that to counter this
form of communal-fascism is to recall the Gandhian and Nehruvian basis of Indian
democracy. The political consequence of this is that the Left must align with the Congress to counter the fascist juggernaut. After all one may ask: ‘Was Gandhi not an apostle
of peace and communal harmony and was Nehru not a socialist?’ While this make seem
to be a superficially correct observation, really nothing can be further from the truth.
Such an approach would be creating terrible confusions. It would mean that one
mixes up completely distinct philosophies and ideologies—Marxism and communism
with Gandhism and capitalism—to create an anti-fascist alliance.
23
‘Left must Team with Congress (and others) to Save Democracy’, interview with Sumanta Banerjee, in
Mainstream, Vol. LVI, No. 13, 17 March 2018.
24
Leon Trotsky, ‘An Open Letter to the Workers of India’, (July 1939), in New Wave, (September 2010).
48
M. Jal
Furthermore, fascism does not emerge from a violent demented conspiracy of some
fanatics, but from the crisis of capitalism itself—the system creates this violent psychotic politics. Those advocating a Left-Congress alliance ignore this very basic materialist
idea. After all, the Congress is a party of capitalism run by capitalist barons and ideologues. Thus, how could one ally with a party of capitalism in fighting fascism?
The triumph of the BJP in election after election is explained by the fact that it has
mastered the macabre ‘art’ of mass politics that Wilhelm Reich outlined in his book
Mass Psychology of Fascism. The question thus is not to ally or not to ally with the Congress, but what the Left’s relation is with the masses. Lenin’s simple dictum that party
work in the masses is the most important aspect of the fight against fascism, a truth
forgotten by the Indian Left.
The move to ally with the Congress and maybe other bourgeois parties is not merely
pragmatism. It is revisionism and reformism of the worst kind. It is not Marxism, it is
Bernsteinism. And what will result is not some Left-liberal victory, but even more
strengthening of communal-fascist forces. The problem with the Left in India—
their isolation from the masses and their regular routs in elections—is that there is
absolutely nothing Marxist about them, most certainly nothing revolutionary. The
problem is that their worldview is heavily predicated on Stalinism and not Leninism.
They want a Revolution without a Revolution instead of a Revolution with a
Revolution.
Once upon a time they were managers of the revolution. Now they have become
managers of the counterrevolution. If they are Stalinist, and this is the primary
problem, they want:
(1) Isolated national socialism (like Stalin’s notorious ‘socialism in one country’), and
(2) State capitalism as their model governed by honest secular bureaucrats.
But they are not just Stalinists. They are also liberals. In fact, they are possibly the only
true liberals in Indian politics, unlike other political parties who base their politics on
the ideology of Caste and Capitalist Oligarchies. What could be commended about the
Left in India is that they are consistent with their Stalinism and their liberalism even
when both Stalinism and liberalism have gone out of fashion. And again—showing
their consistency—neither Stalinism or liberalism ever fought fascism either.
And remember the backbone of the international communist movement was not
broken only by Western imperialism and fascism. This was also helped by Stalinism,
or should one say primarily done by Stalinism. Stalinism represented state capitalism
governed by the Oriental despot (Marx’s favorite term) and this Asiatic form of brutal
state capitalism had necessarily to be authoritarian and brutal. The authoritarian state
needed an authoritarian personality to govern it. The authoritarian state got that
person- Stalin. One only must recall the ailing Lenin’s views on 24 December 1922
on the authoritarian personality of Stalin:
Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that
authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his
Critique
49
struggles against the CC on the question of the People’s Commissariat for Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability.
He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present CC, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely
administrative side of the work … Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite
tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in
a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of
removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all
other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely,
that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the
comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible
detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from
the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and
Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive
importance.25
One has also to remember the infamous Moscow Trials of the late 1930s when the
entire leadership of the 1917 Revolution was executed as imperialist agents! The prosecutor was Andrei Vyshinsky—once a member of the right-wing Menshevik opposition to Lenin, soon to become a collaborator of Stalin. These details are completely
forgotten by the Indian Left. They do not say why and how the Communist International was dissolved in June 1943, a dissolution that has its roots in the Stalinist
counterrevolution that was consolidated by 1928.
At best, Stalinism reflected the idea of the retreat of revolutions in Europe. It must
be understood as the counterrevolution from within; counterposed to fascism which
was defined as a counterrevolution from without. The Left in India—here I refer to
the Parliamentary Left—is weighed down so much by this terrible counterrevolutionary past—that for it to have any revolutionary consequence is almost impossible. The
‘tradition of all the dead generations (weigh) like a nightmare on the brain of the living’
(to recall a phrase of Marx).26 In the 1920s the Oriental form of Stalinist state capitalism was necessary in the Soviet Union to fight the forces of revolution. To fight the
forces of revolution in the twenty first century, fascism serves better the forces of global
reaction. Stalinism has thus become a historical anachronism. It is simply not needed.
