[Reader-list] Aditya Nigam responds to Prabhat Patnaik on Nandigram

[shuddha at sarai.net]

Dear all, 

Here is another response to the article by Prabhat Patnaik identifying the
opposition to the CPI(M) on Nandigram as 'enemies of the people'. This
should be of interest to those following the Nandigram debate. This
response is by Aditya Nigam and was first published on Kafila.org

best 

Shuddha
-------------------

But Prabhat Patnaik is an Honourable Man
by Aditya Nigam

This piece could be read as a letter addressed to one of my former,
esteemed, ideologue-theoreticians. As young students in the 1970s and
1980s, we often went to listen, starry-eyed, to this soft-spoken theorist
expound on what we thought were complex issues of our times and come back
mesmerized. Yes, Prof Prabhat Patnaik (PP) was one of our idols. Today he
fell and smashed himself. And then something strange happened: the broken
pieces rearranged themselves to reveal a frightful other face - the face of
comrade stalin.

Since Patnaik has referred to all critics of the CPM as “anti-Left
intellectuals”, and has also specifically referred to the letter signed
by some of us (including me), I think it would not be wrong to assume that
the entire article is also addressed, among thousands of others, to me
(though I may be pardoned for assuming that a nacheez like me should even
exist on his radar!). Since all those who had signed the statement may have
their own responses to PP – and some might not legitimately wish to stoop
to the level this once-saintly figure has – I must speak for myself here.

Sometime ago, former West Bengal finance minister and marxist economist
Ashok Mitra had written a piece on the happenings in Nandigram. It appeared
in Ananda Bazar Patrika and was subsequently translated into English and
widely circulated. In that piece, Mitra had suggested “prominent
economist and party comrade of the stature of Prabhat Patnaik is hounded”
by the party leadership in Alimuddin Street. In a way, we sort of knew it;
rather hoped it would be true. An intellectual like Prof Patnaik cannot
possibly be a cog in the stalinist machine, even though he may have stepped
in to sign dubious statements not so long ago. We had assumed that given
the political history of stalinist Marxism with intellectuals who were
maligned, denigrated, humiliated and finally put before the firing squad,
Patnaik had made his ‘existential choice’ a la Georg Lukacs. Lukacs,
one of the most brilliant philosophical minds, decided to remain in the
ranks (the ‘camp of the people’, in Patnaik’s words) and become the
voice of stalinism for decades thereafter. Need we recall the whole list of
such people - intellectuals - who were thus repeatedly been destroyed? And
do we need to tell you that so far only fascism or Nazism has been able to
compete with the communist record.

We naively expected this even after we knew that years ago, Comrade Patnaik
and his CESP comrades had celebrated the infamous August 1991 coup d’
`etat in the then USSR that briefly deposed Mikhail Gorbachev. Patnaik’s
recent article, doing the rounds on email and list-serves is of a piece
with that forgotten Patnaik. For, he describes all critics of the CPM,
including the signatories of the letter as “in any case strongly
anti-organized Left, especially anti-Communist (and in particular
anti-CPM), belonging as the do to the erstwhile ‘socialist’ groups, to
NGOs, to the ranks of Naxalite sympathizers, to the community of ‘Free
Thinkers’, and to various shades of ‘populism’”.

Despite his sympathies for Patnaik (’who is being hounded’), Ashok
Mitra too has forfeited the friendship or respect of the latter. For, has
not Mitra too committed blasphemy by doing what PP has accused all of us
of? Listen to Mitra before we proceed. He says: “Till death I would
remain guilty to my conscience if I keep mum about the happenings of the
last two weeks in West Bengal over Nandigram. One gets torn by pain too.
Those against whom I am speaking have been my comrades at some time. The
party whose leadership they are adorning has been the centre of my dreams
and works for last sixty years.”

My purpose here is not to contest the factual claims made by Prof Patnaik.
Rather, I would like to examine some of his more revealing statements and
theoretical propositions.

