Daily Times

Professor Bhagwan Josh develops a sophisticated appreciation of Nehru’s left bloc, which rejected Leninism but not socialism. Instead of relying on the working class crushed by wage slavery, and thus unable to lead the struggle, Nehru broadened it to include the peasantry, the youth and anti-imperialist intellectuals and others. Subhash Chandra Bose was on the left of Nehru, but his bid to capture the leadership of the Congress was thwarted because he predicated armed insurrection that stood no chance of winning. The communists did begin to work towards a united front in 1939-40 but one under their class-based hegemony. That ended in just the opposite and alienated them from the mainstream when they joined hands with the British after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

Since independence, the communists have been displaying the same rigidity in making alliances. Thus in Bengal, where the breakaway Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) emerged as a major player and took up a clear anti-communal stand against the BJP, it nevertheless evaded forming a stable alliance with the Congress. In Kerala, which is a CPM stronghold, no serious attempt to forge a left front with the Congress was attempted either. The ultimate failure of the communists to partake in the building of a progressive Indian nation was when Jyoti Basu of the CPM was not allowed by his party to become the prime minister of India because that would entail major concessions to the capitalist economy that existed in India.

The third volume is jointly authored by Joshi and Josh. Although they take great pains to assert that by culture they do not mean religion, this is not entirely convincing because they identify Hindus and Muslims as heirs to two different cultures and culture codes, phraseology and symbols that essentially disqualify one group from drawing upon the ‘culture’ of the other group. We learn that the two cultures could never merge to create a strong Indian consciousness — by the same token in the Punjab, religiously-demarcated cultural boundaries remain intact and an overarching Punjabi identity could not develop. They provide evidence of communal riots going back in history many centuries, and, therefore, question the rather widespread notion of communalism being the brainchild of colonialism and imperialism, and a product of colonial modernity. They give the example of the song Bande Mataram, which the Congress chose as its party song. The song was written by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and later appeared in his novel, Anandamath (1882), portraying the Muslims and the British as oppressive foreign invaders. Nehru took the position that the first two stanzas could be accepted as they were not communal, the Indian Muslims who saw it as an integral part of a hostile anti-Muslim novel, remained unconvinced. It was a choice made within the broad Hindu culture and appealed directly to the Hindus but alienated the Muslims who could not identify with it.

Ironically, when the communists in the Punjab tried to work within the cultural framework and Dr Adhikari and P C Joshi spoke of the Muslims as an oppressed nationality, they strengthened the separatist bid of the Muslim League while alienating the Sikhs of Punjab. What comes out of their massive study is that while Gandhi, or Gandhi and Nehru together, could trump the hegemony of the colonial state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah could trump their use of culture with a powerful invocation of Islamic symbolism and cultural vocabulary.

Now, this may very much be true. Perhaps culture is the independent variable that defines the choices and consciousness of people. The authors do point out that this happens within particular contexts, but their argument suggests the primacy of culture over class consciousness and solidarity. In other words, the communist project of a class revolution, howsoever attractive to those subscribing to the rationalist logic of class, is largely delusional when it comes to attracting the mass of people.

One can, however, always wonder how and why western culture has transformed in the last two hundred or more years so that Christianity is no longer the defining feature of European politics. Of course, Europe’s reluctance to let in Turkey suggests that the religion factor is still important, but within European politics a secularised culture based on civic nationalism is now the norm, though violent encounters with Islamism may still halt or alter that direction of cultural change.

On the other hand, working within culture to create hegemony as attempted by states such as Pakistan, Iran and indeed Israel are reasons to worry about all the talk about cultural authenticity. In India, Hindutva calls are a dangerous proposition for democracy, and both authors are very much aware of that problem. They show that whereas the colonial state was religiously neutral when it came to communal riots, the Indian state post-Nehru is definitely not: the 1984 slaughter of Sikhs in Delhi and of Muslims in Gujarat are horrible examples of a state pandering to a majoritarian culture.

One can therefore argue that ‘Culture Realism’ and culture as an undifferentiated whole can be a dangerous premise to base politics on. Within cultures there are social classes and strata and powerful interests. Consequently, a broad-based left alliance comprising the progressive forces, oppressed sections of society, non-dominant minorities and nationalities can develop a programme and strategy to challenge reactionary culture, and instead promote secular culture and democratic values that seek to establish a pluralist and fairer society — a social-democratic political community and order.

(Concluded)

The reviewer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com