Between 1936 and 1947, the Communist Party of India grew from a base of few hundred cadre to 80,000. During one of the most critical phases of its history, when it supported the British war effort in 1942, the Party actually expanded and brought into its fold people who later became major cultural figures. When the Royal Indian Mutiny took place in 1946, the flags of three political groups were flown on the mutinous ships- that of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League and the CPI. The then leader of the CPI was also the first person to address Gandhi as the ‘father of the nation’. Given the aura that the party built up at that time, its leader at that time is relatively little known. If his comrades in arms in the party who took over immediately after him had their way, his name would have been completely written off. As it were, they almost succeeded.

There has been little or no remembrance on the part of the CPI and CPM for PC Joshi.

After all, the intellectual decline and current mediocrity of the CPM was achieved at the cost of dismantling the heritage of Joshi, particularly by Pramod Dasgupta.

PC Joshi’s major fault, in their eyes, was that he saw 15 August 1947 as the achievement of Indian independence. An overwhelming majority of the CPI’s leaders at that time felt it was otherwise. Ye azadi jhooti hai, they proclaimed. Faiz even wrote a famous nazm heralding the ‘false’ dawn- jis sehr ka intezaar tha, yeh woh sehr toh nahin.

History, however, proved PC Joshi right. Freedom, blighted as it was, had indeed arrived. But this was not the only manner in which PCJ was redeemed. His advocacy of a Congress- Communist alliance to defeat Right reaction has been by and large accepted even by the CPM, evident in its support for the UPA between 2004-2008. PCJ’s other major contributions- of involving the party cadre in relief work, as in 1943 when the CPI cadres were at the forefront during the Bengal famine, and his ability to branch off a cultural renaissance (IPTA, PWA) have not been surpassed. The communist cadre is rarely involved in any kind of social action nowadays, leaving the field open to organizations like the RSS and religious outfits.

PCJ’s towering personality when he was the General Secretary of the Party is also impressive because of his relatively young age at the time. He was merely 28 years old when he became the general secretary of the CPI. He was later to remark that he might have succeeded in taking the party with him, had he been older. The Party was young and it was not out of place for it to have such a young person at its helm. In a sense, PCJ represented the youthful creativity of the Party before it became mired in a bureaucratic mess.

It is not that PCJ was without faults other than the lack of experience owning to his youthful age. A few of PCJ’s faults are glaring- his stress on bringing the ‘best’ intellectually equipped (read Cambridge educated, upper caste) youngsters into key positions, his inability to carry his peers along with him, his admiration of Stalin and his ignorance of caste. Indeed, nearly the entire leadership of the CPI was Brahmin (Joshi, Dange, Adhikari, BT Ranadive and so on) or upper caste (Hindu or Muslim). Whatever be his weaknesses, he shall forever remain the youthful face of the Party in its years of infancy. His all too mortal flaws pale in contrast to the amount of injustice done to him and his memory.

PCJ was forcibly removed from his post in 1948 and the dogmatic BT Ranadive took over. That was the start of the line of armed struggle inherited from the Telengana movement. Within two years, the Party faced reversals. The CPI was banned, its leadership was forced to be underground and party cadre was at the receiving end of the newly formed Indian government. By the time the Party came out of the left sectarian line in 1951, it was much more than bruised. It was mauled. Membership had declined from a peak of 90,000 in 1948 to a mere 9,000.

The CPI then accepted the reality of Indian freedom, though with a bloodied face. The CPI, and later the CPM, continued to sideline PCJ as well as what he stood for, contributing to their decline as a political force and their ideological appeal.

PCJ’s biography has finally been written by the historian Gargi Chakravartty and was released on the birth centenary of PCJ on 14 April 2007. It has been published by the National Book Trust which is currently headed by Bipan Chandra. Both deserve credit for bringing out this slim and illuminating book. I have only one small quibble, in that there seems to be no reference to the work done on the early years of PC Joshi and the CPI by Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh in their three volume study Struggle for Hegemony in India.

Readers are referred to a more detailed review of the book by Daya Verma.

