Arun Shourie
"I shall travel back with him," says Nawaz Sharif one day on taking the bus to Delhi with the Indian Prime Minister. "We will solve half the problems on the way back." Four days have not passed, and Pakistan observes "Solidarity-with-Kashmir Day." All the usual venom is spewed forth again. What is one to make of these signals?
Look at the same thing from Pakistan's point of view. Bal Thackeray declares that Pakistan's Cricket team will not be allowed to play in India. The RSS Journal, Organiser, counsels the Vajpayee Government to cancel the engagement: we can live without Cricket, it says. Vajpayee sees the series through. "But why go by bus to Pakistan?" thunders a "saint" at the VHP's Dharma Sansad, "Go by a tank... Instead of a match on the Cricket field, there should be a final match with Pakistan on the battlefield..." Should policy makers in Pakistan base their responses on what Vajpayee has been able to see through in this one round? After all, from their eyes, he would seem to be just an individual; true, he happens to be heading a Government at the moment, their analysts will be arguing, but it is a precarious Government. Or should they base their responses on what many there are certain to be arguing, is the more durable "ideological trend" represented by the Shiv Sena, the VHP, the RSS?
In a word, how should one respond when someone who for fifty years has conceived of himself, as or whom we have conceived as an enemy sends contradictory signals?
To dismiss the favourable signal can cause one to miss out on a rare opportunity -- an opportunity to reverse hostilities of fifty years. To disregard the symptom that signifies a continuation of old attitudes can expose one to grave danger. Prudence, therefore, consists in heeding both: proceed on the basis of the signal which offers an opening, but remain alert so that, in case it turns out to have been a ruse, or for effect -- in the current case, for instance, if the peace flag is being waved merely for the benefit of Americans -- the country remains safe.
That yields an operational rule: suspend from our side things which may be construed as hostile; and continue to defeat everything hostile from the other side. To continue with the former -- for instance, rancorous rhetoric -- can become an argument in the hands of those in the other country who are opposed to charting a new course. To allow any hostile activity of the other to succeed on one's soil -- for instance, in the current case, ISI's assistance to insurgents in the Northeast -- can become an equally potent argument for those in the other country who want to persevere on the old course.
Of course, balancing one's response to the two signals remains the key. That and remaining alert -- not only must the options be kept under constant review, the other side should have reason to see that they are under review all the time. The suspension of retaliatory steps for too long, to take one example, can strengthen those on the other side who argue that the mode of pursuing hostilities they have chosen is costless; equally, it can lead the adversary into believing that deception works -- that all that is required to wave those peace flags every now and then. Either conclusion will cause it to do things which will in the end force the victim of the deception to retaliate. And relations will be worse than they were before the peace overtures began. "See, you can never trust them," those who opposed responding to the overtures will say.
The second rule is to keep from expecting miracles. They should never be led to believe that there is some magic switch that the leaders are now going to turn, and that this switch will solve everything. Nor that results will be swift in coming. Quite the contrary. Leaders must at every opportunity drill in the opposite -- that there are bound to be many setbacks, that progress cannot but be a step, a tiny step at a time. That the principal leaders on the two sides are committed to the new course is seldom enough -- look at how close Hamas has come so many times to derailing the Mid-east Peace Process.
Therefore: expect impediments, and convert them into opportunities. Imagine what would have happened had the Government give to Bal Thackerey's threat: all sorts of conspiracy theories would have been floated; and perceptions in Pakistan would have been further embittered. Because the Government stood firm, the threat worked to the opposite effect: it proved that the Indian Government sincerely believes that people-to-people exchanges are the way ahead, that they are good for both countries.
As set-backs are inevitable, leaders on both sides have to be robust enough, determined enough, and durable enough to resume the process after each reversal. Given the State of affairs in the two countries, two factors that may introduce uncertainties are obvious. First, this in the age of revolving-door governments: initiatives taken by one leader can end with him; even if he is of the same mind as the leader he replaces, the new leader will have other worries to contend with in his first few months, and many things can happen in that period to derail the process. Second, it is also the age of adversary politics: just because one Prime Minister has taken the initiative, his opponents will denounce it -- recall the minatory warnings from fundamentalists that came in the wake of Nawaz Sharif's overture. At the least, they will try to belittle the initiative -- recall the Congress response to the "going-by-bus" idea: it should not be a gimmick, the Party proclaimed, implying that a gimmick is what the Party feared it was, exactly the kind of implication which will be grist to the hawks' mill in Pakistan.
