10-20-2005, 01:24 AM
Karat's out-of-body experience
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Udayan Namboodiri sees menacing logic tucked in Prakash Karat's tirade against the media following September 29
CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat has lashed out at the media for questioning a typical Marxian shibboleth: The right of the 'working class' to strike. In these unusual times, editorials in People's Democracy are not just rambling harangue served on the revolutionary masses by a party apparatchik.
These are followed by journalists, academicians, foreign observers and think tankers with special interest because much of what is said - or left unsaid - goes towards speculating on the future of the Government that the CPI(M) and its allies purport to back.
Mr Karat has indicated that not only is he unrepentant for the chaos and disruption he caused on September 29, but is also quite aggressively poised in respect to critics who doubt his group's commitment to the UPA's continuity. He would like us to believe that the institutions of the free state are secure from Communist assault. Apologists of the Left who would rush to condemn the latter concern as plain overreaction have no idea as to what Mr Karat's followers did in Kolkata on the day of the "first general strike faced by the UPA government".
When employees of The Statesman tried to distribute their paper, CPI(M) cadre brutally assaulted them. The toady police of that 'progressive' State not only looked on with passive indifference, but also refused to register a case against the attackers. That in itself is a pointer to the deep politicisation of the administration.
It is perhaps Mr Karat's good fortune that the national media of Delhi is totally lacking in capacities to follow Left politics and interpret its policies in the light of the popular experience in the States where they wield real power. Even those experts who peruse the documents churned out by the CPI(M) or the CPI often miss the sub-text. Communist hacks tuck into their long-winding sentences dangerous - and sometimes rank seditious - remarks which escape media attention only because of the ignorance of the interpreters to the true face of the Indian reds. For instance, one of the many resolutions passed at this year's 15th party congress of the CPI(M) was the party's rejection of the two-child norm. That wasn't mere jholawallah jargon aimed at endlessly plumbing aid dollars through 'awareness building' programmes. Connect it with the demographic changes brought about by the Left's vote banking schemes and you begin to see a pattern to the madness.
Similarly, Mr Karat writes, The media and the editorials have not asked why the state government employees numbering millions went on strike in states where the Left has no influence... they did so because a Supreme Court judgement has sought to deprive them of the right to strike - a right they are not willing to give up. He packs in a threat here which must not be missed. In 2003, CPI(M)'s strongman in Bengal Biman Bose threw a gauntlet at the judiciary when traffic-paralysing demonstrations were banned by an order of Kolkata High Court. Even the intrepid judge, Justice Amitava Lala, author of that historic order, was singled out for attack. At no point in India's free history has a responsible politician - in this case the head of the province's coordination committee of ruling parties - got away with so much. The general secretary is not joking when he says that Leftist workers will not 'give up' their option to defy the Supreme Court.
The agitprop that the Communists imported into India was bred in the laboratories of totalitarianism. In all their 80 years, our Communists have failed to develop even one original tome which could go into the international reservoir of socialist thought (for whatever it is worth) as an Indian contribution. They live by aping and wrongly reading signs from the west and the east. In the late 1980s, Mr Karat, as central committee member of the CPI(M), developed his party's line of rejection of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. Also, he defended the Chinese Government's crackdown on peaceful demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. Today, the same man rejects the Indian citizen-consumer's aspirations for better services against taxes squeezed of him. He interprets liberalisation only from a pecuniary position. The Indian Left has no use for the vast majority of India's workers who toil in beedi, zardozi and agarbatti factories. The CPI(M)'s only interest is in fattening public sector and Government employees. This organised minority makes up the 'working class' for Mr Karat and his acolytes.
Of course, the media is afraid of this 'working class'. Look what they did to West Bengal. In 1967, the year the Communists first tasted power by riding piggyback on the Bangla Congress, they were crazed by the disappointment of being denied the Labour portfolio. But, good for them, it went to an even more lunatic group, the Socialist Unity Centre of India, with which they shared power under an ineffective chief minister called Ajoy Mukherjee. Shibdas Ghosh, the Bengali Karl Marx who wrote the original script for Bengal's industrial decimation, ensured that his understudy, Subodh Banerjee, who became the Labour Minister, encouraged militant trade unionism.
