Jyoti Basu (July 8, 1914-January 17, 2010)
When he decided to associate with the communist movement in India Jyoti Basu could not have seen him becoming the Chief Minister of West Bengal. But then, Basu ended up being the longest serving Chief Minister of any State in India. Basu would not have thought that he would end up with this distinction when he was sworn in as Chief Minister of West Bengal on June 21, 1977.
Well. Nobody, including Basu and the CPI(M) in Bengal had expected, even a month before, that the party would win a majority in the State assembly elections. The Janata wave that swept most parts of Northern, Western and Eastern India had yet to show signs of subsiding at that time. The Janata Party had refused to assign as little as 80 assembly seats to the CPI(M) of the 240 seats in the West Bengal assembly that election. Talks between the CPI(M) and the Janata party broke down. And the party’s West Bengal leadership decided to go it alone.
Pramode Das Gupta is credited for that decision. And Jyoti Basu was certainly the one who must have inspired the party to decide that way. Having been the Deputy Chief Minister, twice in the past, Basu was already the most popular face of the party in West Bengal and when the party decided to fight the elections in all the 294 seats, it was now obvious that Jyoti Basu would be the Chief Minister in the event of a victory. And he remained the natural choice to that post until he decided, with the party’s sanction, to step down from that office in 2000.
It is almost certain that Basu remains the only one from the political establishment, in the present times, to retire from office. This would not have been a virtue in better times. But then, a man is judged in his circumstances and that makes it important to count voluntary retirement from public life as a virtue. Even if these are recorded history, the point is that Basu could not have imagined all these when he began looking at socialism as the alternative.
The transformation from being a studious lad into the one who empathized with the struggle for freedom happened in London. Basu, like many others in his times and more so from his class, landed there to study law. His father had the wealth to send his son abroad for higher studies and the choice of subject too was obvious: Basu went to study law. The times he spent in London too were critical. Being a student there in the 1930s also meant becoming a part of the radical groups that were closer to the idea of socialism and leaning so conspicuously to the Left. Jawaharlal Nehru was indeed the hero of this group and Basu too admired Nehru. He also looked at Subhas Chandra Bose as the ideal leader that the national movement could have.
There is very little from Basu’s recollections that show him close to the Gandhian fold. Jyoti Basu, unlike E.M.S.Namboodiripad, A.K.Gopalan and such others was not drawn into public life through the Gandhian way. Nor was he among those who adopted Marxian precepts as their ideal such as Muzaffar Ahmed, B.T.Ranadive and Pramode Das Gupta. Jyoti Basu belonged to a generation that was drawn into the communist movement in the course of their association with the socialist intellectuals who happened to be in England in the times between the Great Crash and the World War II.
In this sense, the ideas that influenced Basu in his formative years were distinctly different from the one that guided several others in his generation in the communist movement in India. Jyoti Basu was one of those who looked at Nehru with admiration and also shared an intimate relationship with Feroze Gandhi. And it is a fact that Indira Gandhi did not deal with Basu in the same way she dealt with many others in the communist movement. Jyoti Basu, for instance, was not arrested during the emergency. The Indira establishment did not show that respect to many others in the communist movement. Such others like Jyotirmoy Bosu and P.Sundaraya were in jail for the entire period of the emergency.
All this, however, did not render Jyoti Basu a lesser communist. On his return to India, Barrister Basu plunged into the communist party’s activities. The ban on the party then – January 1940 – did not scare him away from that. Jyoti Basu could have settled down to become a lawyer. He had, after all, planned to be one when he left Calcutta for London in 1935. But then, the transformation was complete. Basu was determined to work for his own liberation and the path he chose was to join the communist party. He had established his links with the party through such of those like R.P.Dutt and Ben Bradley, both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and involved directly with the Communist Party of India too.