For the Left to be truly radical, it must be Marxist. This requires a critical understanding of both world history and Indian history. It requires a detailed understanding
of what Marx meant by humanism in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844 and that communism implies a recovery of the human essence. It also requires
relating this humanist theme to Capital and understanding what the Asiatic mode
of production means in Marx’s repertoire: the way that caste forms the essential
base of this mode of production. But has the Indian Left done this? Have they
really understood Marx in this humanist way? Why don’t they philosophise the
25
V.I. Lenin, ‘Letter to the Congress, 23 December 1922’, and ‘Addition to the Letter of 24 December 1922’,
V.I. Lenin. Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 67, 67.
26
Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 96.
M. Jal
50
idea of the party as the party of free humanity? Why have the two radical democrats
from Maharashtra—Jyotiba Phule (1827–1890) and B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956)—
who challenged the caste-based social stratification as a form of ‘slavery’ not
entered their philosophical lexicon as essential elements? Why do they still flirt with
Gandhi and Nehru?
So, while fascism was counterrevolution against communism in West Europe from
1922, and Stalinism was counterrevolution against communism in Eastern Europe, the
Congress initiated the counterrevolution in India in the name of ‘Indian independence’. Since then there have been multiple counterrevolutions all over the world,
especially of the type exemplified by Ayatollah Khomeini and the political theologians
where (to recall Perry Anderson) ‘faith was subordinated to their politics’.27
Fascism in Asia has mobilised faith and converted it into a form of political mobilisation. Indian fascism in particular and Asia in general will have to be studied in all its
detailed aspects. The key questions are—Has the Left which wants to collaborate with
the Congress studied these details? Has it understood what caste in India is and what
Marx meant when he said that caste is the ‘solid foundation of Oriental despotism’?28
Have they asked what the role of caste is in providing the ideological foundation of
Indian fascism?
Further, why has the Left not been able to understand Ambedkar’s critique of caste
and Hinduism and why does it try to create a ‘Left Hinduism’ to fight the onslaught of
the communal-fascists actively backed by the Corporate Media Houses like Times
Now and Republic?29 Is there anything called ‘Left Hinduism’ or can there be no
liberty, equality and fraternity in Hinduism as Ambedkar so often put it? In this
case, for democracy to exist, would not the radical critique of Hinduism be vitally
necessary? Has the Left ever undertaken this? Forget the Congress!
And if Ambedkar is correct in his analysis of caste, where would Gandhi fit in, when
his views of caste were extremely reactionary—more reactionary than those of
Savarkar?
Forgetting revolution
It is obvious that anyone who proclaims a Revolution without a Revolution is proclaiming the restoration of capitalism. The Congress was and is the party of this restoration. Gandhi was their champion of capitalism. So, the question remains: ‘Why
invent Gandhi in the struggle against fascism?’ Further, why have ‘all shades of political opinion in India’ (to recall Perry Anderson once again) ‘from the RSS to the CPM
unite(d) in formal reverence to a national icon’?30
27
Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology, op. cit., p. 18.
Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, in Marx and Engels. On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1977), p. 40.
29
See ‘Left must Team with Congress (and others) to Save Democracy’, interview with Sumanta Banerjee, in
Mainstream, Vol. LVI, No. 13, (17 March 2018).
30
Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology, op. cit.., p. 18, n. 16.
28
Critique
51
And when the Left has suddenly discovered its Gandhian roots, one only has to
recall Ambedkar:
The Mahatma appears not to believe in thinking. He prefers to follow the saints.
Like a conservative with his reverence for consecrated notions he is afraid that if
he once again starts thinking, many ideals and institutions to which he clings will
be doomed. One must sympathise with him. For every act of independent thinking
puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril. But it is equally true that
dependence on saints cannot lead us to know the truth. The saints are after all only
human beings, and as Lord Balfour said, “the human mind is no more a truthfinding apparatus than the snout of a pig.” Insofar as he does think, to me he
really appears to be prostituting his intelligence to find reasons for supporting
this archaic social structure of the Hindus.31
Those who talk of fascism—even sometimes as they recall Georgi Dimitrov’s idea of
‘open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most
imperialist elements of finance capital’—without considering its real social bases
simply understand nothing. In India, talking of fascism and authoritarianism
without integrating an understanding of caste would be meaningless.