The general rule is: deafen yourself to statements. Of fringe groups. Of the opposition. Even of the leader who has reached out. He may have to go on saying several of the old things for domestic consumption -- for the domestic population has to be weaned by degrees from the conditioning of decades. The rule thus is, do not react to statement: instead, see what is happening on the ground. For us the criterion should be, "Is assistance which Pakistan is giving to insurgents in the Northeast waning or swelling?" to this reality we should react, the statement we should ignore.
Naturally, a Government has to assess not just the intention of the other to sue for peace, but also his ability to wage war. In this one must guard in particular against two sources of information -- the press of the other side, and the intelligence agencies of one's own.
If one were to assess the prospects of either India or Pakistan solely by reading the press of that country, one is certain to conclude that the country is on the brink of collapse and disintegration. That sort of an impression can lead one to delay one's response to an overture -- just wait a while, many will argue, the place is coming apart, we will soon be rid of the problem forever. But that picture which the press communicates has more to do with the nature of the media, and what it considers news than it has to do with the nature of reality in either country. We newspapermen focus almost exclusively on problems, on what is going wrong. But that is not all that is going on in the country.
What holds for newspapers, holds even more for specialised agencies, and for activists most of all. An agency like a Human Rights Commission, a group of activists dedicated to protecting the rights of some particular group will, by the very nature of its assignment, be forever looking for atrocities, injustice and the rest: an observer going by the reports of these agencies alone will conclude that the society is coming apart. The Government of the country should take its press and the reports of these agencies seriously -- to see what it has to alleviate; the Government in other country should not form a view of the first one's prospects from that press or those reports.
The position is the reverse when it comes to intelligence agencies. They are forever doing the opposite -- that is, they are only too ready to conclude that the other country is on the verge of collapse, that all it requires is just one more push. That is how they establish the case for a "bold move," for "one decisive intervention." Pakistan has tried open warfare. That having failed, its agencies and rulers thought they had hit upon the infallible, and low-cost solution: sponsored terrorism. Though over 23,000 have been killed as a result, India has not broken up. The insurrections in Punjab and Kashmir have been rolled back. But the moral which agencies such as the ISI will be drawing from the failure will be that the next time round the outcome is bound to be different: the people have once again become disillusioned with the Governments they elected in Punjab, in Kashmir, ISI analysts will be reporting; the Government at the centre is as good as non-existent, they will be reporting. So one "decisive operation", and we are home...
When confronted with such advice, the policy-maker should ask some questions of the agencies. Indeed, it would be better to preempt the advice, and order an internal study. How often in the past have the agencies forecast that such and thus operation will cause the other country to disintegrate? For instance, how often did the ISI assure Zia or his successors that the spark it was lighting would become a conflagration, that the people were on the verge of breaking out in rebellion, that all they needed were arms, and a few examples of successor? Did those rebellions break out? And what explanations did the agencies come up with to explain away their forecasts?
Is the advice they are giving now based on information that is any more reliable than the past, does it rest on fewer uncertainties?
Furthermore, a Nawaz Sharif should ask, "What do you advise I do if India does not break up, what should I do if it does not give in?" Second, "By continuing to inflict killing, am I going to be fortifying the moderates who are arguing for peace, or am I strengthening the hand of those who are urging that the only way to make us desist is to do the same thing to us?" Third, "What is the scale of the effort which will make India break, or reconcile itself to breaking up? Can we mount, and sustain an effort on that scale? Faced with that level of effort, will India just keep bearing deaths and proceeding calmly to certain break up? Will it not launch a counter-operation?"
There is an asymmetry between Pakistan and India in this regard: intelligence agencies and the armed forces have never had the clout that they have in Pakistan; it is that much more difficult for a Pakistan Prime Minister to over-ride them. Nor are those agencies the only ones that will present hurdles there: they have spawned a dozen jihadi groups -- they have become monsters in their own right by now. And with the success in Afghanistan, these organizations have acquired great prestige. Nor do they float in the air; they are backed by the network of madrasahs right across Pakistan -- there were just about 140 madrasahs in all of Pakistan in 1947, today there are over 2,500 in Punjab alone with a quarter million "Taliban". For these organizations, as much as for the intelligence agencies and the Army, jihad against India, as Pakistani papers say, is gosht-roti (bread and butter).
The agencies as well as the jihad groups and madrasahs have become a boomerang for Pakistan, no doubt; by the 18th century syllabus, the Dars-i-Nizami, the graduates of the madrasahs, for instance, are rendered totally unfit for normal, modern occupations; they are the ones who have been swelling the ranks of sectarian organizations, and executing heretics of other sects. Successive Governments have announced several measures to curb and regulate the activities of the organizations and "centres of learning". But none has been able to carry through even one of those steps.
