Comrade Surjeet to whom many tributes are being paid was famous not for a searing analysis of India’s problems. He is known as a wheeler and dealer in the art of coalition forming. In 1977, with all parties against Indira Gandhi. Then in 1989, supporting V P Singh along with the BJP. Then opposing the BJP in 1996 and 2004. There is no shame in this as everyone else is playing the same game. But I am old enough to expect the Left to be more analytical about a society’s ills and framing a theory if not a programme for its solution.India has been badly served by the Left in that respect. No Communist in India, Dharmanand Kosambi aside, has made any contribution to understanding India’s problems. Guided from abroad, at first from Moscow via London and then directly from Moscow, the Communists saw India through Comintern eyes.The Indian Communists missed the gaping fault line of caste and untouchability, because Class had always to take priority and their knowledge of Indian reality was slight. They overestimated their chances of fomenting a revolution soon after Independence in the Telangana peasant struggle and got nearly wiped out. Then Stalin with his shrewd sense of the realities of power told them to give up their delusion and sign up to democracy.So then followed the honeymoon period of Indo-Soviet relations and the comrades were in clover. Instead of performing an analysis of the problems of poverty etc they became the hired ideologues of Nehruvian Congress. Indira Gandhi made them even more subservient and they lapped it up. They had universities to control, professorships and cultural fellowships to enjoy.During the Emergency, the CPI(M) began to play in the bazaar of party politics. It got addictive. As a fig leaf to cover their shame, they battened on to anti-communalism as their banner. It became, in effect, anti-BJPism. Their intellectual hegemony in Congress-related circles meant that the history of Indian independence was distorted to fit the Congress story. So, the doctrine of secularism became the doctrine of defending religious conservatism among Muslims and attacking it among Hindus. Either way for a movement built on rationality and modernity, this was a cop-out.The Non-Communist Left which was once deeply rooted in the soil, with leaders like JP, Acharya Narendra Dev and Ram Manohar Lohia, did not do much better. JP took sanyas. The Congress ate away the rest of the Praja Socialist Party. Lohia survived by inventing anti-Congressism. His brilliant analysis recognised caste as the fault line, but his heirs made that into a recipe for casteist vote bank politics. They too abandoned any criticism of the Congress or analysis of India’s ills and became routinely secular. That meant Mullahs for Muslims and brickbats for the Hindus. Casteism is secular as long as it also seeks Muslim vote.This is very much at the heart of the present malaise. When a terrorist attack happens the powers that be are speechless lest they offend their Muslim clients. In Britain, where we have had terrorism for 30 years neither when it was IRA from Northern Ireland nor when it came to be Islamist has there ever been a spineless uncritical defence of an entire minority. Terrorists are criminals first and foremost and Muslims or Hindus or Catholics next. In India when an attack happens the first concern of the politicians and the media is not the victims but the clarion call to avoid any communal riot. Paying one or two lakhs in compensation and blaming the ISI is all we do about terrorism. Why?The tragedy is that 61 years after Partition, India is still suffering from that festering wound. Muslims are either enemy aliens or legally unmentionable special guests. They cannot be ordinary Indian citizens, neither for the secularists nor for the communalists. No cure exists for this fractured notion of Indian-ness. The poverty of Muslims cannot act on their own politically as a Dalit or a Yadav party can. Political parties of the Left and Right have seen to this by forming kaleidoscopic coalitions in the name of secularism. What if a few die while we look away?