Recall Gandhi here where he states his most anti-humanistic idea on dalits (the
Untouchables and the most oppressed and downtrodden sections of Indian
society). Also note his strictures against dalits getting knowledge, claiming that a
dalit is a ‘person without moral education, without sense, and without knowledge.’32 If this is not apartheid, then what is it? Note another rendering of Gandhian apartheid:
I believe that interdining or intermarriage are not necessary for promoting national
unity. That dining together creates friendship is contrary to experience. If this was
true, there would have been no war in Europe … Taking food is as dirty an act as
answering the call of nature. The only difference is that after answering call of
nature we get peace while after eating food we get discomfort. Just as we perform
the act of answering the call of nature in seclusion so also the act of taking food
must also be done in seclusion.33
Consider Ambedkar’s arguments against Gandhi’s romantic view of the Indian village:
I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. I am therefore
surprised that those who condemn Provincialism and communalism should come
forward as champions of the village. What is the village but a sink of localism, a
den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the
Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as
its unit.34
31
B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Reply to the Mahatma’, in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.) The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 318.
32
M.K. Gandhi, The Bhagavad Gita (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2017), p. 3.
33
See B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Gandhism’, in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.) The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 151.
34
B.R. Ambedkar, ‘On the Draft Constitution’, in Bhagwan Das (ed.) Thus Spoke Ambedkar. Vol. I. A Stake in
the Nation (New Delhi: Navayana, 2010), p. 176.
M. Jal
52
We saw Gandhi’s extremely reactionary views on caste and humanity. Now recall
Gandhi’s views on capitalism:
I am working for the co-operation and co-ordination of capital and labour and of
landlords and tenants … You may be sure that I shall throw the whole weight of
my influence into preventing class war … No member will talk of expropriation
or extinction of private property … That is the fundamental conception of Hinduism, which has years of penance and austerity at the back of the discovery of their
truth. That is why whilst we had the saints who have burnt out their bodies and laid
down their lives in order to explore the secrets of the soul, we have none as in the
West who have laid down their lives in exploring the remotest or highest regions of
earth. 35
Now considering the above, can we not say that these views are also fascistic in form
and content? Why, after all, was Gandhi always sabotaging every democratic mode of
resistance of Ambedkar and the revolutionary communists? If this is the case, how can
we take both Ambedkar and Gandhi? And is Gandhism merely a myth and a dangerous one that is being mobilised by both the liberals and the fascists? But then why
should the Left be involved in this ideological civil war between these two bourgeois
parties?
This is because the Left fears fascism. They really believe in the myth that fascism is
the sole enemy. But the Left also wants to intervene in the ideological civil war between
the two main bourgeois parties. This is because they do not understand the Marxist
idea of secularism. Bereft of this, they cling to the liberal democratic idea of secularism
as the mere separation of religion from politics. As Prakash Karat—the ex-General
Secretary of the CPI(M)—put it, ‘There is a need to reassess the secular heritage left
behind by Gandhi.’36
What is necessary is to involve a terrain shift in the study of secularism from three
perspectives:
(1) That the politics of secularism in India has its own independent and autonomous
history determined by the concrete class struggles in South Asia, that cannot be
reduced to the West European versions of social formations (especially the question of ‘class’) and secularism,
(2) That secularism in India is continuously tied to the issues of caste and class, and,
(3) That there is a rigorous difference between ‘secularism as we know it’, or rather
liberal democratic secularism and Marx’s idea of the ‘secular’.
Elsewhere, I have written the following:
According to Žižek (he is quoting Gilles Deleuze here): “If you’re trapped in the
dream of the other, you’re fucked”. What I am claiming is that both the dreams
of the liberals and the fascists are the dreams of the other, the other who is not
35
M.K. Gandhi, ‘Answers to Zamindars’ [25 July 1934], in Rudrangshu Mukherjee (ed.) The Penguin Gandhi
Reader (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 238–240.
36
Prakash Karat, ‘EMS on Gandhi’, EMS Namboodripad, in The Mahatma and the Ism (New Delhi: Left
Word, 2010), p. 17.
Critique
53
merely the other (the “humanistic other” of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844), but the “other as hell” (to recall Jean-Paul Sartre) the
“hellish other” who now appears as the “big Other” and the “symbolic order” (as
Jacques Lacan had put it). What I am also claiming is that because one has not
been able to differentiate the liberal view of secularism (as the mere separation of
religion and state) from the continent of knowledge that Marx opened (the continent of knowledge of understanding history as insurrection), one is blunting the
politics of anti-fascism in India.37
It is necessary to understand that there are three ideas of secularism:
(1) The commonsensical (in the Gramscian sense), where secularism implies the political narrative which involves democracy in the everyday life-world. This commonsensical narrative confronts caste and communalism at the pre-conceptual,
pre-theoretical levels. This is the everyday idea of secularism as used by the
popular classes of India. Secularism here implies fraternity and promotes the
ideas of equality and citizenship.