Moves for conciliation with India will, therefore, turn on the extent to which Pakistani society feels the cost of these organizations to such an extent that, for its own safety and tranquility, it curbs them.
The agencies and organizations reinforce and broadcast further a murderous ideology, of course, but they are themselves products of that ideology. Till that ideology is turned inside out, the moves for conciliation will be overturned sooner rather than later. That is the real difficulty: for fifty years Pakistanis have been fed an "ideology" of a kind that we just cannot imagine; the ruler who proposes peace with India has to now proclaim that ideology to have been poison.
For fifty years Pakistanis have been taught that their mission, their Allah-ordanied mission is to break India, that patriotism consists in firing up the youth for that task, that he who sacrifices his life in that cause will have attained shahadat, that he will find Allah waiting for him with the most delectable pleasures in Paradise. If an operation seems to have gone well, the agencies argue, "But how can you ask us to stop when we are winning?" If it has floundered, and hundreds of their own men have been killed, they argue, "But how can we abandon it now? Are all these young men to have died in vain? This temporary setback is just a trial that Allah has put in our way to test our faith..."
On this also there is asymmetry between the two countries. Because Pakistan has been conceived of in terms of an exclusivist ideology, even when the fundamentalist groups do not get many votes, they set the agenda, they set the norms of fidelity. Here, because the world-view of the overwhelming majority is pluralist and because we have remained a plural society, every individual or group which has adopted an extreme position has been quickly isolated.
To paraphrase what F C Ikle set out in his excellent study, Every War Must End (Columbia University Press, 1991), a Nawaz Sharif will have to convince the people there, or their own experience would have had to convince people that their mission is not to "avenge" past deaths -- deaths which were completely self-inflicted in that they resulted from pursuing a "cause" which was wrong in the first place -- but to prevent further deaths. That devotion to the country consists not in wearing Pakistan down in the attempt to break India, but in saving it from the consequences of pursuing that objective. That courage does not consist in sending youth -- other people's sons -- to slaughter, but in speaking out that the goal for which they are being sent to death has been wrong. The Pakistani ruler will have to, in a sense, "betray" the very groups which Pakistani Governments have themselves spawned.
It is a formidable task. Not impossible by any means -- others have reversed course exactly in this way: General de Gaulle was carried to power by Frenchmen and Algerians who expected him to fight to retain Algeria as a colony; once in power, he led France in freeing Algeria; the Algerians who has stood by France were smothered in the sequel, the Frenchmen felt so deeply betrayed that they attempted many times to assassinate the General. But he preserved, and thereby liberated not just Algeria, he liberated France.
In a world, it is going to be a long haul. The outcome will primarily turn on internal developments within Pakistan.
For us the lesson is: respond to every gesture -- with a gesture. Never respond to a gesture with a substantive concession in the illusion that doing so will "strengthen the moderate elements in Pakistan." Quite the contrary: once a people have been fed poison, it has to work itself out of the system. It is only when, by long and painful experience, the Pakistani people have themselves come to see that the goal they have been pursuing -- by war yesterday, by terrorism today -- is not going to be attained, when they come to see that the goal itself is wrong, that the organizations and agencies which have been set up to accomplish that goal have become a deadly boomerang, only then will peace finally break out.
That realisation will come mainly from costs which Pakistani society comes to bear within Pakistan. We have little role to play in that consummation. Save one: by defeating every effort they launch on our side of the border, we will hasten the realisation.
Thus, respond to every gesture with a gesture, to every substantive step with a substantive step. And in the meantime watch the following:
* Is Pakistani assistance to violent groups in India lessening?
* To what extent is Pakistan prepared to move on issues other than securing what it has been saying is "the solution to the Kashmir problem?"
* What is happening to the standing of fundamentalist and extremist groups within Pakistan?
* What is happening there to the current staple, the anti-India indoctrination and propaganda -- for instance, what is happening to the content of broadcasts on Pakistan TV, and of the textbooks in their schools?
These will be the surer guides to what the future holds.
Daily Excelsior
February 14, 1999
Showing posts with label sangha pariwar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sangha pariwar. Show all posts
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Cut, Paste and Preserve Their Calumny
Arun Shourie
Namboodiripas' fusillade was just the opening salvo, it turned out. The Communist Party of India published a series of pamphlets - Arun Shourie's Slanders Rebutted History has indicated the Communists, 1942 August Struggle and the Communist Party of India... Translated into several languages, these were distributed far and wide. Today, they are prophylactics -- anyone who reads them will be immunised against the abuse of these 'leading intellectuals' and their parties!
"This is not the first time that the Quit India movement has been forked out to slander and attack the communist movement in our country," began the Foreword by the General Secretary of the CPI, C Rajeshwara Rao.
