Unlikely Revolutionary

A Traveller and the Road is agreeably written and admirably unpretentious. It recounts the journey of Mohit Sen’s own life, his personal triumphs and adversities, and the trajectory of the CPI. It recounts in clear detail the doctrinal disputes within the party on almost all its controversial stands. It discusses the CPI’s decision to oppose Quit India and collaborate with the British on the grounds that World War II was a people’s war since it was being fought for the protection of Russia, to initially give China the benefit of the doubt in 1962 on the grounds that a people’s revolution could neither be imperialistic or nationalist, to the split in the party over whether India was an independent country or not, to its struggles in Telengana, to the debate over collaboration with Indira Gandhi during the Emergency.

To his credit, Sen sets out all the issues very straightforwardly and there is no attempt at retroactive duplicity. It shows a party clearly more enamoured of textual debates than the complexities of history, a party more concerned with what its brethren are thinking in Russia, China and France than with the ideological divides of its own citizens, a party more obsessed with the heresy of those who split from it than its real ideological rivals. He candidly describes the party as, in the final analysis, not possessing any significant social base; it was rather more a movement of intellectuals.

What led Mohit Sen to take up communism? He grew up in a relatively privileged family, studied at Cambridge and there aren’t any obviously compelling incidents that can explain his own transition to communism. In Calcutta he is clearly influenced by charismatic friends and teachers. I rather suspect that most of us choose our comrades first and ideology as a result rather than the other way round. The personal elements of the biography, the scenes of family life, the hardship of his own “internment” in China, are all recounted with a reticence characteristic of Indian autobiographies that also make them more poignant.

Sen seems an unlikely revolutionary: more at home amongst films and books than in the grime of history. No joy in the book is quite matched by the rapture of his reading War and Peace in the idyllic surroundings of Cambridge. Sen is a Bengali intellectual more than he is a politician.

But it is the almost fawning exoneration of Mrs Gandhi that draws attention to itself. He justifies the Emergency as a blow against counter-revolution, a necessity against internal destabilisers like the RSS, JP and the external designs of the CIA. From the plausible premise that the CIA would have been active in India in the seventies and some unsubstantiated testimony of Justice Thakkar, he draws the conclusion that Mrs Gandhi’s assassination was a CIA conspiracy. The ease with which the CPI condoned authoritarianism, its self-fulfilling penchant for conspiracy theories, reveals much about the trajectory of twentieth century communism, its ability to excuse crimes because they might be fulfilling the forward march of history.

For all of its candid self-reflection the book does not come to terms with the central failing of communism: its deep authoritarianism. This is a failing it shares with the right and all other assorted anti-liberal ideologies. And Sen’s diagnosis for why communism failed in India: it was over ambitious; its leaders were stricken by personal ambition and jealousy. Sounds like the will of men at work more than the forces of history.