(2) The liberal democratic idea which itself has different parts: the separation of state
and religion, the privatisation of faith, the equality of all religions and the spirit of
tolerance; and
(3) The Marxist idea of secularism which talks of the historicisation and humanisation of society and the transcendence (Aufhebung) of religion and the state, along
with the complete transcendence of class society itself.
When the Left in India refers to secularism it refers to Gandhi and Nehru, not Marx.
It does not talk of Marx’s On the Jewish Question where Marx talks of the question of
secularism as inexorably linked to the terrains of capitalist civil society and the bourgeois state. The thesis of separation of religion and the state is totally bourgeois in the
West European liberal sense. It is not Marxist. The Marxist idea is the transcendence of
both religion and the state.
The problem with the Indian Left is that it does not talk of the Marxist theory of the
state, but the liberal bourgeois state. In wanting the bourgeois republic, they actually
want the bourgeois state, forgetting Marx observation that, ‘In the state … humanity is
the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life
and endowed with unreal universality.’38
For Marx the state is the realm of universality as against civil society which is the
real of particularity, true, but it is an ‘unreal universality’, in fact as alienated
universality:
The members of the political state are religious owing to the dualism between individual life and species life (Gattungsleben), between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious because humanity treats the political life of the state, an
37
See my ‘Confronting Communal-fascism @Bolshevik.com’, in Zaheer Ali (ed.) Secularism under Siege:
Revisiting the Indian Secular State (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2016).
38
Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Marx. Engels. Collected Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 152.
M. Jal
54
area beyond their real individuality, as if it were their true life. They are religious
insofar as religion here is the spirit of civil society, expressing the separation and
remoteness of human from human. [Both emphases are mine] Political democracy
is Christian since in it humanity, not merely one human but every human, ranks as
sovereign, as the highest being, but it is the human in his uncivilised, unsocial form,
the human in his fortuitous existence, the human just as he is, the human as he has
been corrupted by the whole organisation of our society, who has lost himself, been
alienated, and handed over to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements—in
short, the human who is not yet a real species-being. That which is a creation of
fantasy, a dream, a postulate of Christianity, i.e. the sovereignty of humanity—
but humanity as an alien being different from the real human—becomes, in democracy, tangible reality, present existence, and secular principle.39
The Indian Left (like the Indian liberals) forget that for Marx, the state as fantasy and
dream is necessarily ‘divorced from the real individual and collective interests’ and
thus takes the phantasmagorical form of an ‘illusory community’.40 They forget that
the state becomes an ‘alien power’, ‘alien [“fremd”] to them and “independent” of
them’.41 What the fascists have learned is taking total control of this alienation.
They are the masters of alienation. Unfortunately the theory of alienation that Marx
keeps central to not only the question of capitalism, but central to the human condition under capitalism, is almost never considered in the political theory and practice
of the Indian Left.
If Louis Althusser thought (wrongly so) that the idea of alienation was that of an
idealist ‘young Marx’,42 the Indian Left never ever considered this idea at all. Likewise,
Althusser’s rebuking the idea of ‘socialist humanism’ was not merely philosophically
incorrect, it was a dangerous idea.43 Fascism consequently emerged from this nasty
soil of alienation and anti-humanism. The problem with the Indian Left is that it
has not been able to relate Marx’s philosophy with his politics. In fact, the Indian
Left obsessed with the pre-Marxist theory of materialism, could never fathom his
philosophy of human emancipation and revolution.
That is why the Indian Left does not talk of revolution. It only talks of the parliamentary fight against fascism, while wining and dining with the same fascists in parliament.
Fascism in the east: yearning for Pagan Nostalgia
Let us see one view of the Indian variation of fascism. The essence of Indian fascism
lies in the romantic view of a ‘Hindu empire’ where Hindutva as the Vedic form of
paganism is celebrated. Note that this form of romantic nostalgia which the Indian fascists are trying to mobilise is a view shared by liberal thinkers like S. Radhakrishnan, a
Congress party member and the second President of independent India (1962–1967).
39
40
41
42
43
Ibid., p. 159.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 52.
Ibid., p. 53.
Louis Althusser, For Marx, transl. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), pp. 11–3, 36–7, 52–3, 103.