His assignment, once in India, was to be with the trade union movement in the Railways. Those were times when the Railways were owned by companies that were based in England. And the unions, hence, were as much engaged in nationalist struggles as much for wages and better living conditions. Basu emerged as leader of the union in the Bengal-Assam region; the Bengal, at that time, included today’s Bangladesh too. In February 1946, Basu was elected to the Bengal Legislative Assembly to represent the Railway workers. In 1946, there were constituencies to represent workers in specific industries. Interestingly, the communist leaders won elections in the Railway workers constituencies across the country. That was when K.Anandan Nambiar won elections to the Madras Assembly from the Railway Workers constituency.
The communist party, however, was banned on March 26, 1948 and Basu was among those arrested in the morning that day. The ban was a consequence of the party’s decision at its second congress in Calcutta between February 28 and March 6, 1948. And Basu’s stint in prison, the first time in his life, lasted a few days only. The party’s cadre was hounded into jail across West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala in the four years after the ban imposed in March 1948. And the battles that were fought in Telengana, Tebhaga and Punnapra-Vayalar rendered the party stronger than before. Basu played a crucial role in negotiating with Prime Minister Nehru for lifting of the ban. He was among those who met the Prime Minister, prior to the general election in 1951 to talk. The meeting between some communist leaders and Nehru was arranged by Mrinalini Sarabhai.
That the communist movement did not lose its support base during the ban period was evident in the results of the first general elections. And Basu too won as MLA from Baranagar, in 24 Parganas district. He would represent this constituency continuously for several terms until the March 1972 elections. Basu also happened to address an election campaign rally in Malabar along with AKG; that was on November 4, 1951.Basu was also instrumental in striking a broad alliance with some other Left-leaning groups in the first ever general elections. In one of his reminiscences, Basu laments that the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party and the Socialist Party could not be brought into the United Socialist Platform at that time. This, in fact, was one of the most striking distinction that Basu showed from his other comrades in the communist movement. Jyoti Basu was among those who realized the necessity of forging as broad a socialist alliance as is possible than letting the movement drift in the path of left sectarianism.
Basu, along with other leaders of the party, were in the front leading a mass agitation against increase in tram fares in Calcutta in 1953 and also in agitations pressuring the Government to ensure foodgrain supply to the masses. And all this helped the Communist Party win in 46 assembly seats in West Bengal in the 1967 elections. This was against the 28 seats it won in 1951-52. And this time, there was a pre-poll seat sharing arrangement and a Common Minimum Programme among the CPI, RSP, PSP, Forward Bloc and some smaller left-progressive platforms. The foundation was laid for a United Front in Bengal in 1957 and when a section led by Ajoy Mukherjee left the Congress to found the Bangla Congress, Basu was among those who moved fast to strike an alliance with them.
It was, thus, that the first non-Congress Government came into place in West Bengal. Jyoti Basu was sworn in as Deputy Chief Minister holding charge of the Finance as well as Transport portfolios in that cabinet. Ajoy Mukherjee of the Bangla Congress became Chief Minister. Comrade Hari Krishna Konar became Minister for Land Revenue in that cabinet and set in motion the land reforms programme that made the communist party into what it became in West Bengal in the years to come. Though the United Front collapsed under its own weight and due to defections led by P.C.Ghosh (who would become Chief Minister for a few months after November 1967), the idea or the concept of a broad front against the Congress remained alive for long. The Front won a majority in the February 1969 elections too and Basu was now the Deputy Chief Minister again holding charge of the Home Portfolio.
His approach to politics remained non-sectarian. Basu did not give up this commitment to the idea of a United Front even in the wake of a hunger strike that Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee resorted to on December 1, 1969. The Chief Minister’s fast was to record his opposition to his own Home Minister’s refusal to let the police loose against protestors in the State. The Government fell after Mukherjee resigned as Chief Minister on March 16, 1970. And Basu survived an attempt on his life at Patna railway station on March 31, 1970. Imam Ali, a member of the party and an officer with the Life Insurance Corporation of India was hit by a bullet that was aimed at Basu. The killer belonged to the Anand Marg, a sect that believed in violent means against anyone who opposed it. Basu was the target that day. In the elections to the state assembly, held in March 1971, Basu led the CPI(M) to win as many as 111 seats.
