Why Would A Liberal Want To Isolate And Vilify Leftists In The Face of A Fascist Offensive We All Face?
A rejoinder to Sonali Ranade
A recent opinion piece by Sonali Ranade urges Indian liberals to embrace an anti-communist position on economic and social issues alike. Ms Ranade publisher her piece – an ideological tirade regurgitating tired conspiracy theories about communists – came out around the same time that Sudha Bharadwaj, an advocate and feminist trade unionist associated with the leftist Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, was released on bail after three years as a political prisoner of the Modi regime under the draconian UAPA law. At a time when the BJP regime is on a witch-hunt based on both ideology and identity, persecuting Gandhians, communists, leftists, liberals, Ambedkarites, Muslims and Kashmiris; when fascists have imprisoned leftists indefinitely in the Bhima Koregaon case ; why does Ms Ranade argue for the morally questionable and politically suicidal step of throwing Indian leftists under the bus in order to save Indian liberals?
The Left-liberal hyphenation is mainly of the BJP’s making: the BJP brands even liberal and Gandhian anti-fascists as “urban naxals.” Surely this clubbing together of Left and Liberal by the fascists should be answered by mutual solidarity? Why instead is Ms Ranade so concerned for the liberals to de-hyphenate themselves from the Left? It is only the BJP which can benefit from a fragmentation of the resistance; from liberals appeasing the right by dissociating from the Left. Ms Ranade’s suggestion that liberals could avoid attack from the Sangh if only they dissociated and de-hyphenated themselves from the Left sounds much like suggestions that Sikhs avoid Islamophobic attacks by explaining that they are not Muslim: something many Sikh individuals and organisations have rejected as a morally bankrupt strategy. (‘Why I Didn’t Tell That Heckler That I’m A Sikh, Not Muslim: Jagmeet Singh’ https://sabrangindia.in/article/why-i-didnt-tell-heckler-im-sikh-not-muslim-jagmeet-singh).
What is especially disturbing is Ranade’s reproduction of the right wing canard that for Leftists, the agenda of welfare measures for the poor, and the defence and assertion of democracy is merely a “tactical” guise to fool “wooly-headed” bleeding-heart liberals and the poor while in fact harbouring a secret agenda of overthrowing democracy. This is precisely the kind of argument the BJP makes to justify its persecution of left intellectuals and trade unionists (Gautam Navlakha and Sudha Bharadwaj are two of the better-known examples) who have defended democracy and civil liberties their whole lives. The BJP wants you to believe that leftists such as these aren’t what they seem: while their works defends civil liberties of the most deprived and oppressed, claims the BJP, they’re actually plotting sedition.
Would the resounding success of the yearlong farmers’ movement even be possible without the rainbow coalition of farmers’ groups that included the prominent presence of left groups? Why seek to fragment coalitions like this by dissing the left which was such an important part of that movement?
Communists from Marx onwards, through Bhagat Singh and India’s CPs make no secret of their revolutionary aims. There is nothing secretive or conspiratorial about this. Welfare measures (for which Ms Ranade displays her contempt by calling them “freebies”) are really the very barest minimum a state must do to prevent workers being starved to death. These measures (“minimum wage; “minimum” support price; a “minimum” quantity of rations; “minimum” workplace democracy represented by the right to form Unions and bargain collectively with bosses) are literally a “minimum” of what workers and farmers are entitled to. What Ms Ranade calls “freebies” are in fact the opposite of “free = unearned”: they represent a “minimum” fraction of the wealth workers and farmers actually produce by their labour. Communists organise workers and farmers to demand and achieve these minimum measures – with our eyes firmly fixed on the eventual goal - a revolutionary change of the current social, economic, and political system. Can anyone deny that the prevailing system allows a handful to expropriate limitless wealth produced by the labour of others and yet does not call such wealth “freebies”; while deeming the barest survival-level minimum to those who labour hardest, to be “freebies”!
