In his reply to the Motion of Thanks on the President’s address to Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an important point, which highlighted a hitherto unnoticed fact of India’s politics and economy: The huge political and intellectual influence that the Left has enjoyed since Independence, the influence that has been greatly disproportionate to their electoral strength.
“In the 1960s and 1970s, the Left always criticised Birlas and Tatas. That Tata-Birla were running the country… You have not only aligned with the Left but also adopted the same language. Only the punching bag has changed, not the mentality,” PM Modi rightly said.
Evidently, the Prime Minister was referring to the Congress-Communist Party of India alliance for just seven years (1970-77) but had a huge bearing on not just politics but also the economy, society, culture, and intellectual history since then. In fact, then prime minister Indira Gandhi’s flirtation with the Left had begun even before the formal alliance; this had enormous consequences, such as the nationalisation of banks and insurance companies, the consequences, which are tormenting the economy and nation to date.
Interestingly, what PM Modi said on February 7 was almost hinted at a few months ago by a senior Congress leader and former Union minister Manish Tewari. In the wake of CPI leader Kanhaiya Kumar’s joining the grand old party, Tewari tweeted, “As speculation abounds about certain communist leaders joining @INCIndia it perhaps may be instructive to revisit a 1973 book ‘Communists in Congress’ Kumarmanglam Thesis. The more things change the more they perhaps remain the same. I re-read it today.”
Tewari is one of the 23 Congress rebels who earlier wrote to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi seeking an organisational overhaul and restructuring. He was referring to a thesis by senior CPI leader S Mohan Kumaramangalam, which was about communists joining the Congress and converting it to their own cause.
Satindra Singh, who was a card-carrying member of the CPI for a decade but was disillusioned by communism, wrote in a book ‘Communists in Congress (1973)’: “Mr. Kumarmangalam’s ‘Thesis,’ entitled ‘A Review of Party Policy Since 1947,’ was submitted as a confidential document of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1964. It was then unceremoniously consigned to the party archives. In early 1969, he submitted it again with a postscript dealing with political and economic developments in the country during the intervening period. On this occasion, the party leadership plumped for it.”
Kumaramangalam’s ‘thesis’ is to “infiltrate” the GOP, “own” its radical slogans and launch movements in support of these demands and “pressurize” the Congress leadership both within and without with the ultimate object of capturing power.
The political alliance helped the Leftists entrench themselves in the system. They became opinion-makers and, in some cases, like Jawaharlal Nehru University, which was dominated by Leftist teachers, the opinion-makers of opinion-makers. Committed Leftist activists, Left-libbers, and pinkish intellectuals would decide the syllabi for universities, write textbooks for school students, set norms in the fields of art and culture, man the committees giving awards to creative writers, dominate edit pages of major dailies and columns of news magazines, and promote ‘art’ cinema.
The worst effect of such intellectual hegemony was that generation after generation was indoctrinated with the calamitous socialist doctrines, especially its economic interpretations. So, capitalism was equated with exploitation, inequality, iniquity, and worse, while socialism and often communism were described as noble ideologies.
This was despite the fact that socialism and communism result in dreadful collectivisation drives, concentration camps, and mass murder. Consider this: over 100 million people died under various socialist and communist regimes in the last century. Even the Left-leaning Amartya Sen concedes that in Mao’s China 30 million to 40 million people died because of the implementation of various revolutionary projects.
Capitalism, on the other hand, has produced the richest and freest societies. Even in India—which was essentially socialist till 1991 when some of the worst controls were removed—the adoption of free market principles, though haltingly, has resulted in the uplift of hundreds of millions of people since liberalisation.
And yet, as PM Modi said, the Congress refuses to shed the Leftist mentality. Whether it is the issue of opening up of the farm sector, which the three now withdrawn laws intended to do, or the sale of public sector undertakings, the GOP is opposed to any sort of liberalisation.
Worse, the sister organisations of the ruling party are also wedded to socialist thinking. In fact, bizarre though it might appear but true it is that there is hardly any difference between the economic philosophies of the Sangh Parivar bodies such as Swadeshi Jagran Manch and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh.
The innumerable students who read and (sometimes unconsciously) imbibed the lies of socialism in their school and college textbooks became bureaucrats, academics, journalists, writers, judges, and lawyers—in short, the decision and policy makers of the nation. They may be important people in the current regime but their worldview, especially on the matters related to the economy, remain more or less the same: capitalists are bloodsucking vampires who thrive at the expense of their employees; in capitalism profits are privatised and losses nationalised; the country, indeed the world, needs to be saved by way of state intervention; society ought to be shielded from the excesses of market; long is the list of socialist lies, myths, and fairy tales.
The lies and fables, however, have real consequences, as evident from the RSS affiliates mouthing socialist slogans.
The Left may be dead politically but it lives on ideologically.
The author is a freelance journalist. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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