A bizarre situation ensued. A Government in power began to openly back gheraos and militancy on the shopfloors and yards of factories. In the nine-month term of the first United Front Government, there were 811 gheraos (roughly three-a-day) and the police was specifically instructed not to intervene. At one point, Justice Deep Narayan Sinha of Calcutta High Court took suo motu notice of the degenerating conditions, the Communist regime took a disingenuous line of defence - they claimed that since gherao was a crime unlisted under the Industrial Disputes Act or CrPC, the police could not be forced to step into the breach when management staff, along with their families, were barricaded for days on end. Yet, when they saw Justice Sinha refusing to yield, they sent their vicious cadre to the High Court to heckle the judge and shout slogans demanding the scrapping of the Constitution of India!
As responsible observers of the situation, fitted out with requisite institutional memory and the courage of conviction to expose Communist chicanery, the 'right wing media' of India will be ever vigilant against Mr Karat's working class. When he says, The reality is that the September 29 strike drew in a large section of people who are neither organised in the trade unions which gave the strike call nor are they followers of the Left parties, he actually offers patent justification for using professional agitators. The Gurgaon incident was no spontaneous outburst of workers, but the handiwork of hardened criminals who charged at the police with sticks and poles. The Haryana Police should be lauded for its show of restraint.
To Indian Communists, the war for establishing a just social order is already lost. Now, under helmsman Karat, the goal is to win a few battles against the raiding parties of globalisation and liberalisation. Most of his own comrades, including Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, have debunked Communism as 'dogma'. He is left with nothing but the liberty to have out of body experiences. His consciousness has, therefore, separated itself from the reality of national life and is floating like a discorporate form all over the UPA Government - proscribing this and prescribing that. As for votes, they have their well-oiled rigging machinery.
Yes, terrible injustices are perpetrated in the name of economic reforms. But the medicine should not be worse than the disease. Get that, comrade?<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Udayan Namboodiri sees menacing logic tucked in Prakash Karat's tirade against the media following September 29
CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat has lashed out at the media for questioning a typical Marxian shibboleth: The right of the 'working class' to strike. In these unusual times, editorials in People's Democracy are not just rambling harangue served on the revolutionary masses by a party apparatchik.
These are followed by journalists, academicians, foreign observers and think tankers with special interest because much of what is said - or left unsaid - goes towards speculating on the future of the Government that the CPI(M) and its allies purport to back.
Mr Karat has indicated that not only is he unrepentant for the chaos and disruption he caused on September 29, but is also quite aggressively poised in respect to critics who doubt his group's commitment to the UPA's continuity. He would like us to believe that the institutions of the free state are secure from Communist assault. Apologists of the Left who would rush to condemn the latter concern as plain overreaction have no idea as to what Mr Karat's followers did in Kolkata on the day of the "first general strike faced by the UPA government".
When employees of The Statesman tried to distribute their paper, CPI(M) cadre brutally assaulted them. The toady police of that 'progressive' State not only looked on with passive indifference, but also refused to register a case against the attackers. That in itself is a pointer to the deep politicisation of the administration.
It is perhaps Mr Karat's good fortune that the national media of Delhi is totally lacking in capacities to follow Left politics and interpret its policies in the light of the popular experience in the States where they wield real power. Even those experts who peruse the documents churned out by the CPI(M) or the CPI often miss the sub-text. Communist hacks tuck into their long-winding sentences dangerous - and sometimes rank seditious - remarks which escape media attention only because of the ignorance of the interpreters to the true face of the Indian reds. For instance, one of the many resolutions passed at this year's 15th party congress of the CPI(M) was the party's rejection of the two-child norm. That wasn't mere jholawallah jargon aimed at endlessly plumbing aid dollars through 'awareness building' programmes. Connect it with the demographic changes brought about by the Left's vote banking schemes and you begin to see a pattern to the madness.