See the chapter ‘Marxism and Humanism’, Ibid., pp 219–247.
Critique
55
His The Hindu View of Life makes clear not only the nostalgia but also the deriding of
modernity, a reactionary view that he held alongside Gandhi.44 The problem is that the
‘Indian Enlightenment’ has its roots more in the views of the upper caste elites from
Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) onwards. It completely forgets Phule and Ambedkar. Both the liberal and the fascist elites yearn for nostalgia. The only difference is that
the former is not exclusivist. But then the question we must poses is: Do not the liberals not also yearn for this mythical ‘Hindu Rashtra’? After all, what was Gandhi’s
Ram Rajya? And why did Gandhi along with Aurobindo and Vivekananda share
the philosophical fascination for the Gita, a book that fascinated also the Nazi
second in command Heinrich Himmler—a man who imagined that he was Arjuna
and Hitler was Krishna? Note the following from Maximiani Portas (the GrecoFrench Nazi writer) soon to become Savitri Devi, who apparently was also a philosophical devote of the Gita, a text that Ambedkar calls ‘a philosophic defence of war and
killing in war’ and ‘the Bible of counterrevolution’:45
Hindudom has reached a stage where it has either to die out, or else, to react vigorously—and then, not merely to survive, but to rule. There is no third alternative. If
Hindudom were to die, India would no longer be India. But what if Hindudom were
to react, and rule? Most Hindus are not deeply interested in their vital today’s
problem: to live or to die, just because they cannot imagine vividly enough what
it means to live. To live, for a nation, means: to rule. And, as the Hindu leaders
repeat, the Hindus are a nation, not a community. They are a nation that is not conscious of its existence, but that still is a nation, just as a man is still himself, while
asleep. Nobody can tell what would happen, if the Hindus were to awake. First,
future free India would be a reconquered Hindu India … Hindudom, once, used
to extend over what is now Afghanistan, over Java, over Cambodia etc. The wife
of Dhritarashtra was a princess from Gandahar, that is to say Afghanistan, and
the remotest kings of Java, Cambodia etc. were Indian kings. Powerful Hindu
India could reconquer these lands and give them back the pride of their Indian civilisation. She could make Greater India once more a cultural reality, and a political
one too—why not? And further still (who knows?), she could spread her name,
assert her strength, establish her glory, wherever there are lands with a great
culture that has been forsaken, lands waiting to be given back to themselves.46
While this romantic nostalgia must be noted, the real question that one needs to ask is
that is fascism as understood by liberalism the sole danger? Note that the three great
spiritualist philosophers of pre-independent India—Aurobindo (1872–1950), Keshab
Chunder Sen (1838–1884) and Vivekananda (1863–1902) (all part of the liberal narrative)—also had the same views of nationalism as the spiritual-cultural nationalism of
Savitri Devi.
After all, did not these three spiritual nationalists also talk of theological nationalism
which is to ‘expand and extend itself over the world’, to borrow a phrase from
44
See S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life (Noida: Harpercollins, 2012), p. 61.
B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Krishna and His Gita’, in The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar, ed. Valerian Rodrigues
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 193, 195.
46
Savatri Devi, Warning to the Hindus (Calcutta, 1939), p. 76.
45
56
M. Jal
Aurobindo? Did not Vivekananda say that ‘we must conquer the world through our
spirituality and philosophy’? Thus, do not the above stated views of Savitri Devi
also reflect the views of the liberals, albeit the ‘spiritual liberals’? So, are we to fight
for bourgeois democracy (as ‘spiritual democracy’) in the struggle against fascism?
Or should we see the economic roots of this romantic nostalgia which now has
become fascistic in the sense that it wants to become violent against its own citizens?
In the Marxist sense though, one cannot be reductionist; one also cannot take the
question of fascism in the bourgeois liberal (mere cultural and political) sense. After
all, should the revolutionaries fear and tremble in front of the bourgeois monster?
And most importantly does the Congress want to fight fascism, or only the BJP?
It is imperative that while we cannot accept the liberal idea of anti-fascism, we also
cannot take the Stalinist one. What one does in these liberal and Stalinist paradigms is
to completely forget the socialist programme of the international overthrow of global
capitalism. In fact, fascism the world over has been triumphant when anti-fascism has
taken these liberal and Stalinist turns- from the coup of Mussolini in 1922, the victory
of Hitler in the 1933 national elections, to the 1979 Mullah coup against the Tudeh
party in Iran and the complete theological-militarisation of Pakistan since Zia.
