PrintFriendlyAfter having ignored India’s cultural symbols for over five decades, communist parties are now up to denouncing PM’s efforts to revive the same
Among the many principal by-products of the effects of the Narendra Modi regime and its attempts at a comprehensive overhauling of the India narrative and its debunking of that manipulated and weaponised construct ‘Idea of India’, is that communists and Marxists have started delineating and deriving their connect and political pedigree to the freedom movement, to its ideals and to free India’s Constitution and its ideals.
Comrade D Raja’s recent article written for an English daily, saw him chanting a litany of those customary abuses reserved for Modi and the BJP such as majoritarianism, nefarious design, but it also saw him speak, even if displaying his limited and confused reading, of the ideals of the Indian Constitution and the aims and ideals of the freedom movement and its avant-garde leaders. This is among some of the most welcome changes to have taken place in recent times.
Ignoring the fact that his party now only lives in newspaper columns and party mouthpieces, D Raja went on a fantasy weaving trip, trying to portray that the ideals of the freedom movement and of free India’s Constitution are under threat and that the rebuilding of the precincts of the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir and the Corridor and the telecast of its widely watched inauguration was a ‘nefarious design’ of the Modi establishment. Even after 75 years of independence, Indian communists continue to commit and resort to their ‘historic blunder’ of denouncing the faith of India’s majority and of displaying their extreme hatred and disdain for their symbols of faith.
Polish thinker and writer, Ryszard Kapuściński, in his opus ‘Imperium’ speaks of the protection of symbols as an act of patriotism. Communists would hardly understand this, for them patriotism has always been a bourgeois word and sentiment and symbols – especially religious, cultural and civilisational – manifestations which needed to be destroyed, liquidated and the masses re-educated into rejecting and denouncing them.
The communist obsession with Modi and the BJP has led them not only to denounce them but has also compelled them to try and connect themselves to episodes and phases in India’s history from which they had once boldly declared their divorce. In the course of the last five decades, one saw them build a wide network, both academic and political, with the nefarious design of subverting the truth of these historical episodes.
Their political cadres and the web of communisants that they spawned went about subverting and deconstructing many watershed episodes and events of our history by either negating them or deliberately misinterpreting them in order to suit their ideological designs. Legendary French political philosopher Raymond Aron in his classic, ‘The Opium of the Intellectuals’, which tore apart duplicitous intellectual communist constructs, describes communisants as “those who do not belong to the party but whose sympathies are with the Soviet world.” In almost every country, these communisants continued to be active in trying to subvert its core founding ideals and objectives.
In his recent study, ‘American Marxism’, popular journalist and author Mark Levin, speaks of an ongoing ‘counterrevolution’ in America to the American Revolution, Marxist-led and Marxist-driven which seeks to ‘destroy American society.’ Levin’s description of how these communisants operate in American society is hardly new for us in India since we have been their victims for decades. In America, Levin writes, “many Marxists cloak themselves in phrases like ‘progressive’, ‘democratic socialists’, ‘social activists’, ‘community activists’…They operate under myriad newly-minted organisations or identifying nomenclatures…And they claim to promote ‘economic justice’, ‘environmental justice’, ‘racial equity’, ‘gender equity'”. The real purpose of these operations, he observes, “is to tear down and tear apart the nation for a thousand reasons and in a thousand ways, thereby dispiriting and demoralising the public; undermining the citizenry’s confidence in the nation’s institutions, traditions, and customs, creating one calamity after another; weakening the nation from within…”
Over the decades, these professional and patronised communisants and counter-revolutionaries penetrated every institution in India with the objective of sabotaging and compromising them. They fanned out to spread the Marxist poison in Indian society and to generate the narrative of victimhood, deprivation, insurgency, revolt, non-compliance with the aims and ideals of the Constitution, of India’s civilisational achievements and essence of the ideals of the freedom movement. These communisants, trained and tutored by their political masters, cast aspersions on the faith of India’s majority, denounced their symbols of faith as retrograde and were vituperative whenever there were expressions and manifestations of that faith through sacred symbols, spaces and acts.
For over five decades they ensured that official India, the Indian governance system and framework, policy-makers and leaders in power came across as apologetic of our cultural and religious symbols. This mindset led them to make sure that the Ram Mandir issue was kept on the boil, they secretly rejoiced when the Samajwadi Party government ordered karsevaks to be gunned down in Ayodhya, they ensured that the incident made no impact or was under-reported in the Western media controlled by their ideological co-traveller. Indian communists and their ruling wing, the Congress party, applied every theory and tactic to destroy and undermine the majority’s faith in their symbols, traditions, customs and institutions. They created an array, a class of, to use intellectual historian Ted McAllister’s description, ‘Bad Elites’, in India who worked to and thrived on subjugating the subalterns and their objects and institutions of worship and faith.
Modi has worked to restore, rejuvenate and to revivify that faith and confidence at all levels. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, restoration of Adi Shankaracharya’s Samadhi, the reconstruction of the iconic Ramna Kali Mandir in Dhaka, destroyed five decades ago by the marauding Pakistan army, the Char Dham road to ease the travails of the ordinary pilgrim and to also serve India’s strategic objectives, the return, in large numbers, of Indian murtis of Gods and Goddesses once smuggle out of India and their reinstatement, all are expressions of that rejuvenation and consolidation. For Modi, protecting symbols, recovering them and rejuvenating them is also an act of supreme patriotism. He irks the counter-revolutionaries who see in these acts the crumbling of their lifelong obsession and the failure of their ideological mission. Depleted in their ranks, fatigued in their opposition, clueless on the way forward, limited in their reach, they are confined to heaping calumny on Modi and the BJP.
Speaking of the communist obsession with the BJP, LK Advani, had once spoken of EMS Namboodiripad that ‘he has an obsession about the BJP. He is worried about [our] growing strength and is conscious of his own party’s limitations…In more than 425 Lok Sabha seats…The Communist Parties just do not matter…nevertheless they keep trying to dictate to other parties what they should do or not do. It is high time the communist bluff is called…’ Modi is repeatedly calling that bluff by cementing the foundations of a new India.
The writer is a member of National Executive Committee (NEC), BJP, and the Director of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation. Views expressed are personal.