The more you bend a straight iron rod, the closer the two extremes will come to each other. If you are good enough to bend the rod perfectly, you will get a horseshoe shape with the ends within kissing distance of each other. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party took power, the Hindu right has tried to bend the iron rod of Indian pluralism with its rabid majoritarianism. The further it has tried to bend the rod, the closer it has come to meeting its other end, its alter-ego: left-wing extremism. The extreme right and extreme left have more in common than they care to admit.
North Korea is the best current example of the horseshoe theory of political science. North Korea is a communist nation in name, but ruled like a fascist state with a hereditary dictatorship, supported by a crony military elite. The deification of the dictator, the extreme nationalism, xenophobia and militaristic state are straight out of the Third Reich manual, and far removed from Marx or Engels. From the Soviet Union to eastern European nations, to Cuba, ‘people’s revolutions’ have ultimately descended into tinpot dictatorships, not the egalitarian societies that its leaders promised.
Closer home, West Bengal’s communists under Jyoti Basu ruled more with fear than hope: fear of violence, fear of the foreign, fear of big business. In contrast, Narendra Modi’s right-wing government is friendly to big business and foreign investors. But its brazen support for political violence (the Patiala House lawyers who thrashed Kanhaiya Kumar still roam free and Muzaffarnagar riot-accused are ministers in the government) makes it a mirror image of Basu’s government in West Bengal, where communist cadres killed and looted with abandon, all in the name of the ‘people’s revolution’. For the right wing, ‘nationalism’ is their ‘people’s revolution’: the
Not only are the extreme left and right similar, they also need each other to survive. Less than two years ago, communist parties in India were reduced to just 10 seats, a historic fall that many believed it could not recover from. The fruits of 25 years of economic liberalisation had created enough mass resentment against India’s welfare State hangover. Young, aspirational India wanted a leg-up, not hand-me-downs. Trade unions were losing their relevance in the new India.
Class struggle for a utopian equality did not vibe with India’s millennials or their elder siblings, who are now the decisive demographic group in Indian elections. Modi’s victory was the most resounding victory for the free market in independent India, and the most crushing defeat for communism. Even in its bastions of Bengal and Kerala, red was no longer the coolest colour.
It says something about the ineptitude of the Modi government — and the complete loss of a great reforms mandate — that a communist student leader is now the talk of the nation. A student leader who mistakenly frames azaadi from hunger and azaadi from capitalism as the same, and gets away with it, though more people have died from hunger in communist nations, and continue to die in North Korea. Kumar’s rise and the revival of the Left are the natural result of the political violence of the right wing, which Modi has failed to control. The revival of the extreme left has re-established the political equilibrium that was disturbed by the rise of the extreme right.
Did Modi and the RSS think that India was Gujarat, where the mercantilism of the population meant the Left could be rolled over without a fight? How did they think they could get away with this assault on a beehive called Jawaharlal Nehru University, which houses some of the brightest, most driven and idealistic young minds from across the country? It takes extreme arrogance or extreme stupidity (or both) to do what this government did in JNU.
I am a capitalist and business owner, who believes that the tyranny of the Left is as bad as the tyranny of the Right. I grew up in Basu’s Bengal and consider it one of the worst governments to have ever ruled a state in India. And yet I joined the student protests to free comrade Kanhaiya Kumar; I found myself cheering his speech and the electric crowd as they fearlessly took on Modi from the ramparts of JNU, a campus with which I have a long association.
But now that he is free and safe, I hope that Kumar and his colleagues read up the old adage: If you are not a socialist in your 20s then you don’t have a heart, but if you are still a socialist in your 30s then you don’t have a brain. I hope they understand that the free market is an azaadi they should also be fighting for. Way more Indians have found azaadi from hunger in the post-liberalisation years than they did before.
As for Modi and his colleagues, they need azaadi from the prison of their own hubris. To translate the words of Pakistani poet Habib Jalib: “The one who held this throne before you/He too was sure that he is God.”