Recall Trotsky’s words in his 1939 letter to the Indian workers:
Agents of the British government depict the matter as though the war will be waged
for principles of “democracy” which must be saved from fascism. All classes and
peoples must rally around the “peaceful” “democratic” governments so as to repel
the fascist aggressors. Then “democracy” will be saved and peace stabilised
forever. This gospel rests on a deliberate lie. If the British government were really
concerned with the flowering of democracy, then a very simple opportunity to
demonstrate this exists: let the government give complete freedom to India. The
right of national independence is one of the elementary democratic rights. But actually, the London government is ready to hand over all the democracies in the world
in return for one tenth of its colonies. If the Indian people do not wish to remain as
slaves for all eternity, then they must expose and reject those false preachers who
assert that the sole enemy of the people is fascism. Hitler and Mussolini are,
beyond doubt, the bitterest enemies of the toilers and oppressed. They are gory
executioners, deserving of the greatest hatred from the toilers and oppressed of
the world. But they are, before everything, the enemies of the German and Italian
peoples on whose backs they sit. The oppressed classes and peoples—as Marx,
Engels, Lenin and Liebknecht have taught us—must always seek out their main
enemy at home, cast in the role of their own immediate oppressors and exploiters.
In India that enemy above all is the British bourgeoisie. The overthrow of British
imperialism would deliver a terrible blow at all the oppressors, including the
fascist dictators. In the long run the imperialists are distinguished from one
another in form—not in essence. German imperialism, deprived of colonies, puts
on the fearful mask of fascism with its saber teeth protruding. British imperialism,
gorged, because it possesses immense colonies, hides its saber teeth behind a mask of
democracy. But this democracy exists only for the metropolitan center, for the
45,000,000 souls—or more correctly, for the ruling bourgeoisie—in the metropolitan center. India is deprived not only of democracy but of the most elementary right
of national independence. Imperialist democracy is thus the democracy of slave
Critique
57
owners fed by the lifeblood of the colonies. But India seeks her own democracy, and
not to serve as fertiliser for the slave owners. Those who desire to end fascism, reaction and all forms of oppression must overthrow imperialism. There is no other
road. This task cannot, however, be accomplished by peaceful methods, by negotiations and pledges. Never before in history have slave owners voluntarily freed
their slaves. Only a bold, resolute struggle of the Indian people for their economic
and national emancipation can free India.47
Ever since the Indian Left got sucked into parliamentary politics, forgetting its essential alienating power, they became totally detached from real revolutionary concerns
and struggles. They forget that fascism, especially Nazism, was not merely a terrible
dictatorial rule of finance capitalism, but also that it was fascinated with the East,
especially with ancient India, the ideology of the Vedas and the caste system. This
‘Indian connection’ of German fascism has not been explored in detail. Savitri Devi
in her Warning to the Hindus, as we have noted, talks of the fascination of Europe
for India’s past; a pagan past which was no different from Gandhi’s romantic nostalgia
for this deluded history. This nostalgia and glorification for the past is a fixation of the
Indian upper caste elites, to which Ambedkar warned in the last pages of his Annihilation of Caste: ‘stop worship(ing) the past!’48 The problem with both the liberals and
the fascists is they are obsessed with the past which creates a form of irrationality that
Georg Lukács outlined in his The Destruction of Reason, irrationality that gives rise to
fascist instincts. The question that the present Indian Left is not posing is that why
Marx, Engels and Lenin were always critical of idealism and spiritualism, claiming
that after Hegel there was no possibility of any further development of idealism as a
progressive force? Why then is the Left, when they find that they are politically in
retreat, want to ally with the party of idealism and spiritualism? Can one fight spiritual
fascism by another form of spiritualism?
In my In the Name of Marx I said the following about fascism in India and the
relation of the Nazis to India:
It must be noted that the Indian fascists place at the centre of their violent ideology
the figure of the warrior-priest. One must also note that this caste-based idea of the
warrior-priest ideology evoked by the Indian fascists and their contempt for the
Indian liberals, especially secular democracy in general and Jawaharlal Nehru and
M.K. Gandhi in particular, is because the latter did not believe in this warriorpriest ideology. It must also be noted that it is not merely the case that the
Indian fascists borrowed (and continue borrowing) from the Nazis. What is interesting to note is that the Nazis were avid readers of the Vedas and the Gita. And
considering that the Gita, as the so-called ‘Holy Book’ of Hinduism, is being propelled by the RSS to be the National Book, it also implies that the Democratic Constitution is also in the process of being sidelined. It must be noted that Heinrich
Himmler imagined that he was the mythical Hindu ‘hero’ Arjun and Hitler was
Krishna, the ideologist par excellence of the caste system. For Himmler deeds of
47
Leon Trotsky, ‘An Open Letter to the Workers of India’, (July 1939), op.cit.