An overwhelming majority of hits that new posts on this blog receive of late are via twitter and facebook. Given their popularity, I am adding interfaces to both to make a reader’s words more accessible on both platforms.

Click here to follow via twitter (thanks to twitterfeed).

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Mahatama Gandhi’s posthumous adulation is in sharp contrast to the treatment that he received during his lifetime and even for many decades after his death. The Rashtriya Swayemsewak Sangh (RSS) criticized him for his perceived closeness to the Muslims, Muslims saw him as one who popularized Hindu symbolism in Indian politics, progressive Muslims opposed his support for the Khilafat movement and the communists opposed his advocacy of class collaboration. Even his closest followers like Pandit Nehru did not share his vision best laid out in Hind Swaraj[pdf].

Indeed, Gandhi’s politics was contradictory and invited criticism from many sides. His ‘non- violence’ has found support internationally- Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King and more recently Obama’s reiteration of the Mahatma’s message as being pertinent for our times. There seems to be a fatigue on part of his Indian critics, though. A section of Left nationalists like Bipan Chandra ¹, Prof. PC Joshi² and the communist ideologue Mohit Sen have come to admire Gandhi’s political vision, mainstream communists, particularly the CPI(M), ignore him. The RSS and other Hindutva outfits, except for an occasional outburst, too ignore him. Though this is in sharp contrast to earlier times. Golwalkar, for example, had commented thus on Gandhi (without naming him, though)³ :

Those who declare ‘No swaraj without Hindu- Muslim unity’ have thus perpetrated the greatest treason to our society. They have committed the most heinous sin of killing the life- spirit of a great and ancient people. To preach impotency to a society which gave rise to Shivaji who, in the words of the historian Jadunath Sarkar, ‘proved to the whole world that the Hindu has drunk the elixir of immortality’ and to break the self- confident and proud spirit of such a great and virile society has no parallel in the history of the world for sheer magnitude of its betrayal.

While politically Gandhi may be ignored today, he has found newer adherents among the intelligentsia in the form of what is sometimes called the ‘neo- Gandhian school‘, particularly Ashish Nandy, Bhiku Parikh and TN Madan. The only ideological and political current of thought that is heavily critical of Gandhi is the Dalit stream deriving it’s inspiration from Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar.

It is indeed pertinent to remember what Dr. Ambedkar had to say about Gandhi and Gandhism. The first of his accusations was that Gandhi was an advocate of class collaboration. In his essay ‘Gandhism’, he wrote:

Mr Gandhi does not wish to hurt the propertied class. He is even opposed to a campaign against them. He has no passion for economic equality… His solution for the economic conflict between the owners and workers, between the rich and the poor, between the landlords and tenants, between the employers and the employees is very simple. The owners need not deprive themselves of property…⁴

There was nothing new in this criticism even when it was written. The communists were already saying this and Dr Ambedkar acknowledged the same.

It is the other point that the latter raised that was original, and makes Dr Ambedkar standout as a far better Marxist than all the Indian communist ideologues put together. This was in relation to Gandhi’s extremely reactionary approach towards caste. Once this perspective was adopted, all Ambedkar had to do was quote Gandhi in full and his historically regressive stance became evident. The communists missed this altogether partly because of their class based analysis but much more because they were dominated and controlled by the Brahmins and upper castes.

Ambedkar quotes from Gandhi’s Gujarati journal Nava Jiwan (1922):

1. I believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand it is because it is founded on the caste system.

2. The seeds of Swaraj are to be found in the caste system. Different castes are like different sections of military division. Each division is working for the good of the whole.

3. A community which can create the caste system must be said to possess unique power of organization.

4. Caste has a ready made means for spreading primary education. Every caste can take responsibility for the education of the children of the caste…

5. I believe that interdining and intermarriage are not necessary for promoting national unity. That dining together creates friendship is contrary to experience…

6. … The caste system cannot be said to be bad because it does not allow interdining or intermarriage between different castes.

7. Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment…

8. To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder…

The grounds for supporting the caste system was obviously to maintain social stability. Indeed Gandhi himself had said so in his writing ‘ Caste versus Class’⁵.

Ambedkar’s scathing criticism of ‘Gandhism’ is summarized well below:

What hope can Gandhism offer to the untouchables? To the untouchables, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors. The sanctity and infallibility of the Vedas, Smritis and Shastras, the iron law of caste, the heartless law of Karma, and the senseless law of status birth are to the untouchables veritable instruments of torture which Hinduism has forged against the untouchables. These very instruments which have mutilated, blasted and blighted the life of untouchables are to be found intact and untarnished in the bosom of Gandhism. How can the untouchables say that Gandhism is a heaven and not a chamber of horrors as Hinduism has been? The only reaction and a very natural reaction of untouchables would be to run away from Gandhi.

Elsewhere Ambedkar traced the roots of Gandhi’s conservatism⁶:

As a Mahatma, he may be trying to spiritualize politics. Whether he has succeeded or not politics has surely commercialized him. A politician must know that society cannot bear the whole truth and that he must not speak the whole truth; if he is speaking the whole truth then it is bad for his politics. The reason why the Mahatma is always supporting caste and varna is because he is afraid that if he opposed them he will lose his place in politics. Whatever maybe the source of this confusion the Mahatma must be told that he is deceiving himself and also deceiving the people by preaching caste under the name of varna.

While there is no gainsaying the fact that Gandhi was an astute politician and a great anti- imperialist leader, he lacked the stamina for a social revolution. Indeed, he did his best to maintain ’social stability’ and hence was in essence a reactionary.

For an overwhelming number of people who constitute the poor and the working classes in the country, there are grounds to feel no need for his ideals in the 21st century and are justified, as Dr. Ambedkar indicated, in trying to ‘run away from Gandhi’.

***
Notes:
1. India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra et al.
2. Essay on Gandhi by PC Joshi published in National and Left Movements in India
3. page 150,151, A Bunch of Thoughts by MS Golwalkar (1966 edition)
4. Page 157, Essential Writings of Dr. Ambedkar by Valerian Rodrigues, OUP, 2002
5. Page 313, op cit (“Reply to the Mahatma”)
6. Page 316, op cit (“Reply to the Mahatma”)

Hats off to the Maoists in Nepal for taking the caste question to the UN level. This is in sharp contrast to the stance taken by the Indian government all through. During the World Conference Against Racism in Durban (2001) India had opposed equating the caste system with racism and the then Attorney General Soli Sorabjee had gone on record stating that:

“There were misconceived attempts by some NGOs to equate racism with caste-based discrimination which is based on birth and occupation and has nothing to do with the race of a person.”

Earlier this year in April the Indian government had succeeded in having caste discrimination ignored in the resolution during the World Conference on Racism held in Geneva. One can, of course, debate the technicalities of equating caste and racism but then racism has always been used in different senses and there is no reason why the definition cannot be extended to include caste disrimination. After all, the UN does not define racism per se, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racism Discrimination states that:

the term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life. (source)

There is a slight change in terminology this time, and the verbage in the draft resolution used is “effective elimination of discrimination based on work and descent” rather than racism. Maybe this will do the trick!

A very comprehensive essay on The Dreyfus Affair that split French opinion in the 1890s- 1900s.  (wikipedia link) and which in literature is most remembered for the references it finds in Proust’s works. I found the following observation to be quite insightful though it is tangential to the topic.

In any modernized country, the backward-looking party will always tend toward resentment and grievance. The key is to keep the conservatives feeling that they are an alternative party of modernity. (This was Disraeli’s great achievement, as it was, much later, de Gaulle’s.) When the conservative party comes to see itself as unfairly marginalized, it becomes a party of pure reaction…

Githa Hariharan has a fine column in The Telegraph where she writes about the ‘kitsch in everyday life‘:

At The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Esposito writes on the Guatemalean novelist Horacio Castenellos, whose novella ‘Senselessness’ I read recently and heartily recommend as a fine political novel.

