Falling of Lenin in Khmelnytskyi park

The Eccentric Tripartite for BJP’s Congress Mukt Bharat

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After a staggering 25 years, Left Front was booted out of office in Tripura, paving the way for BJP which won 35 seats in a house of 60. It marked an increase in the vote share of the right-wing party from a mere 1.5 percent to 43 percent which came as a deadly setback for the incumbent CPI(M) which has now been reduced to just one state in the entire Indian Union i.e. Kerala.

This also reiterates the fact that BJP is now in power, independently or in alliance, in 20 out of 29 Indian states. The win in Tripura is a landmark victory especially because the BJP came out winners against their arch-rivals, the CPI(M). The people of India have now deliberately and progressively alienated the Left from the political discourse of India and the Right has been filling the vacuum, the so called centre being a hapless, clueless and docile spectator.

From Tripura (Photo : Reuters)
From Tripura (Photo : Reuters)

However, what should have been a cause for positive reinforcement and celebrations in the BJP has turned out to be the harbinger of mayhem, disruption, and anarchy. A day after the ground-breaking win in Tripura, alleged workers of the saffron party instead of celebrating their win with integrity, composure and the proverbial laddoos, chose vandalism instead and demolished the statue of Lenin, considered to be the fore-father of Communists world over. This mala fide activity, no doubt gave rise to much mayhem among the left front and was akin to rubbing salt on a freshly inflicted wound. Naturally, ‘Liberals’ from all sections berated this act of utter shamelessness and indiscipline from a party which has always taken pride in being called ‘disciplined and cadre-based’. The right presented the initiative to the left on a platter and the left did not disappoint. A statue of Dr. Ambedkar vandalized by unknown miscreants in U.P. a couple of days ago was immediately saffronized. People from the cabal immediately set out to find a pattern and in a large country like India finding selective patterns has never been a tough task. All was going well, the narrative was firmly with the left when some imbecile left novices in Jadavpur University decided to dismember a statue of Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookherjee. Although I don’t believe in bans but whoever gave them that idea should definitely be banned from politics.

All these disruptive and unsettling developments were slowly coming to the end of the very short attention span of Indian public when they were given a fresh lease of life by BJP’s Mr. H. Raja. He wrote on his Facebook page:
“Who is Lenin? What is the connection between him (Lenin) and India? What connection between communism and India? Lenin’s statue was broken down in Tripura. Today it is Lenin’s statue in Tripura and tomorrow it will be the statue of caste fanatic EV Ramasamy.”

For the uninitiated, the “caste fanatic EV Ramasamy” that he talks about is none other than Periyar and before one terms Mr. Raja as another fringe element in BJP, let it be known that he is one of the national secretaries of BJP. What is interesting though is the alacrity with which PM Narendra Modi and Party Chief Amit Shah have denounced the statement and the vandalism. They seem to know the reverence with which Periyar is seen in Tamil Nadu, and although the BJP’s neo-nationalism is in stark contrast with the regional nationalism of Periyar, they have no qualms in bargaining that for a better outreach in the region.

The 21st century has been BJPs century so far. From Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Mr. Narendra Modi, the hierarchy of BJP has truly aged and evolved. Mr. Modi and Mr. Shah have forged a formidable partnership to the chagrin of the opposition. Their combination has worked wonders for the saffron outfit pan India. However, there are pockets of opposition still left especially in the southern states, where an eccentric alliance is being touted. This peculiar tripartite consists of communists, ambedkarites and periyarites who have historically disagreed vehemently with each other on matters of ideology. But as they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. Having come to touching distance of Modi’s dream of “Congress-Mukt Bharat”, it can therefore be argued that the main challenge that lies ahead for him is this tripartite. And the irresponsible statements and actions of his peripheral leaders is only making this amalgamation a lot easier than envisaged.

About the Author : Ambikesh Kumar Jha is a social writer and a sailor, presently ashore.

Books – The Used and the Abused!

Abhishek Jha17 Comments

Barely a minute after the gift books had reached the recipients, I got an email from Junglee, an Amazon subsidiary, saying something to the effect of – ‘Now that you have bought books from amazon, how about selling some on Junglee?’ Though this was a routine pitch, it got me into wondering about a lot of things of recent past. Just a day earlier I had told a friend in jest that I was going to sell all my books, take note – it was not a serious statement!