B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.) The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 303.
48
M. Jal
58
the most violent type do not harm the inner self. This he learnt from the Gita. Note
also how Mathias Tietke the German author of Yoga in the Third Reich: Concepts,
Contrasts, Consequences talks of how Himmler lectured on reaching the status of
“Kshatriyakaste” (the military and ruling elite of ancient India) where salvation
(Moksha) is realised through bloody wars. Note also that for Walter WustGerman Orientalist and Nazi ideologue who from 1937 was the President of the
Research Institute of the Ahnenerbe (literally “inherited from the forefathers”)—
Hitler was a “Chakravartin” (Indo-Aryan world emperor). In his speech of
Posener, Himmler—influenced by the spirit of Gita where Krishna the hero of
Hindu religion instructs Arjuna to attack his kin and kill them—said that it was
the duty of every associate of the SS to carry out action without pity and without considering any human relationships. In this age of mass yoga, which the contemporary
Indian fascist government is promoting, it is important to note how yoga enthusiasts
like the German Indologist and SS Capt. Jakob Wilhelm Hauer influenced the Nazis
on the Aryan theory of racial superiority. The Nazi order according to Himmler was
conceived as a spiritual order—a spirituality that led to the consciousness of the superman—willing to kill without looking at the consequences, killing of relatives and
family members not excluded. He demanded that one must detach oneself from
such concepts as “good” and “evil.” Moksha is this fascist going beyond good and
evil. Without this understanding, it is impossible to understand the rise of Indian
fascism. Why do we say this? We say this because the Indian bourgeois democratic
revolution has not been accomplished and can never be accomplished. In this
sense the very idea of the bourgeois democratic revolution could be a myth. This is
because the bourgeoisie was incapable of being revolutionary anymore. In India the
bourgeoisie (especially the bania capitalists, the Kshatriya kulaks and upper caste
ideologues, along with the political kulaks and the bureaucracy) carried caste
within its economic base and ideological cranium.49
While we were told that Savarkar and Golwalkar (the two chief ideologues of the
Indian fascist movement) borrowed from the cranium of European fascism, the
reverse, namely the ideological borrowing of the Nazis from Indian Brahmanical
orthodoxy has not been spelt out in detail. Consequently, the struggle against
fascism is not merely a political fight against this or that organisation. It is a struggle
against a deep-rooted social system. Gandhi’s role and that of the Congress in the
reproduction of caste cannot be wished away. Merely saying that the Congress is
for Hindu-Muslim unity while the BJP promotes antagonism will simply not work.
Caste is the basis; Hindu-Muslim hostility is the effect of this cruel base. Colonialism
and the colonial administration that independent India inherited did not attack the
base or the effect. Instead it promoted them. This promotion, this refusal to annihilate
the caste system, this refusal to democratise in social terms, this fooling with Gandhian
pedagogy, has only helped the growth of fascistic forces.
Gandhism weakened the Left. It has weakened the fight against the Shiv Sena (a
fascist party based in Maharashtra) since the 1960s. Stalinism meanwhile made
them bereft of revolutionary thinking. Since the Left married Gandhism and Stalinism,
the rise of fascism was inevitable.
49
See my In the Name of Marx (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2018), pp. 52–3.
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Capitalism is not merely in crisis; it is crisis itself. One cannot save it. Fascism is a
response to this crisis. The struggle against fascism is at the same time the struggle
against capitalism. Try getting the Congress in the struggle against capitalism and
you will see them on the other side of the barricades along with the communal-fascists
where Congress’s promise of liberty, equality and fraternity will be seen marching with
fascism’s infantry, artillery and cavalry.
Conclusion: discovering new games
The question is not of the Left aligning with the Congress or not, but how it reinvents itself, how it goes to the masses and talks directly to the working people, not
talking with Congress oligarchs and satraps. Look deep down into the fascist party.
You will not only see the original fascists, but also the born-again fascists who were
members once upon a time of the Congress party. After all, the founders of the
Indian fascist movement were all at one time or the other Congress members. It
was Phule and Ambedkar who were not members of this party of the elites. In
fact, it was they who vehemently opposed the Congress as the party of the
counterrevolution.
Gandhi was, as Ambedkar said in his December 1955 interview with the BBC,
merely an ‘episode’ not an ‘epoch making’ figure. But he was made epoch-making
by the global elites. Thus he was raised to a myth created by the Western and Nehruvian elites. His fighting British colonialism and then influencing Martin Luther King
and Nelson Mandela are parts of this bourgeois myth. It is in this false history that the
fascists stepped in with their total communal rewriting of history.