What distinguishes Moya’s work, and what allows it to be at once utterly political without being political fiction, is that Moya brings this kind of paranoia to the ordinary individual. He does not write about political actors—more often than not his characters have no interest in politics beyond the average citizen’s concern with the news of the day. And yet, through paranoia his characters come to feel deeply—too deeply—involved in the great national political matters of their time.

This article was written 14 years ago when internet services officially started in India. I had expressed a number of fears in this some of which have been happily proved incorrect. However, I find it interesting that there are almost no fundamentally new technological breakthroughs that have come around since the article was written. Some of the concerns raised in the article still hold, particularly its conclusion.

Trivia: The original article was typed on a PC- XT machine using Word Star 7.

I had used email for just over a  month then using a corporate account and the browser I was then using were Mosaic and Gopher !

Anyone remember using these ??

Information Revolution
The Future is Here, Almost
by Bhupinder Singh
(Op Ed, The Tribune, Chandigarh, 19 August 1995)

India formally joined Internet, the real information superhighway- on Wednesday. With a PC and a modem, Indians now have the wide, wild, world of information at their button tips. This article by a computer engineer talks about new vistas and, hidden traps.

While we were not looking, the future arrived.

It did not arrive the way popular science fiction had predicted- with personal trips to Mars on weekends, et al. Instead, it arrived as a social, cultural, informational and technological revolution more world- changing than the futurists could have dreamed. This change is so headlong and profound that it is more than difficult to comes to terms with or even grasp it, let alone understand it.

Within the lifetime of people who have barely got beyond middle age, human society and the relations of people within them have gone through a sort of economic and social earthquake. To a large extent, technological change since the Industrial Revolution, has not much been derived from it as it has driven this cataclysmic change.

The G-7 group correctly sums up the phenomenon when it says that “information technology is the engine of economic growth today”. In the economically advanced countries this is specially true. According to the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, about 73 million of the nation’s 129 million workforce already has information jobs. Within this century, the total number of this workforce is expected to rise to 86 million.

Three technologies form the bedrock of the current information revolution- the ubiquitous personal computer, the telecommunications network spanning the globe and now slowly but surely the integration of television with the above two. The three technologies, even when used independently, wield massive power, but when combined form a synergistic whole that far outstrips the sum of the parts.

Personal computers now provide the user with more power than that provided by giant mainframe computers to large organizations less than 20 years ago. Computers networked all over the world over telephone lines create a whole new sphere of existence, generally termed the cyberspace though also more popularly but incorrectly called the information super- highway. This in itself lets the users to exchange information as never before. Add television to this, and you have a formidable triad, which combines the flexibility of the telephone with the carrying capacity of the television (“a picture speaks a thousand word”). And the command of computers.

This, then, is the imperative driving the merger of the three technologies.,

Wire less technologies too is making rapid strides though it still has a many a technological jungle to clear before it can become a worldwide way of life.

So explosive is this growth that language is struggling to give expression to these realities. Terms like ‘cyberspace’, ‘information superhighways’, ‘virtual communities, ‘internet’, ‘Pavlov’s cyber dog’, telecommuting, and fiber- sphere are surging in a bid to grasp the fast changing reality around us.

The future once the romantic dream of science fiction writer, is already here.

One would however, until completely overwhelmed by the truly mind boggling developments, ad a note of caution and say” The future is here, almost.

To begin with, consider the fact that out of over 5.5 b people, 4 b are yet to hear the dial tone of a telephone, far less, having pressed a computer keyboard. There are about 600 m telephones worldwide, out of which 80% are in the developed world. As Sam Pitroda says:

Telecom brings openness, accessibility, accountability, connectivity and networking. It is an instrument for democratization, decentralization and social transformation. As a great leveler, telecom in particular and information technology a s a whole can raise cultural barriers, overwhelm economic inequalities and compensates for intellectual disparities.