The article in question followed an episode on Twitter where Ms Ranade faced criticisms from many when she posted a series of tweets arguing that 1) Hindus have a right to a nation of their own; 2) Hindus should not be deprived of freedom of expression to ask for a nation of their own; 3) that Hindus in fact do have a nation of their own – and that is the secular Indian nation that Hindus who form more than 80% of India’s population chose. I had posted a thread of tweets in response pointing out the fallacy in these tweets: namely, that the tweets assume a stance that is innocent of any knowledge of the reality, which is that fascist outfits like RSS have demanded a Hindu supremacist nation since 1925, and far from being denied the freedom of expression to do so, have gotten away with openly using Islamophobic hate-speech and violence inside the arena of parliamentary democracy. Also, India is not, as Ms Ranade implied in her tweets, a secular democratic nation because its Hindu majority chose to tolerate minorities: it is one because from 1857 onwards Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and so many others came together to fight British colonialism and define themselves as “Indian”; and because in 1947, “Hindu, Bauddho, Shikkho, Jaino, Parasiko, Musholmaano, Christaani” (to quote from the poem by Tagore, the first stanza of which is India’s national anthem) came together as “we the people of India” to “give unto themselves” a secular democratic constitution.
If we accept Ms Ranade’s assertion that the Hindu majority did the others a favour back in 1947 by choosing to include others in “their” nation; does it not imply that the same Hindu majority now has the right to make a different choice, to stop “tolerating” others in “their” nation? If we believe that the Hindu majority was magnanimous enough to include Muslims and Christians in the idea of India back then, are we not encouraging Hindus to feel that in return for such magnanimity, surely the least the Muslims and Christians can do is to avoid eating beef and propagating their faith and converting willing Hindus? Is it perhaps this shadow of Hindu supremacist ideology (the notion that India’s character as a nation and the rules for living in India are for the Hindu majority to decide) in secular liberal and even left common sense in India that has helped land us where we are? Is this perhaps why we had Congress governments passing cow protection and beef ban laws that are now providing the pretext for lynchings and persecution of Muslims?
Ms Ranade suggested in her tweets that the Sangh is in power partly because the left in India which monopolised liberal space had normalised ridicule for the religious Hindu; and liberals had failed to distinguish themselves from this position. Where, I wondered, did “the Left” display this ridicule for the religious Hindu? In the organising committees for Durga Puja celebrations in every para all over West Bengal which invariably had local CPIM cadres in enthusiastic and leading roles?! The claim that the Sangh won support as a result of the slights borne by religious Hindus at the hands of a disproportionately powerful Left is in fact a Sanghi canard, without any basis in reality. Take some of the instances that the Sangh chose to construe as “insult” to the religious Hindu: the feminist opposition to modern iterations of the practice of sati (where a Hindu widow was burnt to death on the pyre of her husband); the dalit campaign against untouchability in the matter of temple entry; the scholarship of generations of historians who said there was simply no evidence that Babar demolished a Ram temple to built the Babri Masjid in its place. These positions embodying common decency and democracy, not to mention historical facts, were supported by “left” and “liberal” sections alike. Should liberals have dissociated themselves from leftists so as to appease the Sangh on such questions as the prerogative of some Hindus to practice sati or untouchability, or to promote bigoted “alternate facts” without evidence?
I do in fact think there is something wilfully “wooly-headed” in some Indian liberals arguing in favour of humanism against feminism and All Lives Matter against Black Lives Matter (I have in mind Dhruv Rathee); or attributing India’s character as a secular democracy to Hindu majoritarian magnanimity and virtue (Ms Ranade). To quote an old slogan: feminism is the radical idea that women are human. In order for all human lives to matter equally, one needs feminist, queer and anti-racist, anti-caste, anti-Islamophobic movements to assert that female, queer, Black, Dalit, Muslim lives matter as much as white, upper caste, male lives are seen to matter in our world.
Hindu majoritarianism – – benign and magnanimous or discriminatory and violent – cannot be the basis of a moral society. Majoritarianisms (of white people in the US or Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, or Han Chinese in China to take just a few examples) of any kind in any country cannot be the basis of a moral society. And in the face of Hindu majoritarian fascism in India, liberals and leftists should be displaying mutual solidarity (along with civilly expressed disagreements no doubt).