04-27-2007, 07:07 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Treachery recalled </b>
Pioneer.com
Udayan Namboodiri
<b>PC Joshi offered the British unsolicited support in crushing the freedom movement, and, in the process, sent hundreds of patriots to their death. </b>Subsequently, he got his just desserts - his own party banished him. Yet, this month, the CPI and CPI(M) came together to rehabilitate Joshi in their respective histories
<b>The CPI and the CPI(M) agreed this month to rehabilitate PC Joshi, the first general secretary of the united party. After all, Joshi belongs to their common past and being inheritors to that tradition, they must jointly own up to the wrongs heaped on him</b>.
Seeing AB Bardhan and Prakash Karat, the respective heads of the CPI and CPI(M) pay tributes to PC Joshi on the occasion of his birth centenary, any thinking animal would be likely to arrive at two final summations about India's Communists:
Communists should desist from taking hard positions on any issue or personality, because history shows how regularly they perform 180-degree changes in their judgements. But in the interregnum, people suffer and, often get killed. So, just to save time, <b>Sitaram Yechury should right away "take responsibility" (they never "apologise" - remember Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee after Nandigram?) for demonising Narendra Modi and HS Surjeet should thank Murli Manohar Joshi for "saffronising" education.</b>
Indian Communist leaders are, after all, drawn from Hindu society. Through their act of giving belated recognition to PC Joshi, the man they humiliated and banished in his prime for merely suggesting they make up with the Congress, they are confirming their own Hindu ethos that says, "With death ends all controversy".
Now, who was this PC Joshi and why does Bardhan (see main article) admit with regret today that no Communist tears were shed when he died? Mohit Sen, in his autobiography, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist (2003), wrote<b>: "What crimes did we not commit! Our cruelty was no less than that of the imperialists and the fascists. We can never be forgiven for this. We were unjust, including to ourselves. What did some of us not do to try and destroy PC Joshi or SA Dange"? </b>(p-493)
Basab Dasgupta, a CPI(M) insider who often contributes to Saturday Special, says (The Other Voice) <b>that Joshi was humiliated and marginalised because he dared to foresee the day when the Communists of India would have to back the Congress</b>. In 1948, this was a treasonable idea for the comrades. At the Calcutta Congress of the party in 1948, the same in which the odious "yeh azadi jhoota hai" slogan was raised, Joshi was accused of being a "reformist", which must be something heinous in the Commie lexicon.
So, at the young age of 40, Joshi found himself "retired hurt". However, he continued to serve the movement, always dressed in "half-pant and half-shirt" (Bardhan) and won over to the Communist cause a great number of writers of socialist maudlin.<b> It is not clear whether he did an honest day's work in his entire life. Thanks to funds from Moscow and Nehruvian indulgence, it was possible to have a petit bourgeois life in Delhi by keeping alive the dream of "revolution". </b>One thing is sure, without a Joshi, India's Communists would not have succeeded in acquiring the awesome reservoirs of support that they enjoyed in Nehruvian academic and cultural citadels before Nandigram. Now, with the arrival of a blundering Chief Minister in Bengal, things may have changed dramatically, but, back in the 1950s, Joshi charmed a generation of creative people into abetting all their treachery and murderous crimes. Of course, the prospect of <b>annual free holidays in the East Bloc - even an award or two for a poverty film here or a book of bad verse there </b>- must have been added incentives. But it cannot be denied that Joshi's genius helped the Indian Left leave the Indian Right far behind in the race for chatteratti respectability.
Bardhan, employing characteristic Communist underplay, glosses over Joshi's role in undermining the freedom movement. The real story behind that is told by Arun Shourie in The Only Fatherland (1991). It reveals how Joshi offered unsolicited support to the British after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union in exchange for lifting the ban on the CPI. On December 16, 1941, he sent Reginald Maxwell, the Home Member in the Viceroy's Council, a letter solemnly promising "unconditional support to the government's war effort". That led to the large-scale release of Communists lodged in jail. Of course, they had to certify in writing that their attitude towards His Majesty's government had undergone a change. The rest is history.
In British confidential reports, which are now de-classified, Joshi figures as a bit of a nerd. One official describes his appearance as "student-like" - short, clean-shaven and spectacled - who was very verbose. In fact, it was often quite difficult to follow him (Shourie, p-38). In other words, his appearance superbly concealed the person within. Thousands of freedom loving men and women went to jail, got shot in fields and hung in crude gallows, because PC Joshi decided that the British empire was good for India.