With the same emphasis, one can remark that the absence and denial of such a powerful medium chokes and stifles democracy. In this process, information technology and specially telecom on which it firmly rides piggyback, both of which are supposed to bridge the gap between the North and South, are basically increasing the gap. This might not be fully true about those areas of the of the South- the educated, urban middle class specially in the country where it has the fastest rate of growth- India, for example.

According to one estimate, developing countries today require $30 billion a year to build appropriate infrastructure to move up into the knowledge based domains and the IT age of tomorrow. Despite the fact that telecom is a profitable venture, less than $3 b today is being provided by the World bank and other multilateral agencies. Over the last 45 years, the World Bank has invested less than 2 percent of its lending in the telecom sector.

This is not the only danger. In a scenario where the South is famished and starved of basic telecommunication infrastructure, telecom companies from the North where the competition is fierce and the market saturated, are using them as dumping grounds for old technology. Or they are interested only in the elite, rich segments and urban areas, where it is easier to install and maintain these services. So, while the telecom sector is being deregulated and replaced by undoubtedly more ‘efficient’ private companies, the gap between the two Indias, as Dr. K.N. Raj described it so eloquently, is increasing.

Third, there is an increasing disparity in the pricing of high- technology “consumer items”. A cellular phone which costs about $200- 300 (about Rs. 6000 to Rs 9000) in the USA costs Rs. 25, 000 to Rs 52, 000 in India. Similarly, a desktop PC which costs $1000 in the US is available for more than double the price in India. Thus while the PC costs about one- fifth of an average middle- class American’s monthly salary, it costs his Indian peer almost his entire annual salary. The cost of legal software, too, is monstrously high. The result of this abnormality in the pricing structure is that things which are accessible to large populations in the West are sold in economically less developed countries as items for a very small section, which uses them as symbols of power and “boosting its image”.

In the naive belief of emulating the ‘technological republics’ of the advanced economies, technology is being sought to be imported lock, stock and barrel. The blind import of technology from the West has serious implications for the growth of indigenous technology and technologists. The once famed band of engineers nurtured at Center of Development of Telematics (C- DOT) and other such centers, like Ramesh Chauhan who has been reduced from an industrialist to a trader, have been reduced to mere installation boys of the MNCs.

Technology can have a unique aura of being ‘value free’. It appeals to both the progressive radical who sees in it the ‘development of productive forces’ to the conservative for whom, unlike poverty and human development, technology does not prick the conscience. It is, of course, a different issue where science is concerned. The shift in the emphasis from Nehru’s insistence on scientific tempter to the current fascination with technology alone has to be seen in this light. In the fresh dawn of the country’s ‘tryst with destiny’, science and technology went hand in hand, with equal and rightly so, emphasis on scientific temper as well as technology (‘the dams are the temples of modern India’).

Myths have often been used to sell products- “paperless office” for computers, “global village” for telecom and “super highway” for informatics and the internet; these simplistic buzzwords hide much more than they reveal. It has often turned out to be a different state of affairs. While printers and photocopiers have increased our capacity to multiply paper and “super highway” is all set to be captured by the private marketeers, it is generally ignored that the village is not a homogeneous community. It has land owners and tenants, it has cattle grazers and small time shopkeepers. It also has sharecroppers and landless peasants. This is true of the “global village” too.

Regardless of such impediments and abnormalities, the future has arrived. The question is not whether we embrace it of reject it. Nations, like individuals, cannot choose the circumstances they are or live in. the question is how to come to terms with the new realities we face. While technology today has built the material conditions for a better, more equitable world, it is yet to find a new ideological and social expression to bring about a more egalitarian society. In the absence of efforts to properly harness the developments in technology, it remains open for the forces of war and dominance to exploit them– remember the high- tech operations of the USA in the war with Iraq.

At the beginning of the century, as a contemporary historian notes, Rosa Luxemburg warned us that the real alternative of the 20 the century was socialism, or barbarism. Today, we do not have socialism. Let us beware of the rise of barbarism, especially barbarism combined with high technology.