The Congress, under Indira Gandhi in Delhi and Sidhartha Sankar Ray in Calcutta, however, pulled all the stops to wrest power. Ajoy Mukherjee, with only five MLAs from his Bangla Congress, was swron in Chief Minister. The Government collapsed in no time and West Bengal went to polls again in March 1972. It turned out to be the bloodiest elections ever. In Baranagar, where Basu was the candidate once again, the rigging was unprecedented. All the votes were cast even before 10 30 in the morning on March 9, 1972. And that was the only instance when Basu did not win from Baranagar. The stage was set for bringing democracy to an end and what followed was a reign of terror. The semi-fascist terror in Bengal preceded the emergency declared on June 25, 1975. Basu led the CPI(M) from the front. And in the elections to the sate assembly, in June 1977, the CPI(M) won 178 seats in the House of 294 and Jyoti Basu was sworn in as Chief Minister on June 21, 1977.
Basu emerged a key player in mobilizing the opposition to the Congress in the early eighties. And in due course emerged into a key player in the several conclaves of non-Congress Chief Ministers such as Ramakrishna Hegde, Farooq Abdullah, N.T.Rama Rao and also in the process by which the individual leaders of the Janata Party such as H.N.Bahuguna, Charan Singh, Devi Lal and Karpoori Thakur were brought to realise the imperative for unity. In many ways, Basu’s role in the making of the National Front was from behind the scenes and substantive. Basu was also conscious of the dangers to democracy that the BJP posed and it was quite natural that his name came up for the Prime Minister’s job in May 1996.
Basu knew the mind of his party’s leaders. He was not naïve to even imagine that the proposal to make him the Prime Minister of a United Front consisting of parties and leaders brought together without any ideological coherence was anything to celebrate. Basu did not react against the proposal, made at an impromptu meeting of leaders at the Bihar Bhawan one night during the tumultuous summer in May 1996. Basu had, after all, just been at the meeting with his Central Committee that had resolved, only a few hours before he reached the Bihar Bhawan, against participating in a Government that the United Front was trying to form. And he knew as did anyone who followed the party’s affairs that his party was not going to let him become the Prime Minister and knowing very well that such a Government was possible only with support coming from the Congress.
But then, Basu insisted upon calling that decision against his becoming the Prime Minister as a ``historic blunder’’. A lot of communist leaders were pilloried and persecuted for saying more innocuous things. But then, Basu probably knew that he was not going to meet with the same fate. Basu’s moorings or his initiation into the communist movement, after all, were not the same as such others like Ranadive’s or Sundarayya’s. And he did not seem to believe that the Parliamentary path to political power was the same as surrendering to bourgeois politics. Basu, after all, had spent most part of his political life as an elected member of the state assembly. He had become a MLA in February 1946; within a couple of years after he was assigned to lead the union in the Bengal Assam Railway! And he remained a legislator throughout until May 2001.
Basu also believed in forging political alliances and he established himself as a master in the art of coalition politics in West Bengal. And he did not see that as deviating from the tenets of democratic socialism even while being a part of the CPI(M)’s Politburo ever since the party was founded, from out of the CPI, in 1964. He was one of the nine members of the Politburo at the time of the CPI(M)’s formation. And the others were: A.K.Gopalan, E.M.S.Namboodiripad, P.Sundarayya, M.Basavapunaiah, B.T.Ranadive, P.Ramamurthi, Pramode Das Gupta and Harkishen Singh Surjeet. All of them are now dead and gone.