Ultimately, by an ancient Indian tradition, the same people whom he wronged and betrayed gave Joshi a living. Perhaps a similar fate awaits the authors of Singur and Nandigram.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Pioneer.com
Udayan Namboodiri
<b>PC Joshi offered the British unsolicited support in crushing the freedom movement, and, in the process, sent hundreds of patriots to their death. </b>Subsequently, he got his just desserts - his own party banished him. Yet, this month, the CPI and CPI(M) came together to rehabilitate Joshi in their respective histories
<b>The CPI and the CPI(M) agreed this month to rehabilitate PC Joshi, the first general secretary of the united party. After all, Joshi belongs to their common past and being inheritors to that tradition, they must jointly own up to the wrongs heaped on him</b>.
Seeing AB Bardhan and Prakash Karat, the respective heads of the CPI and CPI(M) pay tributes to PC Joshi on the occasion of his birth centenary, any thinking animal would be likely to arrive at two final summations about India's Communists:
Communists should desist from taking hard positions on any issue or personality, because history shows how regularly they perform 180-degree changes in their judgements. But in the interregnum, people suffer and, often get killed. So, just to save time, <b>Sitaram Yechury should right away "take responsibility" (they never "apologise" - remember Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee after Nandigram?) for demonising Narendra Modi and HS Surjeet should thank Murli Manohar Joshi for "saffronising" education.</b>
Indian Communist leaders are, after all, drawn from Hindu society. Through their act of giving belated recognition to PC Joshi, the man they humiliated and banished in his prime for merely suggesting they make up with the Congress, they are confirming their own Hindu ethos that says, "With death ends all controversy".
Now, who was this PC Joshi and why does Bardhan (see main article) admit with regret today that no Communist tears were shed when he died? Mohit Sen, in his autobiography, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist (2003), wrote<b>: "What crimes did we not commit! Our cruelty was no less than that of the imperialists and the fascists. We can never be forgiven for this. We were unjust, including to ourselves. What did some of us not do to try and destroy PC Joshi or SA Dange"? </b>(p-493)
Basab Dasgupta, a CPI(M) insider who often contributes to Saturday Special, says (The Other Voice) <b>that Joshi was humiliated and marginalised because he dared to foresee the day when the Communists of India would have to back the Congress</b>. In 1948, this was a treasonable idea for the comrades. At the Calcutta Congress of the party in 1948, the same in which the odious "yeh azadi jhoota hai" slogan was raised, Joshi was accused of being a "reformist", which must be something heinous in the Commie lexicon.
So, at the young age of 40, Joshi found himself "retired hurt". However, he continued to serve the movement, always dressed in "half-pant and half-shirt" (Bardhan) and won over to the Communist cause a great number of writers of socialist maudlin.<b> It is not clear whether he did an honest day's work in his entire life. Thanks to funds from Moscow and Nehruvian indulgence, it was possible to have a petit bourgeois life in Delhi by keeping alive the dream of "revolution". </b>One thing is sure, without a Joshi, India's Communists would not have succeeded in acquiring the awesome reservoirs of support that they enjoyed in Nehruvian academic and cultural citadels before Nandigram. Now, with the arrival of a blundering Chief Minister in Bengal, things may have changed dramatically, but, back in the 1950s, Joshi charmed a generation of creative people into abetting all their treachery and murderous crimes. Of course, the prospect of <b>annual free holidays in the East Bloc - even an award or two for a poverty film here or a book of bad verse there </b>- must have been added incentives. But it cannot be denied that Joshi's genius helped the Indian Left leave the Indian Right far behind in the race for chatteratti respectability.
Bardhan, employing characteristic Communist underplay, glosses over Joshi's role in undermining the freedom movement. The real story behind that is told by Arun Shourie in The Only Fatherland (1991). It reveals how Joshi offered unsolicited support to the British after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union in exchange for lifting the ban on the CPI. On December 16, 1941, he sent Reginald Maxwell, the Home Member in the Viceroy's Council, a letter solemnly promising "unconditional support to the government's war effort". That led to the large-scale release of Communists lodged in jail. Of course, they had to certify in writing that their attitude towards His Majesty's government had undergone a change. The rest is history.
In British confidential reports, which are now de-classified, Joshi figures as a bit of a nerd. One official describes his appearance as "student-like" - short, clean-shaven and spectacled - who was very verbose. In fact, it was often quite difficult to follow him (Shourie, p-38). In other words, his appearance superbly concealed the person within. Thousands of freedom loving men and women went to jail, got shot in fields and hung in crude gallows, because PC Joshi decided that the British empire was good for India.
Ultimately, by an ancient Indian tradition, the same people whom he wronged and betrayed gave Joshi a living. Perhaps a similar fate awaits the authors of Singur and Nandigram.
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