Marx’s Das Capital: A Biography by Francis Wheen (2008, Manjul Publications, India, Rs. 195)

Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx, published in 2001, was probably the first one to be published after the collapse of the Soviet Union and ‘existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe. He has now written a ‘biography’ of Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital. Wheen’s central point is that Capital needs to be seen, above all, as a work of art.

Although Das Kapital is usually categorized as a work of economics, Karl Marx turned to the study of political economy only after many years of spadework in philosophy and literature. It is these intellectual foundations of underpin the project, and it is his personal experience of alienation that gives such intensity to the analysis of an economic system which estranges people from one another and from the world that they inhabit- a world in which humans are  enslaved by the monstrous power of inanimate capital and commodities. (page 7)

Later in the book he re- asserts the same:

 …only a handful of critics have given serious attention to Marx’s own declared ambition- in several letters to Engels- to produce a work of art. (page 74)

Divided into three chapters: Birth, Gestation and Afterlife, it examines the literary influences on Capital in the first, gives an exposition of the ideas contained in the work in the second chapter and finally examines the legacy and contemporary influence. The most interesting section, however, is the introduction that has earlier appeared in Guardian.

Wheen’s treatment of Marx is enthusiastic but also bathetic. There is a quote attributed to Marx that casts aspersions on Marx’s use of dialectics:

As Marx knew, however, these dialectical dalliances had an extra use value.  After  writing an article on Indian mutiny in 1857, suggesting that the British would begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season started, he had confessed to Engels: ‘It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.’ When applied like this, dialectics means never having to admit that one was wrong. (page 64)

Wheen’s over enthusiasm for looking at Das Capital as a ‘work of art’ also results in his trashing of the work as a ‘difficult work’. Particularly in the last chapter ‘Afterlife’, he prefers to quote other writers on this aspect rather than layout anything himself. Besides making the short book read like a collection of quotations, it leaves the reader un- enthused about the ideas on political economy contained in Das Capital. Lenin comes in for direct attack as being dismissive of the central tenets of Capital.

Overall, I found the book disappointing. It gives a a few interesting glimpses to the literary underpinnings to the work- Frankenstein, Tristram Shandy,  Faust, but meanders through the economic ideas contained in the work. The large number of unreferenced quotes are jarring. Despite some  interesting insights into the literary aspects of Das Capital, I find it hard to recommend this slim volume as an appropriate introduction to Marx’s magnum opus.

A detailed critique of Wheen’s exposition of the ideas in Das Capital has been provided by Gerry Gold.

My initial reaction to ebook readers like the Kindle and the Sony reader were Luddite. I now feel they were knee jerk as well.

I realized this a few months back when I was relocating from the United States to India for an uncertain length of time. Three boxfuls of books had piled up during a little over four years. Not even half of them had been read. The Hamlet- ian question was whether I should ship them back to India or leave them in the US. Given my indecisiveness regarding where in the world I want to be, I decided to leave them with a friend in the US. It was in those moments between packing and then driving them down to his place that sealed my decision as far as switching to an ereader was concerned. For the very least, I wouldn’t have to lug around these paper versions. For another, I would have access to my books where ever I was. A look at the Sony reader at the local bookstore convinced me of the inevitable, though at $350, the price was still a deterrent.

Since then the prices for the ebook readers have declined. Kindle has already reduced it from $350 to $299 in the face of competition from the Sony reader. The cost of an ebook- generally around $10, is also less than the paper version. The availability of over 700, 000 out of copyright books on the Sony reader is an added bonus. Of course, there will be a downside in that one can no longer purchase used books. I have bought good quality used books for as low as 1 cent. With a 3.99 dollar shipping charge, they have cost me about $4, or rupees 200, by all means an excellent price.

Besides the inability to buy used books, one cannot loan the ebooks either. In other words, while ebooks make a person more free, they would also reduce the  social aspect of borrowing and lending books, or re- selling them. Unless, of course, workarounds are found, for example, some kind of a password enabled ‘loan’ for a certain number of days, that would enable ‘borrowing’ e-books.

Nevertheless, I hope that it would be always possible to buy the print edition of a book that one would really like to sniff and cuddle.