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ESSAY
The
Inherited Lie
Perhaps
our doddering comrades are the last residues of history's biggest ghost
story. Perhaps certain parts of India are haunted by the orphaned vampires
of Transylvania. Perhaps it's vampirialism at its tropical worst. The
pioneers of the bloody revolution, beginning with Comrade Dracula, had
their residence in the countryside of Romania where the supremacy of matter
over spirit was achieved by the living corpse, the undead. The vampirism
of revolution was an oversized dream. It was expected to transcend frontiers,
to overwhelm the entire bad world. It was supposed to create the New Man.
As a character in George Steiner's post-Wall story, Proofs, says, "Marxism
did man supreme honour. The Moses and Jesus and Marx vision of the just
earth, of neighbour's love, of human universality, the abolition of barriers
between lands, classes, races, the abolition of tribal hatreds: that vision
was ... a huge impatience. But it was more. It was an overestimate of
man." The New Man was an overestimation of the revolutionary. The
Ancient Man, the undead, was the overwhelming reality.
After the
Ceausescu exorcism in Romania-what an apt coincidence-the undead nobles
seem to have migrated to the remoteness of India. That may explain why
the Surjeets and the Nayanars and the equally eminent grandees of Indian
communism leave no shadows behind them. They continue to rejuvenate themselves
by feasting on a dead ideology. And they are not realising that India
is fast becoming a less inhabitable haunt for them. Today, in this age
of post-ideology, they are unaware of their own failure: the class didn't
work; the struggle didn't materialise; and the caste they couldn't grasp.
And India is not certainly bleeding to keep the Red Counts healthy. Still,
why are they refusing to withdraw?
The embellished
answer, once again, is provided by Steiner's protagonist: "I am a
socialist. I am and remain a Marxist. Because otherwise I could not be
a proof-reader! ... Utopia simply means getting it right! Communism means
taking the errata out of history. Out of man. Reading proofs." The
undead of Indian communism, the last survivors of a lost romance, have
never got it right, despite their permanent struggle for the realisation
of a semi-urban utopia. According to them, nations and epochs can go wrong,
but the pure Marxist-Leninists cannot, unless there are proofing errors
in the book. The truth is: the book had lost its meaning not because of
proofing errors but because of serious doubts about the sanity of its
author. After all, for one wise man to reduce millions of human variables
into a few identifiable categories is to indulge in a kind of insanity.
The Europeans had learned it the hard way: they lived the Big Lie to repudiate
it.
For the
Indian communists, it is not insanity, or the Big Lie. It is senility,
and the Big Truth. Certainly, they are too ancient to see the difference
between the inherited lie and the existing truth. Steiner's proofreader
was a lucky one. One day when he reaches the party office, a new office-bearer
informs him: "Gone and buried, the old whore. It is now the party
of the Democratic Left. No more red star. A green tree. Look here: a bushy
green tree." Can you imagine something of this sort ever happening
to Basu or Surjeet or any other old man of Indian communism? Can you imagine
the Indian communist discarding the book and repainting the star? Still,
in a limited sense, Basu seems to have the intention to show the way.
For the sake of history, India and the "masses", Indian communists
should retire from politics-also from this foreign country.
Pg.
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