I don’t own a lot of things. My friends who know me well are completely sick of my wardrobe and at times have to take me hostage to get me to buy stuffs. This is not because I am on some money-saving mission, I don’t save either. So where does the money go? I don’t claim to have some sort of library for myself, but I have a respectable number of books with me and the number increases at a staggering rate. In fact, our Government could define BPL (Below Poverty Line) mark by just contrasting between my wardrobe and the bookshelf.  Rich gets richer, the poor gets poorer.

Capitalism-Socialism-Communism all sleep in the same bed here. I had read somewhere that the day you own more than single pair of clothes to cover yourself, you cease to be a communist. Now, most of the present day communists would certainly fail this test in today’s age and I don’t blame them. The condition itself is too stringent and suffocating. However, if for a few considerations, I am allowed to take it as the benchmark, then the beggar who just had a garbage box to comfort his spine in and almost no rag on his body,  just outside my workplace in Chennai would perhaps make the greatest Communist on earth. Marx and Lenin would miserably fail this test. Taking heart from this, my wardrobe stands a much better chance to be regarded as at least a reluctant communist, reluctant because perhaps it wants to get a few more clothes for itself, but its master is lazy as a dead bone in such matters. This opens up two new ways to become a communist –

1. Have a very bad master!
2. Become lazy, lazy like a dead bone.

Sitting on an antipodal citadel, my bookshelf is a shelf-ish enchantress. If there ever was a true capitalist, it is her. The master is possessed by her beauty and she makes him do all that she desires. When much of what the master earns goes into her wishes and fancies every month, it is not very difficult to understand how enslaved and smitten by her the master is!

There is no end to her desires. I have never left my bookshelf alone, but perhaps on one occasion when I was moving to a new city and all her possessions had to be transported beforehand. For about a month, I couldn’t see her due to delays in courier service. That was the only time we were separated. A thing to note here is that this Capitalist monster owns a lot of anti-communism books, and since sits just beside my reluctantly communist wardrobe, leaves no opportunity to jeer at him and show him how communism failed the day master’s friends bought him a second pair of clothes. I can’t tell you any method here to become a capitalist. It can’t be done. Capitalize is a verb, but capitalism is a noun. So, you might think you can capitalize to become a Capitalist but Capitalize in turn depends on some noun, say in this case – situation! That situation comes by itself, you just have to be greedy enough. Like I said, the day you work your ass off for another pair of clothes in your wardrobe, you have embarked yourself onto the voyage of Capitalism.

To let myself wander for some more time, I would want to touch upon capitalism in books-industry and what’s going wrong there. I remember my boyhood days when books containing spiritual or religious messages used to be distributed for free and if I talk particularly about a few organizations, they used to encourage their first readers to pass on the books to somebody who hadn’t read them and continue the relay so that someday in distant future, entire planet would know about these organizations. Backed up by huge grants and charity money, this was their way of marketing. To be candid about it, I used to collect all of them just to sniff the fresh-from-print pages. Not that I didn’t try reading them but failed to make any sense of the content matter then. Interestingly, many customers stood benefited as even if they never opened these books, never turned over a single page; they could always keep them on their study tables and shelves to show off.

This still continues with the Quran and the Bible. You get them for free most of the times and the people who throng on the stores to get these books for free, generally don’t belong to Islam or Christianity. However once they rack up these books in their house, it helps to prove their broad-mindedness and establish a secular image to their guests without having read a word. That notwithstanding, let us think from the perspective of an involved reader. For him, these socio-religious books still come at nominal costs. Additionally, most of the dedicated readers share these books on their own after having read them. While he can get a Bible or a Quran, or a Gita for almost nothing, Das Kapital will cost him somewhere between Rs 500 to Rs 1500 on Amazon.

The socio-religious book segment is more communist than the segment that sells the works of Karl Marx. Marx would perhaps say today – ‘Socio-religious book is the new opiate of the masses!’
Think of all the socio-religious books as public owned and the fact that anyone can read them easily, re-interpret, comment, criticize, and burn them amidst a few fatwas from selected communities – not very difficult to fathom! Unwittingly and ironically, the bible of communism can’t be bought by the segment of the society that needs to read it more than anyone else. They have to be content with mind-numbing tall tales of leaders and impostors, not that the leaders and impostors have much of a difference in today’s age.

The article continues in its second part.