PP starts his article with a certain touching innocence: “why have these
people turned against us?”, he asks. After all, he tells his party
readers, “they may have been anticommunist, anti-CPM, Naxalites,
NGO-ites,” “but they did make common cause with us till recently.”
“Why is it suddenly so different now?” This is truly touching because
it shows the make-believe world that Communists live in, where they cannot
understand that elementary fact of change. It suddenly reminded me of
another ’sad’ incident narrated by Slavoj Zizek. It goes like this: In
Romania, the magical spell of ‘communism’ was broken quite
dramatically, says Zizek. After the demonstrations in Timisoara against the
government, in order to prove that he still enjoyed popular support
Ceausescu convened a mass rally in Bucharest. “The crowd started to shout
at Ceausescu, who then raised his hands in a tragicomic and bewildered
display of impotent paternal love, as if wanting to embrace them all.”
Little did he believe that this was the beginning of his end.

To this day, there are people who believe that the collapse of socialism
was an imperialist conspiracy and look back longingly at the 1991 coup as a
last ray of hope that vanished thanks to the CIA!

Interestingly, one of the characteristics of the stalinist method is
deployed by Patnaik to brilliant effect. It should be underlined here:
After asking why is it that ‘even’ somewhat sensible people (if they
made common cause with you at some point, they must be at least partly
sensible) have turned against us, you do not ask what ordinary mortals
might. You do not ask, “did we do something wrong?” After all what have
we done to lose the trust of our own supporters? There are communist,
indeed CPM supporters also among those are today criticizing us. That is
foreign to the stalinist mind. On the contrary, you ask: what is it with
them that they have turned against us? Something must be cooking? Have they
been bribed by Satan? Has Imperialism been upto some tricks? Surely some
Conspiracy must be underway….

But just to set the record straight for PP and his comrades. Yes, we did
make common cause with your party. We made every attempt in every possible
way to stay together and work on issues of common concern. At every stage
people had to deal with the antics of your comrades who believed that they
had the contract or better, the Divine Right of being the Vanguard of
History, who therefore believed that for this reason nothing should happen
except under their leadership.

There are ridiculous but frustrating stories like this huge joint
demonstration in Bangalore a couple of years ago, where participants
discovered to their horror, on reaching the maidan that the stage had been
set up and captured by the CPM. The venue was decorated with CPM flags and
the entire control was in their hands. We have innumerable such instances
from every part of the country. Or take the antiwar demonstrations in
Delhi. Some of the largest joint rallies were held after the US attack on
Afghanistan. But then, the CPM suddenly woke up and by the time of the
attack on Iraq, your party decided to ‘take over’. It did. The
fledgling joint movement was split. Finally there rallies ‘under your
leadership’ where your comrades treated us, hapless participants to the
outpourings of a Joginder Sharma (don’t ask us who he is!) and such
others. The result was that in subsequent year, when there were coordinated
global demonstrations against the War on Iraq, there were pathetic, CPM
demos in Delhi and many other places. People gradually dropped out.

The list is really long and begins right at the time of the most vicious
manifestation of the Hindutva threat: the day after the demolition of the
Babri Masjid. Hundreds of people had assembled at the Vithalbhai Patel
House lawns. Ask your comrades what happened that day - that shameful day.
Even on that day, the CPM refused to hold a joint programme on an equal
basis. Senior citizens like Rajni Kothari were not allowed to speak. In
full public view, the then state secretary of the CPM told the police,
pointing to another small group of CPI(ML) Liberation activists, that
“they are not part of our demonstration.” The police proceeded to
cordon them off.  A few hundred of us came back and were forced to hold
another meeting. That was when the People’s Movement for Secularism (PMS)
was born.

Some day, all this history will have to be written and it will stink,
professor Patnaik. And just to set the record further straight, all this
(except for the PMS story) was WHILE THE BJP-NDA WAS STILL IN POWER. Some
day, the history of organizations and coalitions like the CNDP will be
written and the goings on about how the World Social Forum process came to
be captured by the CPM to the point of making it meaningless will have to
be uncovered.

Dear Prof Patnaik, you are quite fond of claiming a radical and
‘political’ mantle for yourself, but if you had spent just one day
trying to organize the joint struggles that you nostalgically look back at,
you would realize how out of tune you sound to everybody but your vanguard
comrades.

So, let us take the theoretical propositions and charges, one by one.