When he decided to associate with the communist movement in India Jyoti Basu could not have seen him becoming the Chief Minister of West Bengal. But then, Basu ended up being the longest serving Chief Minister of any State in India. Basu would not have thought that he would end up with this distinction when he was sworn in as Chief Minister of West Bengal on June 21, 1977.
Well. Nobody, including Basu and the CPI(M) in Bengal had expected, even a month before, that the party would win a majority in the State assembly elections. The Janata wave that swept most parts of Northern, Western and Eastern India had yet to show signs of subsiding at that time. The Janata Party had refused to assign as little as 80 assembly seats to the CPI(M) of the 240 seats in the West Bengal assembly that election. Talks between the CPI(M) and the Janata party broke down. And the party’s West Bengal leadership decided to go it alone.
Pramode Das Gupta is credited for that decision. And Jyoti Basu was certainly the one who must have inspired the party to decide that way. Having been the Deputy Chief Minister, twice in the past, Basu was already the most popular face of the party in West Bengal and when the party decided to fight the elections in all the 294 seats, it was now obvious that Jyoti Basu would be the Chief Minister in the event of a victory. And he remained the natural choice to that post until he decided, with the party’s sanction, to step down from that office in 2000.
It is almost certain that Basu remains the only one from the political establishment, in the present times, to retire from office. This would not have been a virtue in better times. But then, a man is judged in his circumstances and that makes it important to count voluntary retirement from public life as a virtue. Even if these are recorded history, the point is that Basu could not have imagined all these when he began looking at socialism as the alternative.
The transformation from being a studious lad into the one who empathized with the struggle for freedom happened in London. Basu, like many others in his times and more so from his class, landed there to study law. His father had the wealth to send his son abroad for higher studies and the choice of subject too was obvious: Basu went to study law. The times he spent in London too were critical. Being a student there in the 1930s also meant becoming a part of the radical groups that were closer to the idea of socialism and leaning so conspicuously to the Left. Jawaharlal Nehru was indeed the hero of this group and Basu too admired Nehru. He also looked at Subhas Chandra Bose as the ideal leader that the national movement could have.
There is very little from Basu’s recollections that show him close to the Gandhian fold. Jyoti Basu, unlike E.M.S.Namboodiripad, A.K.Gopalan and such others was not drawn into public life through the Gandhian way. Nor was he among those who adopted Marxian precepts as their ideal such as Muzaffar Ahmed, B.T.Ranadive and Pramode Das Gupta. Jyoti Basu belonged to a generation that was drawn into the communist movement in the course of their association with the socialist intellectuals who happened to be in England in the times between the Great Crash and the World War II.
In this sense, the ideas that influenced Basu in his formative years were distinctly different from the one that guided several others in his generation in the communist movement in India. Jyoti Basu was one of those who looked at Nehru with admiration and also shared an intimate relationship with Feroze Gandhi. And it is a fact that Indira Gandhi did not deal with Basu in the same way she dealt with many others in the communist movement. Jyoti Basu, for instance, was not arrested during the emergency. The Indira establishment did not show that respect to many others in the communist movement. Such others like Jyotirmoy Bosu and P.Sundaraya were in jail for the entire period of the emergency.
All this, however, did not render Jyoti Basu a lesser communist. On his return to India, Barrister Basu plunged into the communist party’s activities. The ban on the party then – January 1940 – did not scare him away from that. Jyoti Basu could have settled down to become a lawyer. He had, after all, planned to be one when he left Calcutta for London in 1935. But then, the transformation was complete. Basu was determined to work for his own liberation and the path he chose was to join the communist party. He had established his links with the party through such of those like R.P.Dutt and Ben Bradley, both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and involved directly with the Communist Party of India too.
His assignment, once in India, was to be with the trade union movement in the Railways. Those were times when the Railways were owned by companies that were based in England. And the unions, hence, were as much engaged in nationalist struggles as much for wages and better living conditions. Basu emerged as leader of the union in the Bengal-Assam region; the Bengal, at that time, included today’s Bangladesh too. In February 1946, Basu was elected to the Bengal Legislative Assembly to represent the Railway workers. In 1946, there were constituencies to represent workers in specific industries. Interestingly, the communist leaders won elections in the Railway workers constituencies across the country. That was when K.Anandan Nambiar won elections to the Madras Assembly from the Railway Workers constituency.