"Whenever the ruling circles and reactionary vested interests are in a tight corner or the communist movement is making headway, they would dig up old fables to whip up anti-Communist prejudices. The pet theme is the so-called 'betrayal' of the freedom struggle in 1942 by the united Communist Party of India. Such things have happened a number of times in the past, even as late as 1975, during the days of Emergency imposed by Mrs Indira Gandhi' -- that last bit was truly audacious! For it was the General Secretary's very own Communist Party which had supported Mrs Gandhi's Emergency!
"Now the extreme reaction is worried because of the forging of left unity through the united struggles of the toiling people and also its gathering round of democratic allies," the General Secretary pronounced. "Hence this resurrection of the ghost of 1942 once again by Mr Arun Shourie in order to isolate the communist movement by fanning anti-communism."
"One would have ignored these attacks since we know very well that this is not the first time that such attacks have been leveled against us," the publication declared. "Arun Shourie, howsoever his journalistic talent may be, stands no comparison to such eminent personalities who have attacked us in the past. The eminent barrister, Langford James, of Meerut Conspiracy Case called us anti-God, anti-family, anti-decent everything with no sense of humour. History vindicated us. The Communist Party of India grew from strength to strength since those days of 1929. Today the Communist Movement is a strength to reckon with."
What all this had to do with the facts which I had set out, what I had to do with that barrister of 1929 was and remains a mystery. But 'devastating refutation' it was! And remember the line, 'One would have ignored these attacks...' -- it too is a standard one. The facts which have been brought to light, even more so those who have brought the facts to light are always beneath their dignity to answer. In his article 'refuting' what I had written, Panikkar had been the embodiment of lofty self- abnegation: "The alternative of suing for defamation the likes of Shourie is below one's dignity.... "
Now that a heap of new facts have been revealed, he is loftier still -- Shourie is not a historian, he is a mythologist... a political pornographer... I shall not dignify him by answering his diatribe...
Apart from everything else, one reason it is a waste of one's time to do so is that the dunce is not going to be able to comprehend the reality in any case. "It will be a waste of effort and also good space to refute this nonsense which betrays Shourie's utter Ignorance of history and world events," the Communist Party publication continued.
"We do not want to go into his vapid nonsensical utterances in the last installment," wrote the Communist Party publication. "They are tarred with the same rotten anti-Communist stuff with the hackneyed claim that communists are but the agents of Moscow (or rather of the Soviet Union) and as such they have to be treated with contempt. (On the contrary, my argument had been that precisely for this reason they ought to be treated with wariness, that their potential for harming the country, for poisoning discourse must not be ignored!)
"Even a cursory reading of the names of the Communist Party members who have found their way from other streams Of the national movement, either of the national revolutionary or of the orthodox Gandhian type (And what about those who saw through the Communist Party, including several of the topmost functionaries of the Party, and left it?) and the whole host of intellectuals who have adored (sic) the ranks of the Communist Party, and the large mass of workers and peasants who have acquired a new stature in their life by joining and working for the Communist Party would belie Arun Shourie's vile slanders."
Suppose for a moment that all the intellectuals of India had fallen to 'adoring' the ranks of the Communist Party, that every worker and peasant had become a devotee of the Party, how would that alter the assistance the Party had rendered to the British?
The 'this-is-an-old-charge' defence again: "These slanders themselves are not of Arun Shourie's original imagination either; they are products of a diseased and jaundiced view of the state of affairs which cannot bear the thought of the ordinary worker and peasant, of the ordinary man taking part and having a say in the political life of the country..."
Mockery, derision, scorn, the charge of conspiracy, of secret funds being pumped in by un-named forces, the charge that the critic is privilege-personified and therefore cannot stand the fact that, because of the struggles put up by the Left, the masses are coming into their own - an avalanche to scare everyone from doing what this fellow has done. "The argument would be similar to say, 'When did you last stop beating your wife?'," the Party publication declared. "This pearl of wisdom which Shourie seems to be bestowing cannot just be called a fool's paradise in which he may be lurking. It is a dangerous game to sow dissensions In the minds of the young political workers. And there are many other interests in the country who are financing it as is evident from various translations and other media coverage that have gone with it."
But hope also, confidence too -- lest the rank and file lose heart: "But truth is truth and must stand out, even when Shourie indulges in making a lot of 'shor' (noise), but with a purpose no doubt."
The great names who saw the light and acknowledged that the Communists are the ones who had been right... : "They all did this out of a process of understanding of national events in the context of international developments which is beyond the mental horizon of Arun Shourie or similar other anti-Communist scribes who have slandered us in the past..." Two key points in that - the ones who criticise them are deficient in understanding, and they are congenitally anti-Communist.
