What happened to the Indian Left?
- In Politics
- 08:02 AM, Feb 28, 2016
- Nithin Ramakrishnan
I come from a family and neighborhood who believe that if you claim to be a good man, then you must have been the “LEFT”, at least in some point of time in your early adulthood. To watch the ‘so dearly’ LEFT, in the media for all the wrong reasons constantly pushes me to probe the million-dollar question, “What happened to the Indian Left?”. Protecting identities was never your cause – protecting the commoner was your cause – Oh dear Left, do you even realize that, when you fight and fall for an identity, you fail those who can’t afford to think beyond their livelihood.
If you believe that little indiscipline is required to nurture original thinking, it is not wrong, but well-grounded and accepted. If you say a little out of the box thinking is required for creative thinking, again it’s not to be condemned and you are absolutely right. There is a beauty in that disorder. But if you think that everything inside the box or inside the discipline is wrong in itself, and only what found outside is true, then it is not creative thinking – it is disruptive. There is no beauty in it. It is inherently maligned. Of course, every original thinker has the right to deconstruct, but what is indicated in the above thought is not deconstruction but destruction. Let me explain you with a simple example, which shall expose, what really happened to you.
There is an old building, a family property of yours, in a bustling town. It has stayed there from time immemorial and has given you many comforts and pleasure for long. It has now old and weak; holes have appeared on the roofs; walls are affected by fungal plants; the bath rooms are defunct and floor tiles are broken. In all sense, the building had become dangerous not just to inhabitants but also to the commuters in the street where it stood. Yet, the building stands as a beautiful monument of the architectural skills of your great grandfather. You may still want to rebuild it for security reasons, but your brother may want to cherish the grandfather’s memoir. However, you are the one to decide – you need to decide the right thing to do. The first thing you must decide is whether you need to reinforce the building or modify it. To decide, you must thoroughly understand the present status of the building. This is the first instance where the above thinking fails you – you fail to understand what is inside the box.
Now, lets us assume that you have decided to modify it. Then the question arises whether you need to do it partly or fully. Again, you need to have an overall idea of what the building is. Let us further assume that you decided to rebuild it fully – that means you have to demolish the building from its very base and construct a new one in its place. But then your brother shall resist fiercely. Now comes the tactical part. What will you do next? Will you bombard the building while your brother is pre-occupied and no one is watching over? This would definitely destruct everything including the life of your brother and the other commuters who were passing by, whose safety you were initially bothered about. Now imagine that you secretly modified the room in which you stay and showed your brother how beautiful and secured the new place is, wont he further allow you to do the same with the rest of the building. This would allow you even to remove the old building with controlled explosion techniques and also with prior caution signs to the commuters. You will have a smooth transition from the old to the new, with less trade-offs.
This is how you deconstruct and rebuild.
This is what exactly the Leftists of Indian politics need to understand. If not, they are not just failing themselves but rest of the people who are not amongst the ruling elite – like the commuters in the above case scenario. It is in you, the commuters believe, for your brother believes in heritage than in the value of their life. They ask you to resist your brother’s idea of continuing the building’s heritage and luxury, not to reject him or hate. Remember the Marx and Engels spoke of resistance not about rejection.
Now, imagine you have another brother for whom the memoirs of your predecessors are important, unlike your former brother, it is his grandmother’s or uncle’s memoir he want to cherish. Perhaps, he may have only a backyard or single study room as such a memoir – a fact you can easily compromise with, while reconstructing. You try to align with him and compel your other brother to reconstruct the building. This shall end up in a family violence and probably the insecurity of your first brother may end up in total disturbance of peace and order in the locality. This is what happens when Left politics or academics takes sides of certain identified sects among the people, different from the side of superclass laborer or commoner, in which they used to believe and ought to believe.
The main argument which comes against the whole setup of above analogy is what if the brother in first case wants to retain some areas in memory of the grandfather or what if he obstructs in every stage of reconstruction, even when you show him the reasoned models. Again this doesn’t give you the power to resort to violence. The answer is that if you retain your purity of interest in having modern secured building, at a particular stage, ‘time’ will bring the commuters, ‘the public’, on your side by whose force you can very well negotiate with the your first brother.
It is what the Left ought to understand as their guiding philosophy – “to stand for the commoners who are not aligned to any identity, perpetually”. For every change there is a real time required – like how much ever you digitalize the information and improve the speed of your technology, still there shall be a quotient of real time for retrieving those information. The new generation of Indian Left ought to understand there is an irremovable fourth dimension in the process of social change and that is ‘time’. If you stand the test of time in standing on the side of commoners, the same identity-less (denied) public shall come to your support. If you set this agenda, a day will come soon, the Indian Left will contribute constructively to the progress of mankind. The other way round is not just failure of the Left, it’s the failure of mankind.
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