The communist party, however, was banned on March 26, 1948 and Basu was among those arrested in the morning that day. The ban was a consequence of the party’s decision at its second congress in Calcutta between February 28 and March 6, 1948. And Basu’s stint in prison, the first time in his life, lasted a few days only. The party’s cadre was hounded into jail across West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala in the four years after the ban imposed in March 1948. And the battles that were fought in Telengana, Tebhaga and Punnapra-Vayalar rendered the party stronger than before. Basu played a crucial role in negotiating with Prime Minister Nehru for lifting of the ban. He was among those who met the Prime Minister, prior to the general election in 1951 to talk. The meeting between some communist leaders and Nehru was arranged by Mrinalini Sarabhai.
That the communist movement did not lose its support base during the ban period was evident in the results of the first general elections. And Basu too won as MLA from Baranagar, in 24 Parganas district. He would represent this constituency continuously for several terms until the March 1972 elections. Basu also happened to address an election campaign rally in Malabar along with AKG; that was on November 4, 1951.Basu was also instrumental in striking a broad alliance with some other Left-leaning groups in the first ever general elections. In one of his reminiscences, Basu laments that the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party and the Socialist Party could not be brought into the United Socialist Platform at that time. This, in fact, was one of the most striking distinction that Basu showed from his other comrades in the communist movement. Jyoti Basu was among those who realized the necessity of forging as broad a socialist alliance as is possible than letting the movement drift in the path of left sectarianism.
Basu, along with other leaders of the party, were in the front leading a mass agitation against increase in tram fares in Calcutta in 1953 and also in agitations pressuring the Government to ensure foodgrain supply to the masses. And all this helped the Communist Party win in 46 assembly seats in West Bengal in the 1967 elections. This was against the 28 seats it won in 1951-52. And this time, there was a pre-poll seat sharing arrangement and a Common Minimum Programme among the CPI, RSP, PSP, Forward Bloc and some smaller left-progressive platforms. The foundation was laid for a United Front in Bengal in 1957 and when a section led by Ajoy Mukherjee left the Congress to found the Bangla Congress, Basu was among those who moved fast to strike an alliance with them.
It was, thus, that the first non-Congress Government came into place in West Bengal. Jyoti Basu was sworn in as Deputy Chief Minister holding charge of the Finance as well as Transport portfolios in that cabinet. Ajoy Mukherjee of the Bangla Congress became Chief Minister. Comrade Hari Krishna Konar became Minister for Land Revenue in that cabinet and set in motion the land reforms programme that made the communist party into what it became in West Bengal in the years to come. Though the United Front collapsed under its own weight and due to defections led by P.C.Ghosh (who would become Chief Minister for a few months after November 1967), the idea or the concept of a broad front against the Congress remained alive for long. The Front won a majority in the February 1969 elections too and Basu was now the Deputy Chief Minister again holding charge of the Home Portfolio.
His approach to politics remained non-sectarian. Basu did not give up this commitment to the idea of a United Front even in the wake of a hunger strike that Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherjee resorted to on December 1, 1969. The Chief Minister’s fast was to record his opposition to his own Home Minister’s refusal to let the police loose against protestors in the State. The Government fell after Mukherjee resigned as Chief Minister on March 16, 1970. And Basu survived an attempt on his life at Patna railway station on March 31, 1970. Imam Ali, a member of the party and an officer with the Life Insurance Corporation of India was hit by a bullet that was aimed at Basu. The killer belonged to the Anand Marg, a sect that believed in violent means against anyone who opposed it. Basu was the target that day. In the elections to the state assembly, held in March 1971, Basu led the CPI(M) to win as many as 111 seats.