Similarly, Mr Karat writes, The media and the editorials have not asked why the state government employees numbering millions went on strike in states where the Left has no influence... they did so because a Supreme Court judgement has sought to deprive them of the right to strike - a right they are not willing to give up. He packs in a threat here which must not be missed. In 2003, CPI(M)'s strongman in Bengal Biman Bose threw a gauntlet at the judiciary when traffic-paralysing demonstrations were banned by an order of Kolkata High Court. Even the intrepid judge, Justice Amitava Lala, author of that historic order, was singled out for attack. At no point in India's free history has a responsible politician - in this case the head of the province's coordination committee of ruling parties - got away with so much. The general secretary is not joking when he says that Leftist workers will not 'give up' their option to defy the Supreme Court.
The agitprop that the Communists imported into India was bred in the laboratories of totalitarianism. In all their 80 years, our Communists have failed to develop even one original tome which could go into the international reservoir of socialist thought (for whatever it is worth) as an Indian contribution. They live by aping and wrongly reading signs from the west and the east. In the late 1980s, Mr Karat, as central committee member of the CPI(M), developed his party's line of rejection of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. Also, he defended the Chinese Government's crackdown on peaceful demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. Today, the same man rejects the Indian citizen-consumer's aspirations for better services against taxes squeezed of him. He interprets liberalisation only from a pecuniary position. The Indian Left has no use for the vast majority of India's workers who toil in beedi, zardozi and agarbatti factories. The CPI(M)'s only interest is in fattening public sector and Government employees. This organised minority makes up the 'working class' for Mr Karat and his acolytes.
Of course, the media is afraid of this 'working class'. Look what they did to West Bengal. In 1967, the year the Communists first tasted power by riding piggyback on the Bangla Congress, they were crazed by the disappointment of being denied the Labour portfolio. But, good for them, it went to an even more lunatic group, the Socialist Unity Centre of India, with which they shared power under an ineffective chief minister called Ajoy Mukherjee. Shibdas Ghosh, the Bengali Karl Marx who wrote the original script for Bengal's industrial decimation, ensured that his understudy, Subodh Banerjee, who became the Labour Minister, encouraged militant trade unionism.
A bizarre situation ensued. A Government in power began to openly back gheraos and militancy on the shopfloors and yards of factories. In the nine-month term of the first United Front Government, there were 811 gheraos (roughly three-a-day) and the police was specifically instructed not to intervene. At one point, Justice Deep Narayan Sinha of Calcutta High Court took suo motu notice of the degenerating conditions, the Communist regime took a disingenuous line of defence - they claimed that since gherao was a crime unlisted under the Industrial Disputes Act or CrPC, the police could not be forced to step into the breach when management staff, along with their families, were barricaded for days on end. Yet, when they saw Justice Sinha refusing to yield, they sent their vicious cadre to the High Court to heckle the judge and shout slogans demanding the scrapping of the Constitution of India!
As responsible observers of the situation, fitted out with requisite institutional memory and the courage of conviction to expose Communist chicanery, the 'right wing media' of India will be ever vigilant against Mr Karat's working class. When he says, The reality is that the September 29 strike drew in a large section of people who are neither organised in the trade unions which gave the strike call nor are they followers of the Left parties, he actually offers patent justification for using professional agitators. The Gurgaon incident was no spontaneous outburst of workers, but the handiwork of hardened criminals who charged at the police with sticks and poles. The Haryana Police should be lauded for its show of restraint.
To Indian Communists, the war for establishing a just social order is already lost. Now, under helmsman Karat, the goal is to win a few battles against the raiding parties of globalisation and liberalisation. Most of his own comrades, including Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, have debunked Communism as 'dogma'. He is left with nothing but the liberty to have out of body experiences. His consciousness has, therefore, separated itself from the reality of national life and is floating like a discorporate form all over the UPA Government - proscribing this and prescribing that. As for votes, they have their well-oiled rigging machinery.
Yes, terrible injustices are perpetrated in the name of economic reforms. But the medicine should not be worse than the disease. Get that, comrade?<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->