That last bit - about being congenitally anti-Communist -- is doubly believed: On metaphysical grounds, as well as practical ones. Once you believe in a religion which maintains that the Revelation has been handed to it alone, it necessarily follows that, if a person does not see the truth of that religion, there is something congenitally wrong with him! In totalitarian societies -- Stalin's Soviet Union which our Communists so adored -- there is a practical reason too: For anyone to stand against the received Line in such a set up, he must necessarily be congenitally mad!
"It is difficult for Arun Shourie to realise this, devoid as he is of any political perspective" -- the person in question can be said to have 'political perspective' only when and if he reaches the same conclusions as The Theory dictates!
As the man lacks elementary political understanding, it is always pointless to check up the facts which such a person has adduced: I had published extensive extracts from a 120-page report which the Communist Party had submitted to the British narrating the assistance its members were rendering by sabotaging the Quit India Movement. "The so-called 120-page document," the publication scoffed, "unfortunately I thought it a waste of time to count whether it was actually 120 pages as Shourie seems to have done. " Exactly what these historians maintained when I nailed the concoction they had put out: Of 'rational' having been surreptitiously changed to 'national' in the ICHR Resolution, of three of the five objectives having been deleted from the Resolution.
Hence, the confidence in the future: "We are aware that the four articles by Arun Shourie both in English and other languages are designed particularly to create a rift between the left and the other democratic forces. We have every confidence that this will fail and our healthy national movement will work steadily towards the goal of bringing about the social transformation through the path of peace, consolidation of national freedom, and socialism."
"Shourie's series", began another publication which the Communist Party put out, "is a long chain of distortions, canards and slander against the Communist Party of India, the international communist movement and the Soviet Union..." "From 1944 onward (and even earlier) paid pen-pushers and agents of imperialism and the bourgeoisie have repeatedly run slander campaigns against the CPI and the USSR..." Hansraj Vohra... Langford James, the barrister again..., "the notorious Minoo Masani and later on his worthy 'disciple' Sitaram Goel"... "Naturally enough questions are being asked by people all over India: Why has Shourie started this foul campaign now?... " That is always a useful question to ask: When you can't answer a person on facts, ask: "But why now?" India carries out its first nuclear explosion on 18 May 1974 at Pokhran. And what does the redoubtable representative of the Communists ask in the Lok Sabha? "We have been told that we have (had) the capability for a long time, we could have set off this blast much earlier, if we wanted to. Well, if we could have set it off much earlier, we could have set it off much later also. My question is about the timing of it. There must be some reason behind the timing of this, this particular timing of 18th May. I am not clear about it."
Next, redouble authority by quoting each other! That is twice- blessed: It doubles the weight of your assertion, and, as the comrade is being cited as an authority, it doubles his weight for the future! And so the CPI publication fortified the question it had posed - the hardy perennial, 'But why now?'- by citing what E M S Namboodiripad had asked!
"Reputed Communist leader and General Secretary of the CPI(M) E M S Namboodiripad," it said, "has queried: 'Why should Arun Shourie have taken up the shop-soiled wares of Communist Betrayal in 1942, 40 years after the Quit India struggle started?' "
And the answer too was fortified by citing E M S once again: "The seasoned anti-Communist Minoo Masani promptly jumped into the fray, in defence of Shourie... E M S sharply retorts: 'What Mr Shourie himself and Mr Masani are afraid of is thus the coming together of opposition parties not opposed to the Communists, but cooperating with them. This is exactly what I suspected in my Bombay press conference.'..." "Thus the cat is out of the bag," the publication proclaimed in triumph taking E M S' assertion as proof.
"Large segments of the non-Communist non-left opposition parties have repeatedly joined hands with the Communist-led left opposition, both against the authoritarian forces led by Indira Congress as well as against right-wing communal and divisive forces like the BJP and others. This has alarmed both Indira Gandhi and her entourage, as well as the BJP, RSS and their allies. Shourie and Masani have come out as their spokesmen and in their desperate efforts to drive a wedge between the Communists and the non-Communist opposition parties. In this foul effort, what better weapon can they take up than the shop- soiled ware of anti-Communist, anti-Soviet canard?"
Thus, congenitally anti-Communist, vile motives, desperation of the critic - all there!