The Congress, under Indira Gandhi in Delhi and Sidhartha Sankar Ray in Calcutta, however, pulled all the stops to wrest power. Ajoy Mukherjee, with only five MLAs from his Bangla Congress, was swron in Chief Minister. The Government collapsed in no time and West Bengal went to polls again in March 1972. It turned out to be the bloodiest elections ever. In Baranagar, where Basu was the candidate once again, the rigging was unprecedented. All the votes were cast even before 10 30 in the morning on March 9, 1972. And that was the only instance when Basu did not win from Baranagar. The stage was set for bringing democracy to an end and what followed was a reign of terror. The semi-fascist terror in Bengal preceded the emergency declared on June 25, 1975. Basu led the CPI(M) from the front. And in the elections to the sate assembly, in June 1977, the CPI(M) won 178 seats in the House of 294 and Jyoti Basu was sworn in as Chief Minister on June 21, 1977.
Basu emerged a key player in mobilizing the opposition to the Congress in the early eighties. And in due course emerged into a key player in the several conclaves of non-Congress Chief Ministers such as Ramakrishna Hegde, Farooq Abdullah, N.T.Rama Rao and also in the process by which the individual leaders of the Janata Party such as H.N.Bahuguna, Charan Singh, Devi Lal and Karpoori Thakur were brought to realise the imperative for unity. In many ways, Basu’s role in the making of the National Front was from behind the scenes and substantive. Basu was also conscious of the dangers to democracy that the BJP posed and it was quite natural that his name came up for the Prime Minister’s job in May 1996.
Basu knew the mind of his party’s leaders. He was not naïve to even imagine that the proposal to make him the Prime Minister of a United Front consisting of parties and leaders brought together without any ideological coherence was anything to celebrate. Basu did not react against the proposal, made at an impromptu meeting of leaders at the Bihar Bhawan one night during the tumultuous summer in May 1996. Basu had, after all, just been at the meeting with his Central Committee that had resolved, only a few hours before he reached the Bihar Bhawan, against participating in a Government that the United Front was trying to form. And he knew as did anyone who followed the party’s affairs that his party was not going to let him become the Prime Minister and knowing very well that such a Government was possible only with support coming from the Congress.
But then, Basu insisted upon calling that decision against his becoming the Prime Minister as a ``historic blunder’’. A lot of communist leaders were pilloried and persecuted for saying more innocuous things. But then, Basu probably knew that he was not going to meet with the same fate. Basu’s moorings or his initiation into the communist movement, after all, were not the same as such others like Ranadive’s or Sundarayya’s. And he did not seem to believe that the Parliamentary path to political power was the same as surrendering to bourgeois politics. Basu, after all, had spent most part of his political life as an elected member of the state assembly. He had become a MLA in February 1946; within a couple of years after he was assigned to lead the union in the Bengal Assam Railway! And he remained a legislator throughout until May 2001.
Basu also believed in forging political alliances and he established himself as a master in the art of coalition politics in West Bengal. And he did not see that as deviating from the tenets of democratic socialism even while being a part of the CPI(M)’s Politburo ever since the party was founded, from out of the CPI, in 1964. He was one of the nine members of the Politburo at the time of the CPI(M)’s formation. And the others were: A.K.Gopalan, E.M.S.Namboodiripad, P.Sundarayya, M.Basavapunaiah, B.T.Ranadive, P.Ramamurthi, Pramode Das Gupta and Harkishen Singh Surjeet. All of them are now dead and gone.
posted by Krishna Ananth at
12:20 AM
9 Comments:
Very informative obituary
Well written and Highly informative Sir. The only thing missing though is the Marichjhapi massacre of 35 Dalits that happened in 1979... it was rather symbolic of what was to follow under the social-fascist cpm.