PP explains his – and his comrades’ bewilderment – by making an
assertion: The coming out of these “anti-Left” intellectuals “openly
against the Left” can only be explained with reference to the process of
destruction of politics that the phenomenon of globalization has unleashed.
There is no argument. Only further assertions to the effect that: “The
anti-Left intellectuals say: politics is filthy; rise above politics;
detach the struggle against ‘development’ from politics.” Who
precisely said this, Professor Patnaik? And where? Any references? The
constant refrain here is ‘Politics’ that is repeated like a mantra
along with “Left” and counterposed to “anti-politics” and
“anti-Left”. So what is this politics? If you try to sift through the
definitional web of assertions, you will be able to isolate two ideas:

(1) The Left is something given; some people are born with into it. Else,
they have to be certified by the Church or some favoured appointees. THEY
do not have to prove anything. Others are by definition, anti-Left. (2)
This idea is related to the idea that POLITICS is about two camps: ‘the
camp of the people’ and the camp of the ‘enemies of the people’
(those hostile etc). Now since the Left is, by definition, in the camp of
the people (remember the contract?), anybody else can only be against the
‘people’, and the Left and therefore, antipolitical.

Quite apart from the fact that Prof Patnaik, that mesmerizing
ideologue-theoretician of yore, does not seem to have read anything about
any movement since the Cuban revolution, his views on politics actually
make one squirm. Did he remember, by the way, that the Cuban revolution was
made against the hated Batista regime that was supported by the Communist
Party? Is he aware that the new left wing formations that have arisen all
across the South American continent, movements that his party does not
cease to invoke in its support, are all movements that arisen on the debris
of old-style communist politics? From the Zapatistas to the Movement for
Socialism of Evo Morales, the Workers’ Party of Brazill, or the
Bolivarian revolution of Chavez - all of them, despite their limitations,
have managed to make any kind of headway by breaking with that old politics.

We could actually go on, both from the history of Marxism and from the more
recent history of anti-globalization struggles to show how the idea of
‘politics’ being enunciated by Prof Patnaik is at least three decades
old. This is not the place for a discussion of those movements but we
invite Prof Patnaik – or any of this other comrades to an open debate on
this in any neutral ground of his choosing.

In any case, apropos of this idea of a world divided into two camps, my
point, for the time being, is simply this: By your definition, esteemed
professor, neither feminism, nor the Dalit movement nor the sexuality and
ecological struggles qualify for either the category ‘political’ or
‘radical’. (By the way, what is their ‘principal contradiction’,
and why should they care about yours?).

Now, I can almost hear shocked marxists exclaim, “of course! Class is the
Real Thing, the Principal Contradiction”. So for these marxist comrades,
let me just remind them that in the meantime, your own class is rapidly
rejecting you - if there was any doubt, in the first place, that is. The
CITU has come down even below the AITUC in terms of working class
membership - a steady decline over the years. On the other hand, the Left
has lost the first ever secret ballot in the railway unions. The people,
indeed the ‘working class’ too, rejects ‘Politics’! They need your
political catechism Prof Patnaik, sorely. Or else, it is time you should
think whose vanguard you want to be.

One more word about the ‘two camps’ notion of politics: Was NATO right
in bombarding Serbia and Milosevic? Especially considering, that a
veritable process of ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Muslims had been going on
under his leadership? We all participated in antiwar demonstrations against
the NATO but would your two-camp notion of politics say that all those
Leftists who saw Milosevic as the most immediate danger, were
anti-political, anti-Left? And what about those who were being eliminated?
They were being silly in welcoming the NATO bombs? Anti-political
“messianic moralism”? They should have written friendly petitions to
Milosevic, or open letters? Why were they becoming accomplices of
imperialism? And what about the Kurdish people killed in a virtual genocide
by the anti-imperialist Saddam Hussain? Does an opposition to the US attack
on Iraq mean that all criticism and even strident criticism of such
‘anti-imperialism’ be suppressed?
Finally, Prof PP says, “this attack inspired by messianic moralism has
been launched when the latter [the Left] is in the forefront of an
extremely crucial but difficult struggle against the attempt of imperialism
to make India its strategic ally.” Well, if you really wish to break the
possibility, take a leaf out of the book of Brazil or South Africa and take
a unilateral position in favour of abandoning the nuclear programme, which
is indefensible in every possible way. Everything else is hot air.