Author: Ramachandra
Guha
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: September 8, 2000
In 1980, the respected
left-wing editor, Nikhil Chakravartty, made a trip to Afghanistan.
He was invited by the Soviets, who, the previous year, had invaded that
unhappy country. On his return, Chakravartty wrote a multi-part essay
in the journal he founded and edited, Mainstream. The burden of that
essay was that the progressive communists were bringing the fruits of modernity
and science to a backward and feudal land.
Twenty years later, another
senior left-wing editor has provided a willing whitewash of a totalitarian
regime. The cover story in the latest issue of the Chennai fortnightly,
Frontline, written by N. Ram, provides an extended and lavishly illustrated
brief for the Chinese occupation of that country. The Chinese, claims
Ram, have brought hospitals, roads and schools to a previously deprived
land. He minimizes the attacks on Tibetan cultural institutions and
religious beliefs that the Chinese have so demonstrably carried out.
He also dismisses the
reports by others of a demographic shift in Tibet. Relying on official
Chinese census data, he rejects independent evidence of the largescale
settlement of the region by the Han people. In any case, Ram has
little sympathy for pre-colonial Tibet. He thinks that before the
Chinese came the land was a reactionary backwater. The dalai lama,
revered by the Tibetans and regarded also by millions of non-Tibetans as
a leader of dignity and courage, is characterized by Ram as a man with
a "separatist, revanchist and backward-looking agenda". The editor
ends his essay with a message from the Chinese government to the Indian
government, asking it to "put an end to the Dalai Lama's virulently anti-Chinese,
separatist, and revanchist political activities in India".
Ram's case is made with
complete confidence, on the basis of a stay of five days. It is safe
to say that the editor's movements in those five days were closely monitored
by his host, the Communist Party of China. For, as is always the
case in authorized travels to totalitarian countries, the visitor is only
allowed to see or talk to what the rulers want him to see or talk to.
It is in keeping with what we know of how and why Ram's article was written
that it carries the Orwellian title: "Tibet: a reality check".
The curious thing about
Nikhil Chakravartty and N. Ram is that at home they have been vigorous
defenders of political and intellectual freedom. In 1975, five years
before he visited Soviet-ruled Afghanistan, Chakravartty closed down Mainstream
rather than subject it to the censorship imposed during the Emergency by
Indira Gandhi. And Ram's Frontline has sometimes championed unfashionable
causes. For instance, it refused to join the super-patriotic acclaim
for the nuclear blasts in the summer of 1998. What then explains
these double standards? Why would these champions of freedom at home so
energetically support brutal dictatorships abroad?
An answer of a kind is
provided in a classic work by the British writer and historian David Caute.
Called The Fellow Travellers, it was first published in 1975, and reappeared
in an expanded edition 12 years later. The book is a superb history
of Western apologists for communist regimes. It starts with the authors
and scholars who supported Joseph Stalin, such as the American writer,
Lincoln Steffens - who famously said, after a week in Russia, that "I have
seen the future and it works" - and The New York Timescorrespondent in
Moscow, Walter Duranty, who consciously suppressed, in his reports, the
evidence of millions of deaths caused by collectivization.
But, as Caute shows,
American leftists have had a monopoly on deceit and credulity. All
the great British Fabians, including George Bernard Shaw and H.G.
Wells, lined up to support Stalin and his ilk. Sidney and Beatrice
Webb even wrote an 800-page book with the wonderful title, Soviet Russia:
A New Civilization? That apologetic question mark was, however, removed
in the second printing. The one and sterling exception to this shameful
trend was Bertrand Russell, who very early saw Soviet communism for the
monstrosity it was. Russell has never been given proper credit for
his 1918 book, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, the first serious
exposé of Leninist politics.
After the Fifties, it
was no longer possible to defend Soviet Russia. So the Western writers
went in search of a substitute Utopia. One group settled on China,
a second on Vietnam, a third on Cuba. But, as Caute remarks, these
intellectuals would not, of course, trade their own life in a free country
for life under the boot. His explanation of this paradox was two-fold.
On the one hand, these men practised an unconscious racism: they believed
the British needed democracy, but not the backward Georgians or Chinese.
On the other hand, they displayed the intellectual's endemic love of power.
The commisars, aware of their propaganda value, would shamelessly flatter
them. Thus the Webbs or Wells would get an audience with Stalin,
and Edgar Snow an audience with Mao, while being denied an interview with
Roosevelt or Churchill. Naturally, they would be disposed to writing
well about their foreign hosts.
Caute's book can also
help explain why Indian Marxists have so zealously supported foreign communist
regimes. Fortunately, they do not have the field all to themselves.
Thus N. Ram's account of Chinese rule in Tibet must be contrasted
with the account provided by another Indian writer, Vikram Seth.
Unlike Ram, Seth speaks fluent Chinese; and unlike him again, he hiked
and hitchhiked through Tibet rather than whizzing through the country by
official car and aeroplane. In his book, From Heaven Lake, Seth provides
chilling details of the destruction and degradation of Tibet at the hands
of the Chinese. With his linguistic gifts and a novelist's empathy,
he was able to obtain from ordinary Tibetans a direct, unmediated account
of what they thought of their rulers. If Ram at all spoke to Tibetans
it would have been through interpreters, and with Chinese colonial officials
standing by.
The Indian Marxists's
admiration of foreign dictators is a curious thing indeed. The Communist
Party of India (Marxist) is the only party in the world which still worships
Stalin, putting up his portrait alongside those of Marx, Engels and Lenin
in their annual congresses. Yet the party has long ago abandoned
armed struggle, and is happy enough to participate in the routine processes
of Indian democracy.
Admittedly, hypocrisy
of another kind is practised by parties of the Indian right. The
founders of what is now the Bharatiya Janata Party were fervent admirers
of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. And Bal Thackeray admires those
fellows still.
This writer is just about
old enough to recall a time when Indian politics and intellectual life
were both dominated by men who were consistently unwavering in their support
to freedom and democracy. I was interested to read in the obituaries
of the recently deceased Congressman, S. Nijalingappa, that he and
Indira Gandhi parted ways over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968. As president of the Congress, Nijalingappa wanted our government
to condemn the invasion, but as prime minister, Indira Gandhi refused to
do so. Nijalingappa was reared in the tradition of M.K. Gandhi
and C. Rajagopalachari, who loathed Hitler as much as they loathed
Stalin, whose life's work was the winning of democratic freedoms for their
people, and who would not be so arrogant as to deny other people those
same freedoms.