The Marichjhapi massacre: Bengali refugees rehabilitated in the Dandakaranya Project in the forest areas of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Chhattisgarh (of today)were all low people. Many prominent Left leaders had assured them (in June 1977) while campaigning for the elections that once voted to power they [the Bengali refugees] would be brought back to West Bengal and rehabilitated appropriately. When voted to power in 1977, the leaders forgot their promises. But the supporters did not. They came on their own volition and settled themselves in Marichjhapi, deep in the Sundarbans.The State swooped on the hapless poor who numbered more 40,000 men, women, children and old. They were killed in cold blood. Women were raped and violated. Drinking water was denied. Medicines were not allowed to the sick and elderly. Dead bodies were thrown to crocodiles and animals to be devoured.
I do not know where these facts could have been inserted in a piece that was essentially an assessment of Jyoti Basu.
In any case, it was not an assessment of the CPI(M).
And from whetever little of social sciences that I have read, I can state with conviction that there is nothing called ``social-fascism''. I know of fascism and from what I know, I will refuse to call the CPI(M) fascist.
Thank you for the elaborate account of the tragic event Sir. I just felt since it happened under Basu's tenure, it deserved a mention in his obituary.
The theory of Social Fascism was introduced by Stalin and was used by the comintern to denounce the dubious role of the social democrats in the 1930s.
A particularly good article on the Social fascist nature of the Britain Labour Party. I found that many of Murphy's criticisms can be applied to the CPM as well.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/murphy-jt/1930/01/social-fascism.htm
I dont think the ML groups would have accused the CPM of social fascism without reason Sir.
Karthick,
You are free to think the way the ML groups think as much as I should be left free to think for myself. To insist that another person too thinks the way I think (or because the ML thinks that way) is indeed unfair and that is what Stalin represented in a way. In any case, I do not know which of the MLs think this way and also know why some other MLs think differently.
As for Stalin and the COMINTERN and the Social Democrats, I do know that the COMINTERN itself changed course in the 30s with Dimitrov and the United Front thesis. I should also recommend Gramsci's political writings where he deals with these in this regard.
I do not see any positive fallout from this business of taking a concept/analysis of a situation in the Thirties of the last century from a different geographical, social and cultural setting to assess a political party of today and insist that since there are similarities between the CPM of today and the Social Democrats of the 1930s, the CPM is a social democratic party.
I suppose the method of history will have to be treated with some more respect.
Sir. We have no issues in using the term 'fascism', a concept in your own words, "of the last century from a different geographical, social and cultural setting" to describe what the BJP does - and rightfully so. If we were to go by the "method of history" that you suggest, then the BJP shouldnt be called fascist.
I think certain concepts have a universal relevance and shouldnt just be disregarded due to considerations of particularities like time, culture or geography.(I am not saying that particularities should be overlooked)
I will look up on Gramsci though.
The BJP is described as a fascist force not because someone observed it that way. Social scientists in the present call the BJP a fascist force based on the fact that the BJP's party programme, its definition of nation and nationalism and its approach to the concept of citizenship are in many ways the same as that of the National Socialists of Germany.
I clearly meant that the analysis of a situation in the thirties and in another setting need not hold true today. Am not against understanding concepts. Hence put the slash there between concept/analysis. The point is that concepts shall not be confused with analysis.
In any case, I maintain that you are free to think the way you do and please let me do that as well. This exercise is not leading us anywhere nor is it of any use to anyone. I am least interested in scoring brownie points. Is that clear?
There are important information about India's politician and he was sworn in as Chief Minister of West Bengal on June 21, 1977.
Term papers
Tleugu programs, Telugu arts, Telugu, Telugu culture, Telugu Traditions, Telugu dancers, Dancers, Classical Dancers, Events, Ravindrabharathi , Tyagaraya ghanasabha, Sundaraya bhavan, Kuchipudi, Paiting, Paint Exhibitions, State Art gallery, Art galleries, Hyderabad, Art gallery, AP
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home