Next, a repeat of denunciation-by-association: "let us now have a brief look at the 'noble' anti-Communist predecessors of Arun Shourie!," the publication proceeds. Hansraj Vohra... Minoo Masani... And now comes Arun Shourie who is supposed to be a talented journalist but who has been exposed as a communalist... And who has published his articles? The Illustrated Weekly of India which has also published an article (among the hundreds it would have published in the period!) 'The RSS will stay' by an RSS member. And so the truth manifest: "The communists must go and the RSS must stay - the 'Weekly-Shourie-Masani tie-up is now crystal clear! This is the basic reason why Shourie has picked up from the dustbin of history the discarded weapon of anti-communism!"
Forty pages of such sterling refutations in one publication, twenty-three pages in another. All leading to the conclusion at once triumphal and defiant, and comic: "The CPI is a party of heroes and martyrs of freedom struggle as well as of class battles. The Shouries and Masanis can wear the shop-soiled dirty shirt of anti-communism as long as they like, but their place is in the dung-heap of history! The combined imperialist armies tried to destroy the young Soviet State. They failed. Hitler tried it too and was destroyed in turn.
"Today the Reagans and Thatchers are again trying to play the same dirty game. They too will meet the fate of Hitler and Mussolini! So also will their paid henchmen, who spatter mud at the communists! Like old man Galileo facing the inquisition and like our own Dimitrov, facing the butcher Goering, we Indian communists also hurl defiance at the face of all our reactionary detractors and persecutors and with rock-like conviction, resolutely declare: Nonetheless, the Earth goes forward, and all roads lead to Communism!"
Amen!
Twin lessons in that. To roll back their untruth, we must immunise ourselves against their verbal terrorism. And among the easy prophylactics is to cut out and store their vituperation -- in less than no time it mutates into the ridiculous.
The press conferences and pamphlets were hurled at me in 1984. In 1986 in his A History of Indian Freedom Struggle, E M S Namboodiripad acknowledged that communists had collaborated with the British -- or rather, that they "did not hesitate to establish contact with the government and accept the assistance...."! -- during the 'Quit India' Movement.
In 1984, as we have just seen, the Communists were proclaiming, "Nonetheless, the Earth goes forward, and all roads lead to Communism." In 1989 the Berlin Wall was pulled down...
The Observer
January 22, 1999
Namboodiripas' fusillade was just the opening salvo, it turned out. The Communist Party of India published a series of pamphlets - Arun Shourie's Slanders Rebutted History has indicated the Communists, 1942 August Struggle and the Communist Party of India... Translated into several languages, these were distributed far and wide. Today, they are prophylactics -- anyone who reads them will be immunised against the abuse of these 'leading intellectuals' and their parties!
"This is not the first time that the Quit India movement has been forked out to slander and attack the communist movement in our country," began the Foreword by the General Secretary of the CPI, C Rajeshwara Rao.
"Whenever the ruling circles and reactionary vested interests are in a tight corner or the communist movement is making headway, they would dig up old fables to whip up anti-Communist prejudices. The pet theme is the so-called 'betrayal' of the freedom struggle in 1942 by the united Communist Party of India. Such things have happened a number of times in the past, even as late as 1975, during the days of Emergency imposed by Mrs Indira Gandhi' -- that last bit was truly audacious! For it was the General Secretary's very own Communist Party which had supported Mrs Gandhi's Emergency!
"Now the extreme reaction is worried because of the forging of left unity through the united struggles of the toiling people and also its gathering round of democratic allies," the General Secretary pronounced. "Hence this resurrection of the ghost of 1942 once again by Mr Arun Shourie in order to isolate the communist movement by fanning anti-communism."
"One would have ignored these attacks since we know very well that this is not the first time that such attacks have been leveled against us," the publication declared. "Arun Shourie, howsoever his journalistic talent may be, stands no comparison to such eminent personalities who have attacked us in the past. The eminent barrister, Langford James, of Meerut Conspiracy Case called us anti-God, anti-family, anti-decent everything with no sense of humour. History vindicated us. The Communist Party of India grew from strength to strength since those days of 1929. Today the Communist Movement is a strength to reckon with."
What all this had to do with the facts which I had set out, what I had to do with that barrister of 1929 was and remains a mystery. But 'devastating refutation' it was! And remember the line, 'One would have ignored these attacks...' -- it too is a standard one. The facts which have been brought to light, even more so those who have brought the facts to light are always beneath their dignity to answer. In his article 'refuting' what I had written, Panikkar had been the embodiment of lofty self- abnegation: "The alternative of suing for defamation the likes of Shourie is below one's dignity.... "
Now that a heap of new facts have been revealed, he is loftier still -- Shourie is not a historian, he is a mythologist... a political pornographer... I shall not dignify him by answering his diatribe...
