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Just after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru began referring to
communalism and communism as the twin dangers that faced
India-communalism because of the creation of Pakistan and communism
because of the first Telengana agitation that began around 1949.
Very often, he equated the two.
Nehru was taken seriously by the people and the communists were
viewed with as much detestation as the RSS and the Jana Sangh. When
he died in 1964, the first episodic decline in Congress fortunes
began. It reached its zenith in 1967 when, for the first time since
1947, Congress governments were voted out in more than half the
states.
Indira Gandhi was the prime minister then, though not the Congress
president. She concluded that if the party had to be revived, she
would have to rid it of the older generation of politicians. But
when she implemented her agenda, the party split and, from 1969 to
1971 when she came back with a thumping majority, she ran a
minority government. In a far greater measure than the Gujral
government, that government depended on the communists for
survival. And that dependence had two consequences.
One, Congressmen loyal to Indira Gandhi stopped viewing the
communists as Nehru did, namely, as a mortal danger to the country.
lie result, when the Congress conquered all in 1971, was a
new-found respectability of the kind that the RSS-BJP are still
struggling to achieve. Second, thanks to the influence of the
former communists, the Left generally began to receive official
patronage. Its ideas soon became the dominant ideology even though
everyone knew where the fount of wisdom lay.
Taken together, this meant that the country was presumed to now
face only one danger, the one from communalists. It also meant
that, if not the communists as a party (or two parties, as is the
case in India), then certainly their ideology became fashionable.
As much, obviously, could not be said about the communalists, who
have rightly remained beyond the pale. Thus did one ideology,
which Nehru had identified as being a major threat, become
respectable, while another which he had mentioned in the same
breath, stayed a pariah.
But this is the less interesting part of the story. The more
interesting part is that while the Congress attitude to the Left
has changed, the communist attitude to the Congress hasn't It still
remains as hostile as it was in 1942, when on Stalin's say-so the
communists sided with the British during the Quit India movement
(Ironically, in India's fiftieth anniversary year, the same lot are
calling the shots, including having a decisive say in who will be
prime minister).
It also seems worth pointing out that although the communalists
have often been accused of threatening the unity and integrity of
India, it was the communists who accepted the right to secede and
that it was only in 1972 that they gave it up. Until then, they
had disguised their stand under the old "nationalities" question on
which Stalin had laid down the law, while of course, not observing
it himself.
Now this party, which helped the British during Quit India, which
took its time in acknowledging Indian independence, which refused
to condemn the Chinese for attacking India, which supported the
right to secede until 1972 i.e a quarter of a century after the
Constitution was promulgated, has suddenly become the arbiter of
Indian governments' destinies.
I wonder what Nehru would have said at this turn of events.
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