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BOOKS
Left
to Itself
From hardboiled
Marxists to teenybopper pinkos, India's left is ever holier than thou
By
Harindra Srivastava
MORE
EQUAL THAN OTHERS
Edited by
RAVI KAPOOR
VISION
Rs. 250 |
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The
blurb states the book's purpose at the very outset: "Who are the
Indian leftists?" Where do they derive their authority from? Why
is their influence disproportionately greater than their electoral strength?
To answer all these questions, Ravi Shankar Kapoor transcends the merely
political orbit. He delves into art, culture, cinema, literature, academia
and the media to assess the intellectual hegemony of this tribe-whose
members range from aristocratic socialists to pinko teeny-bopper intellectuals.
Almost all of them claim to have hearts that bleed for the downtrodden,
never mind if their own lives are replete with contradictions.
The nub
of Kapoor's argument is that the organised left has no business giving
itself sole residency of the moral high ground. He wonders how any Indian
would reconcile himself with a party that practically justified the Chinese
invasion of 1962 but today projects itself as the defender of liberty
by, for instance, inviting Deepa Mehta to film Water in West Bengal. The
Janus-faced communist is a strange being. When, as Kapoor points out,
Manmohan Singh liberalises the economy he is disparaged for "compromising
the country's economic sovereignty". When comrade Jyoti Basu strives
to do exactly the same, he is hailed for "generating employment"
as a "promoter of state industries". Why, even the removal of
thousands of hawkers from Calcutta's streets in 1996 was justified as
necessary before the arrival of John Major and an army of 2,500 enthusiastic
investors. Kapoor's book is full of such examples, of how an act when
performed by the right is wrong but when repeated by the left is right!
The road to revolution is no doubt littered with paradoxes.
Calcutta
is today something of a capital city of the Indian left. Yet during Durga
Puja every year all theories about the denial of religion recede into
the Hugli. Good communists worship the very deity, Durga, that Lord Ram
propitiated before slaying Ravan. But then Calcutta is also the city of
that great example of human exploitation: the man-pulled rickshaw, where
the puller is often older and weaker than his passenger. Battles for freedom,
somebody should remind our left friends, begin at home.
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