Apart from everything else, one reason it is a waste of one's time to do so is that the dunce is not going to be able to comprehend the reality in any case. "It will be a waste of effort and also good space to refute this nonsense which betrays Shourie's utter Ignorance of history and world events," the Communist Party publication continued.
"We do not want to go into his vapid nonsensical utterances in the last installment," wrote the Communist Party publication. "They are tarred with the same rotten anti-Communist stuff with the hackneyed claim that communists are but the agents of Moscow (or rather of the Soviet Union) and as such they have to be treated with contempt. (On the contrary, my argument had been that precisely for this reason they ought to be treated with wariness, that their potential for harming the country, for poisoning discourse must not be ignored!)
"Even a cursory reading of the names of the Communist Party members who have found their way from other streams Of the national movement, either of the national revolutionary or of the orthodox Gandhian type (And what about those who saw through the Communist Party, including several of the topmost functionaries of the Party, and left it?) and the whole host of intellectuals who have adored (sic) the ranks of the Communist Party, and the large mass of workers and peasants who have acquired a new stature in their life by joining and working for the Communist Party would belie Arun Shourie's vile slanders."
Suppose for a moment that all the intellectuals of India had fallen to 'adoring' the ranks of the Communist Party, that every worker and peasant had become a devotee of the Party, how would that alter the assistance the Party had rendered to the British?
The 'this-is-an-old-charge' defence again: "These slanders themselves are not of Arun Shourie's original imagination either; they are products of a diseased and jaundiced view of the state of affairs which cannot bear the thought of the ordinary worker and peasant, of the ordinary man taking part and having a say in the political life of the country..."
Mockery, derision, scorn, the charge of conspiracy, of secret funds being pumped in by un-named forces, the charge that the critic is privilege-personified and therefore cannot stand the fact that, because of the struggles put up by the Left, the masses are coming into their own - an avalanche to scare everyone from doing what this fellow has done. "The argument would be similar to say, 'When did you last stop beating your wife?'," the Party publication declared. "This pearl of wisdom which Shourie seems to be bestowing cannot just be called a fool's paradise in which he may be lurking. It is a dangerous game to sow dissensions In the minds of the young political workers. And there are many other interests in the country who are financing it as is evident from various translations and other media coverage that have gone with it."
But hope also, confidence too -- lest the rank and file lose heart: "But truth is truth and must stand out, even when Shourie indulges in making a lot of 'shor' (noise), but with a purpose no doubt."
The great names who saw the light and acknowledged that the Communists are the ones who had been right... : "They all did this out of a process of understanding of national events in the context of international developments which is beyond the mental horizon of Arun Shourie or similar other anti-Communist scribes who have slandered us in the past..." Two key points in that - the ones who criticise them are deficient in understanding, and they are congenitally anti-Communist.
That last bit - about being congenitally anti-Communist -- is doubly believed: On metaphysical grounds, as well as practical ones. Once you believe in a religion which maintains that the Revelation has been handed to it alone, it necessarily follows that, if a person does not see the truth of that religion, there is something congenitally wrong with him! In totalitarian societies -- Stalin's Soviet Union which our Communists so adored -- there is a practical reason too: For anyone to stand against the received Line in such a set up, he must necessarily be congenitally mad!
"It is difficult for Arun Shourie to realise this, devoid as he is of any political perspective" -- the person in question can be said to have 'political perspective' only when and if he reaches the same conclusions as The Theory dictates!
As the man lacks elementary political understanding, it is always pointless to check up the facts which such a person has adduced: I had published extensive extracts from a 120-page report which the Communist Party had submitted to the British narrating the assistance its members were rendering by sabotaging the Quit India Movement. "The so-called 120-page document," the publication scoffed, "unfortunately I thought it a waste of time to count whether it was actually 120 pages as Shourie seems to have done. " Exactly what these historians maintained when I nailed the concoction they had put out: Of 'rational' having been surreptitiously changed to 'national' in the ICHR Resolution, of three of the five objectives having been deleted from the Resolution.
Hence, the confidence in the future: "We are aware that the four articles by Arun Shourie both in English and other languages are designed particularly to create a rift between the left and the other democratic forces. We have every confidence that this will fail and our healthy national movement will work steadily towards the goal of bringing about the social transformation through the path of peace, consolidation of national freedom, and socialism."
