Daily Times

The collapse of the Soviet Union
and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc countries, the metamorphosing of the People’s Republic of China into the bankers to global capitalism are cataclysmal events of such gigantic proportions that it would take a very long time before one can begin to understand how and why the communist project proved ultimately to be a house of cards.

A major contribution to understanding the failure of communism, as theorised by Vladimir Lenin, to successfully mobilise the masses to overthrow through class struggle imperialism and the colonial state, and subsequently to capture the successor Indian state, is this trilogy. This is a compilation of three earlier works — A History of the Indian Communists: The Irrelevance of Leninism (Shashi Joshi); A History of the Indian Communists: From United Front to Left Front (Bhagwan Josh) and Culture, Community and Power: A Critique of the Discourses of Communalism and Secularism (Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh) — by two leading Indian scholars at India’s premier Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi: Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh. Both have their intellectual roots in the Indian communist movement. It is seldom that one comes across such a vast body of theoretical literature reviewed and facts evaluated in a single study. It is surely the magnum opus of these gifted life-partners.

Two concepts are at the core of their analytical apparatus: hegemony and culture. Deferring to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Bhagwan Josh writes in the second volume: “Hegemony is a relation not of domination by means of force, but of consent by means of political and ideological leadership (vol. 2, page xxi). Gramsci had argued that instead of the revolutionary insurrection that Leninism prescribed, it was necessary for Italian communists to work within the bourgeois democratic state based on the rule of law, rather than go it alone, in order to fight fascism which was then on the rise in Italy.

The second core concept in their analytical framework is their notion of culture. According to Joshi and Josh, economic and social interests no doubt fuel all movements that aggregate individual desires and discontents. However, they wonder why some ideologies and not others attract people. They believe this is determined by culture. Reviewing a number of approaches on culture they settle for one that combines “culture as a battleground on which competing groups struggle to define symbols and meanings” (volume III: xviii), with “culture as a process inevitably involving contradictions, conflict and accommodation, and emphasising the actors’ agency” (ibid). A great degree of emphasis is laid by them on the notion of “internality of culture”. By this they mean the way culture circumscribes the choices of diction and symbols as well as delimits those who can choose them and use them successfully.

In the first volume covering the colonial period, Shashi Joshi demonstrates that the strategy to attempt a violent overthrow of the state was a non-starter from the very onset. The colonial state was not, unlike Czarist Russia, a brute machine that could be confronted head on by mobilising all sections of the people against its domination. It was a sophisticated ideological-political-military apparatus that was, on the one hand, fully prepared to crush any violent challenge to its authority, and on the other, through limited constitutionalism and skilful management of social tensions such as those deriving from religious differences between Hindus and Muslims or through legal measures regulating relations between workers and capitalists or tenants and landowners and those deriving from the divisive caste system, it could impede mass mobilisation.

At the bottom of their argument is that one could not transplant lock stock and barrel the conditions that obtained in Czarist Russia that resulted in the Bolsheviks coming to power through an armed revolution in October 1917. The hegemony of the colonial state had to be challenged from within the cultural and political conditions peculiar to India. In sharp contrast to the communists’ class-based armed insurrection strategy, Gandhi was convinced that a violent overthrow of the colonial state was impossible. He, therefore, devised a challenge to imperialism, which combined the moderate path of constitutionalism and legal protest with mass, non-violent agitation that very prudently evaded a head-on collision with the colonial state. It was, therefore, both constitutional as well as extra-constitutional. The insistence on non-violence steered it away from a head-on collision with the British. Such a sophisticated challenge the British could not combat successfully, because the colonial state was bound by its culture of constitutionalism and recognition of basic civil liberties such as the right peacefully to protest government policies. Thus the Gandhian approach was dialectically more effective in challenging the hegemony of imperialism.

In this regard, Joshi makes the important point that Jawaharlal Nehru, who was generally considered left of Gandhi, did not betray the idea of a revolutionary transformation of India to socialism as was maintained by orthodox communists during 1929-34 when they accused Nehru of eclecticism and of being a “despicable betrayer and beheader of the revolutionary movement” (page 162), but a strategy that sought to combine the Gandhian strategy with socialism.

In the second volume, Bhagwan Josh focuses on the failure of the communists to successfully join the politics of a united front against imperialism. He refers to a statement of the general secretary of the Communist Party, Ajoy Kumar Ghosh, to the effect that although the communist party tried to forge an anti-imperialist front under its leadership, it was the national bourgeoisie led by the Congress Party, which succeeded in doing so. Josh disagrees with Ghosh that the Congress Party was merely a bourgeois party. He considers the Congress a historic multi-class bloc, with its left and right wings being balanced in Gandhi’s strategy to create a broad front against imperialism. Rigid adherence to Leninist theory meant that instead of devising policies and strategies to work with the objective reality, the communists saw the reality through an economistic and deterministic prism.

(To be continued)

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