[Reader-list] Remembering Tienanmen Square on the 4th of June

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

Twenty years ago, the dictatorship that rules China crushed a  
peaceful gathering of students and young people in Tiananmen Square,  
leading to large numbers of deaths. That day, I think I came of age,  
politically. It taught me, that the realities I held in the highest  
esteem could suddenly, over night reveal themselves to be monsters.  
There was no quicker way to grow up, suddenly.

I was an undergraduate student in Delhi University at that time, and  
a member (not overly active) of the Students Federation of India, a  
front organization of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). I had  
been following, with close interest, the events unfolding in Beijing,  
where what seemed to be an entire generation of students and young  
people had been assembling, peacefully, for more than two months, in  
support of political reform, openness and democracy. For me, as for  
many others who identified with the left in India, and elsewhere, the  
students movement was of enormous significance, as it pointed towards  
the possibility of a dynamic socialist democracy. We were buoyed by  
the cheerfulness of our Chinese student comrades, followed every  
communique, every slogan with care and affection, and said to  
ourselves, "see, they sing the Internationale".

The 'official party line' in the CPI(M), as it filtered down to our  
'student cell' while not enthusiastic, was tolerant, in a patronizing  
sort of way, of our 'youthful' enthusiasm for the Chinese students.  
All this changed after the 4th of June. Those at the 'party centre'  
who had expressed their soft spoken approval of the calls for  
democracy in China, as an example of the resilience and flexibility  
of actually existing Socialism, were suddenly forthright in their  
condemnation of the students, and in their justification of the  
Chinese regime's massacre of their (and our) hopes.

I recall my somewhat agitated conversation with a 'student leader' of  
the SFI.

"But Comarde, they (the students) were singing the Internationale  
(the Communist Anthem) and the party ordered tanks on them."

"Their is a difference between subjective conditions and objective  
conditions."

" But till yesterday they were our heroes, and you did not  
disapprove, and now you are calling them Imerialist agents. "

"You don't understand dialectics. "

This was a form of dialectics that I have since then, chosen not to  
understand.

I recall not being able to sleep, reading the Economic and  
Philosophic Manuscripts of Marx, and writings on the Paris Commune. I  
recall an ashen silence at home.

I think it was the next day that we all saw the photograph of the  
lone man in front of the tanks. It stayed for many years, cut out of  
the newspaper, stuck to a wall in my room.

The next day, a rag tag group of people, perhaps fifty odd in number,  
gathered in Delhi and decided to march to the Chinese embassy. I  
remember listening to Dilip Simeon, sometime naxalite, then  
Trotskyist, and widely respected history teacher in Delhi university  
speaking to us at this gathering. We carried a simple large black  
banner which said - "Condemn Murder of Socialism in China" in large  
white letters.

There was a small cordon of policemen near Teen Murti Bhavan, we were  
not allowed to get into Chanakyapuri (the Diplomatic Enclave), let  
alone near the Chinese Embassy.

Afterwards, we sat, bewildered, sad, on a traffic island. Not much  
was said. A hastily written press statement was drafted, and  
laboriously copied by hand by those who had neat handwriting, I was  
deputed to go and drop this statement at various newspaper offices,  
which I did. I do not think anyone in the newspapers in Delhi took it  
seriously. I do not remember it being published, anywhere. I decided  
that I would relinquish my membership of the SFI, and abandon all  
hopes of a life with the CPI (M). That evening, I persuaded my  
father, that he, a lifelong sympathizer, should stop paying the party  
tithe. He agreed. A man in our neighbourhood, who would come around  
every week with the latest edition of Peoples Democracy, came, and we  
spent a few minutes in tense silence. He knew that I had been in the  
demonstration that tried to go to the Chinese Embassy. I think we  
both thought of each other as betrayers. He never came to collect the  
tithe, or to give the party paper again.

In the last twenty years, the memory of Tiananmen Square has always  
remained with me, and haunted me, and I still cannot forget that  
'they were singing the Internationale'. The students, and those who  
killed them, would have all sang the Internationale.

Whenever i have met Chinese people of my generation since then, after  
a while, I invariably ask them, where were you on the 4th of June on  
1989. And then the conversation takes a certain turn. Sometimes,  
there are silences that speak much more eloquently than words can.

As for me, I have never stopped calling myself a communist. I think  
that to do so, would be to perversely betray the young people of my  
generation in China, many of whom believed that Communism could also  
mean freedom, not only the absence of liberty.

Since then, I have grown to understand the peculiar perversity of the  
state that Mao Zedong and his successors presided over, but I have  
never let that sway me that my way of remembering Tiananmen will be  
to continue to whistle the Internationale when the chips are down.  
The chips were down, often.

Where we are born, where we live and grow up, where we come of age -  
all these are accidents in the end. I could just as easily have been  
twenty one years old in Beijing on the 4th of June in 1989. And if I  
had been twenty one years old in Beijing on the 4th of June in 1989,  
I know where I would have been, singing the Internationale. I have  
always had an abhorrence of martyrdom, and out of the love an  
affection I have for those who were cut down that day, I hope I would  
have survived.

Someday, I hope that those who survived Tiananmen that day will be  
able to settle accounts, peacefully, but unforgivingly, with those  
who ordered the massacre, and with their successors, who still hold  
power in China today.

And I know that I will never forget Tiananmen. Someday, I hope I  
stand on its paved stones, and someday I hope I can whistle the  
Internationale there, not in time with the brass band of the Chinese  
Communist Party, but in time with the whistling echoes of the ghosts  
of my Chinese generation.


Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net