True, Gandhi talked of Hindu-Muslim unity, but this unity was itself false because
nothing called ‘Hinduism’ ever existed and that ‘Hindu society is a myth’.50 If Ambedkar was right in saying that Hindu society was a myth and that ‘Hindu society as such
does not exist’51 and the idea of Hinduism emerges only ‘when there is a HinduMuslim riot’,52 then where stands Gandhi and the liberals with their phantasy of
Hindu-Muslim unity? The radical term is Bahujan which Phule outlined, or the ‘multitude’ that we know from the repertoire of Antonio Negri. This Bahujan/multitude
displaces the colonial categorisations of Hindu/Muslim, etc.
Likewise, Gandhi opposed ‘truth’ and satyagraha to the ‘mob’.53 The mob, meaning
the Bahujan/multitude is essentially violent for Gandhi. But the Bahujan/multitude is
not merely the mob. People comprising this ‘mob’ are ‘hooligans’.54 Gandhi’s language
is completely reactionary. His talk of Satan and religion is the same that Khomeini
50
B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’, in Valerian Rodrigues (ed.) The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 267.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
53
M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Crime of Chauri Chaura’, 16 February 1922, in Rudrangshu Mukherjee (ed.) The
Penguin Gandhi Reader (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 150.
54
Ibid., p. 151.
M. Jal
60
would do after some decades.55 Well before Khomeini thought that he was blessed by
God, Gandhi imagined that he too was blessed by the heavens.56
But what did the pre-Khomeini God teach Gandhi? God taught Gandhi non-violence. Now what exactly are the details of God’s message of non-violence to
Gandhi? According to this macabre ideology of non-violence ‘all killing is not
himsa’.57 For he ‘alone can practice ahimsa who knows how to kill’.58 Thus, ‘You
cannot teach ahimsa to a man who cannot kill. You cannot make a dumb man
appreciate the beauty and the merit of silence.’59 Further, ‘the practice of ahimsa
may even necessitate killing and that we as a nation have lost the true power of
killing. Clearly, he who has lost the power to kill cannot practice non-killing.
Ahimsa is a renunciation of the highest type.’60
But is this not the same ethos that Himmler instilled in the SS? Consequently, from
these rather strange treatises what we learn is that we get a rigorous line of demarcation (a term that we borrow from Lenin’s What is to be Done? and Louis Althusser’s
Lenin and Philosophy) between the democratic repertoire of Phule and Ambedkar
(Bahujan/multitude) and the occultist and communal one of the colonialists and
Gandhi (Hindu/Muslim phantasy). In fact, Gandhi was responsible for creating not
only the myth of non-violence—i.e., non-violence with violence—but also the imagined
Hindu demography. The fascists merely exploited this. What the fascists did was
transform what Walter Benjamin called ‘mourning play’ (Trauerspeil) along with
pity and suffering from the Gandhian repertoire into the mass hysteria of fascism.
Marxism cannot work on the site of the caste and colonial elites. It cannot work
within colonial cartography. Likewise, it cannot be class reductionist and caste
blind. It cannot borrow blindly from the cranium of the European working class
movement. It must have its own site of operation. This what Marx said again and
again. Recall his 1877 letter to the Naronikis when he said that one cannot have a
‘master key’ which is used as a ‘general historic-philosophico theory, the supreme
virtue of which consists in being supra-historical’.61
The Left in India has truly become supra-historical. But they can never raise this
supra-history to the level of myth which the fascists have achieved. It is thus important
to note that the Left cannot play the games invented by the elites. It must create its own
games. But the Stalinist oligarchs will never allow this. They will only create myths to
counter the fascist ones.
55
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 152.
57
M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Hanumantrao’, 17 July 1918, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14
(Ahmedabad: The Publication Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India,
1965), p. 485.
58
M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Ras’, 26 June 1918, The Bombay Chronicle, 2 July 1918, Collected Works of
Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14, p. 454
59
M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to C.F. Andrews’ 23 June 1918, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14, p. 444.
60
M.K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Hanumantrao’, 17 July 1918, ibid., p. 485
61
Karl Marx, ‘To the Editorial Board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski’, London, November 1877, in Marx and
Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 294.
56
Critique
61
Meanwhile the 2019 National Elections are knocking at the doors of the Indian
Republic. Are the comrades listening?
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Murzban Jal is Professor and Director at the Centre for Educational Studies, Indian
Institute of Education, Pune. He is the author of several books. Email: murzbanjal@
hotmail.com
Murzban Jal