When a communist leader and TV warrior like Kavita Krishnan leaves the CPI(ML) after a lifetime in it, it gives one pause. After all these long years, Kavita Krishnan sees a motivating vision, in which Stalin and Mao appear to her as red in tooth and claw fascists. They appear no different in deed, tone and tenor to Hitler or Mussolini. And indeed, as she sees it, in tendency, if not in fact, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
That our vegetarian and pacifist Prime Minister Modi, unless pushed by national security concerns, is not responsible for the murder of scores let alone millions, is somehow glossed over by Krishnan. The propagandist and leapfrogging rant of the communist is perhaps too deeply ingrained to be shed.
Stalin and Mao have dispatched over 60 million of their own people via repeated peace-time purges. Their paranoia as supreme despotic leaders knew no bounds, and self-serving and ever-changing communist ideology evolving, rode rough-shod over human suffering.
This astounding communist slaughter rivals not only Hitler’s genocide of 6 million Jews, sexual deviants, cripples, and the insane, but also the casualties from both the World Wars. WWI had 20 million dead and 21 million wounded. WWII had 56 million dead directly owing to war, and another 28 million dead from war-related disease and famine.
While the communist-ruled states in India, of which only one remains, namely Kerala, has seen cases of political intimidation, rape, murder, arson, and threats, the present government at the Centre has shown an unprecedented tolerance to the Opposition and its unfair attacks. That Madame Krishnan and her ilk find this infuriating is understandable. Still, we are talking here of the sudden volte face Krishnan has done, and are wondering if she thinks that Indian Communism has grown old, arthritic, unimaginative, ineffective, and fit to be jettisoned.
Krishnan was a member of the Politburo, the CPI(ML)’s top decision-making body, for over two decades, and a Central Committee member too. She now feels it is not enough to call the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes ‘failed socialism’. She wants to hold these regimes accountable as “some of the world’s worst authoritarianisms”, that now “serve as a model for authoritarian regimes everywhere”.
This is, of course, a departure from the party-line that never criticises its own gods. The long row of portraits above CPI(ML) grey-heads would perhaps come crashing down.
Krishnan, on her part, has thought it fit to become the lone ranger now on her further quest to set things right. While epiphanies like this are not uncommon, Krishnan seems to want to take on the historical wrongs of authoritarian communism. Perhaps this includes the current doings of the Chinese CPC in Xinjiang, and its belligerent dealings with the world. This is quite a work load, and to draw equivalence to the present saffron regime right here in an economically resurgent India may prove difficult.
It is doubly difficult because failed socialism has had a lot to do with lousy economics. Bad economics that has shattered lives, and brought down the USSR and the Berlin Wall. It has shattered the ‘Communist Dream’ and replaced it with the dystopian prescience of Orwell’s Animal Farm, published in 1945.
Animal Farm’s allegory began with ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’, and ‘all animals are equal’. It progressed to ‘no one dared speak his mind, when fierce growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes’.
It was just as well for posterity that George Orwell found a publisher after many turned his brilliant book down as they thought they couldn’t sell ‘animal stories’. It was a view almost as astounding as all those record executives who turned down the Beatles because ‘groups with guitars were on their way out’.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 put the first communist government in power, taking over from the absolute monarchy of Tsar Nicholas 1st, Tsar of all the Russias. This was the new world created by WWI it seemed to many enthusiasts. The new name was USSR — Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Stalin made this entity even bigger than Tsarist Russia, conquering and occupying some countries, annexing them into the USSR, subjugating and installing puppet regimes in other satellite countries after WWII, and drawing the Iron Curtain tightly over them to preserve his precious Communism. This was the Communist dividend to WWII.
The Politburo of the USSR, headed by Vladimir Lenin and soon after, in 1924, by Josef Stalin, after a brief struggle for power on the death of Lenin, was not content to run the largest country in the world. The aim, from the start, was to further establish a Communist Internationale.
It was a direct challenge to the remaining monarchies, dictatorships, imperialists, as well as the democratic world order. That it didn’t work is something we can now see clearly. A few, like Cuba, outside of the direct control of the USSR, responded to the Soviet ideological call, overthrowing the Batista government on the island, to become communist too. Many other countries, emerging from the colonial yoke, were immediately socialist, and permitted Communist parties to be established. This was also true of much of South America that was not formally colonised, despite being under the sway of America’s Monroe Doctrine in the 20th century.
Leon Trotsky, one of the celebrated founders of Soviet Russia, intellectual, ideologue and co-conspirator of Lenin, and thought to be his natural successor, was not only quickly ousted by Josef Stalin, but murdered in distant Mexico City after years in exile, on August 20, 1940.
China became communist much later in 1949, more dividend from WWII, after chasing the nationalists into present-day Taiwan. Under Mao Tse-tung, known as The Great Helmsman, it underwent several paroxysms of ideological change, the inevitable purges to cauterise revisionism, but fared poorly in terms of its economics.
This only changed after the purged Deng Xiaoping came back from the margins, since he had fled to keep from being killed, to preside over China’s near capitalist makeover. Today, the son of another purged father who ran away to save his life, is busy trying to go back to the ideology of the Mao era.
Mao was a communist, but put many an imperialist in the shade with his grabs of Inner Mongolia, Xinkiang and Tibet, all territories beyond the Han heartland demarcated by the Great Wall of China and the Pacific Ocean. With a peasant cunning, he knew he could get away with it in 1950 when the West was weary of war.
But the bloodthirstiness of the only remaining Communist great power has not diminished. It oppresses the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, tries to makeover the Inner Mongolians into Han ways and Mandarin over the province’s native language. It is struggling to mould Tibet in its own image but having trouble with the high altitudes, temperatures, native indifference, and vast, underpopulated areas on the roof of the world.
Winning over hearts and minds, a Western 20th century concept, is alien to the Red Chinese as they oppress even their own Han Chinese in Hong Kong, and try, in ham fisted fashion, to take over Taiwan. Elsewhere, they have multiple border and maritime area disputes with all the countries in its periphery, including India, Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, Borneo, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines.
Being a global nuisance in the Indian Ocean and the Asia Pacific does not seem to faze the Red Chinese either. It has moved farther afield with its rapacious Belt and Road, Silk Route, String of Pearls initiatives that have taken multiple countries to the edge of bankruptcy.
As the No.2 economy, communist China is challenging America at No.1, both in terms of trade and with its military. As a consequence, the world is slowly but surely coalescing against this Chinese highhandedness. Organisations such as Quad and AUKUS have been established to stop China in its belligerence.
Trade with China, manufacturing in it, are both diminishing, and the latter’s export contracts are being cancelled. China’s growth statistics are less than half of what they used to be in the humbler Deng influenced years.
What has all this menacing and saber-rattling to do with the dream of equality that communism promised? Karl Marx may not recognise what has become of his theories. Was it ever intended for the rule of the proletariat to resemble 19th century imperialism?
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