"Shourie's series", began another publication which the Communist Party put out, "is a long chain of distortions, canards and slander against the Communist Party of India, the international communist movement and the Soviet Union..." "From 1944 onward (and even earlier) paid pen-pushers and agents of imperialism and the bourgeoisie have repeatedly run slander campaigns against the CPI and the USSR..." Hansraj Vohra... Langford James, the barrister again..., "the notorious Minoo Masani and later on his worthy 'disciple' Sitaram Goel"... "Naturally enough questions are being asked by people all over India: Why has Shourie started this foul campaign now?... " That is always a useful question to ask: When you can't answer a person on facts, ask: "But why now?" India carries out its first nuclear explosion on 18 May 1974 at Pokhran. And what does the redoubtable representative of the Communists ask in the Lok Sabha? "We have been told that we have (had) the capability for a long time, we could have set off this blast much earlier, if we wanted to. Well, if we could have set it off much earlier, we could have set it off much later also. My question is about the timing of it. There must be some reason behind the timing of this, this particular timing of 18th May. I am not clear about it."
Next, redouble authority by quoting each other! That is twice- blessed: It doubles the weight of your assertion, and, as the comrade is being cited as an authority, it doubles his weight for the future! And so the CPI publication fortified the question it had posed - the hardy perennial, 'But why now?'- by citing what E M S Namboodiripad had asked!
"Reputed Communist leader and General Secretary of the CPI(M) E M S Namboodiripad," it said, "has queried: 'Why should Arun Shourie have taken up the shop-soiled wares of Communist Betrayal in 1942, 40 years after the Quit India struggle started?' "
And the answer too was fortified by citing E M S once again: "The seasoned anti-Communist Minoo Masani promptly jumped into the fray, in defence of Shourie... E M S sharply retorts: 'What Mr Shourie himself and Mr Masani are afraid of is thus the coming together of opposition parties not opposed to the Communists, but cooperating with them. This is exactly what I suspected in my Bombay press conference.'..." "Thus the cat is out of the bag," the publication proclaimed in triumph taking E M S' assertion as proof.
"Large segments of the non-Communist non-left opposition parties have repeatedly joined hands with the Communist-led left opposition, both against the authoritarian forces led by Indira Congress as well as against right-wing communal and divisive forces like the BJP and others. This has alarmed both Indira Gandhi and her entourage, as well as the BJP, RSS and their allies. Shourie and Masani have come out as their spokesmen and in their desperate efforts to drive a wedge between the Communists and the non-Communist opposition parties. In this foul effort, what better weapon can they take up than the shop- soiled ware of anti-Communist, anti-Soviet canard?"
Thus, congenitally anti-Communist, vile motives, desperation of the critic - all there!
Next, a repeat of denunciation-by-association: "let us now have a brief look at the 'noble' anti-Communist predecessors of Arun Shourie!," the publication proceeds. Hansraj Vohra... Minoo Masani... And now comes Arun Shourie who is supposed to be a talented journalist but who has been exposed as a communalist... And who has published his articles? The Illustrated Weekly of India which has also published an article (among the hundreds it would have published in the period!) 'The RSS will stay' by an RSS member. And so the truth manifest: "The communists must go and the RSS must stay - the 'Weekly-Shourie-Masani tie-up is now crystal clear! This is the basic reason why Shourie has picked up from the dustbin of history the discarded weapon of anti-communism!"
Forty pages of such sterling refutations in one publication, twenty-three pages in another. All leading to the conclusion at once triumphal and defiant, and comic: "The CPI is a party of heroes and martyrs of freedom struggle as well as of class battles. The Shouries and Masanis can wear the shop-soiled dirty shirt of anti-communism as long as they like, but their place is in the dung-heap of history! The combined imperialist armies tried to destroy the young Soviet State. They failed. Hitler tried it too and was destroyed in turn.
"Today the Reagans and Thatchers are again trying to play the same dirty game. They too will meet the fate of Hitler and Mussolini! So also will their paid henchmen, who spatter mud at the communists! Like old man Galileo facing the inquisition and like our own Dimitrov, facing the butcher Goering, we Indian communists also hurl defiance at the face of all our reactionary detractors and persecutors and with rock-like conviction, resolutely declare: Nonetheless, the Earth goes forward, and all roads lead to Communism!"
Amen!
Twin lessons in that. To roll back their untruth, we must immunise ourselves against their verbal terrorism. And among the easy prophylactics is to cut out and store their vituperation -- in less than no time it mutates into the ridiculous.
The press conferences and pamphlets were hurled at me in 1984. In 1986 in his A History of Indian Freedom Struggle, E M S Namboodiripad acknowledged that communists had collaborated with the British -- or rather, that they "did not hesitate to establish contact with the government and accept the assistance...."! -- during the 'Quit India' Movement.
In 1984, as we have just seen, the Communists were proclaiming, "Nonetheless, the Earth goes forward, and all roads lead to Communism." In 1989 the Berlin Wall was pulled down...
The Observer
January 22, 1999
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