Re: [Marxism] Fwd: [foil] P.C. Joshi Restoration Drama

[Sukla Sen <suklasenp@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This PC vs. PDG narrative has a small problem of
history, notwithstanding the fact that the points made
regarding two different approaches are right on the
mark.

Joshi had been dishonoured and disrobed back by 1948
(Feb.-March?) when the Calcutta Conference took place.
In came BTR.
He had to recant shortly thereafter and was
nonetheless shown the door in 1950 when his "militant"
line fell foul of the changed needs of the Soviet
foreign office, and also Chinese rulers, in view of
the all too visible shift in India's foreign policy
towards the Soviet camp - the most notable inaugural
move being granting recognition to the People's
Republic of China, subsequently to be followed up by
the support to its claim to permanent membership in
the UNSC and opposition to the Korean War.

Then came, as per my knowledge faded over time,
Rajeshwar Rao. He was pretty soon replaced by Ajay
Ghosh sans any rituals of recant and all that.
Ajay Ghosh died a premature death. 
Rajeshwar Rao again took up the reins.

The Party split for all practical purpose in the wake
of October 62 - Sino-Indian border war.
In 1964 the CPIM came (formally) into being. Sundaraya
became its General Secretary. PDG became the West
Bengal State Secretary and of course an important
Polit Bureau member. Prior to that he had perhaps been
the Office Secretary in the West Bengal State
Committee of the undivided Party.
And despite all his importance he remained essentially
a provincial leader very much unlike what PC had been.
He had no special knack, or even the faintest hint of
it, to connect to the "intellectuals". Again very much
unlike PC. 

He was for various reasons compared with Stalin. Not
exactly known for his intellectual brilliance.
[His first (immediate elder) cousin, Pannalal
Dasgupta, with whom he had been brought up together by
his father as Pannalal, also known as Panna, had lost
his own and would later lead a section of the RCPI was
more known for his intellectual prowess despite his
legendary acts of daring. (PDG's family nickname was
Mani or rather Mainya - in their ancestral dialect. So
one was "Panna" and the other was "Mani/Mainya" - both
gems of different varieties.) (The leader of the other
faction of the RCPI was a very flamboyant personality
with international stature, great family background
and a highly accomplished artiste himself -
Soumyendranath Tagore, a self-styled "Bukharinist"
somewhat misleadingly known as a Trotskyist. He had
reportedly named his pet dog after Stalin.)
For that matter even Jyoti Basu, despite his too
visible aristocratic arrogance and highly privileged
Western education, never ever enjoyed any
"intellectual" halo around him. Amongst the Party
dignitaries in Bengal, Hiren Mukherjee of the CPI was
known as the leading intellectual. Also Somnath
Lahiri, again from the CPI, another notable name. On
the national scale of course Dange, Adhikari,
Namboodiripad are few other notable names of this
batch.]

*So the essential point is that the comparison between
PC and PDG is quite a bit out of place.*

Sukla  

In connection with the recent discussions about
Arundhati Roy and
"Westernized" elites and the communist movement in
India, the
following is of considerable interest.

-Sayan.


The Telegraph
Calcutta
April 22, 2007

RESTORATION DRAMA
- P.C. Joshi rehabilitated means that Promode Dasgupta
is finally dead

by Ashis Chakrabarti

Poetic justice?

I wonder how Promode Dasgupta would have reacted to
his party, the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), finally
rehabilitating P.C. Joshi
in the pantheon of communist heroes of India. None
other than the
CPI(M) general secretary, Prakash Karat, signalled the
change by
taking a leading part in the inaugural programme of
Joshi's birth
centenary celebrations in Delhi last week and then by
following it up
with a full-page article on the man in the party
organ, People's
Democracy.

But the party that Dasgupta built and led in Bengal
negated almost
everything that Joshi, the first general secretary of
the undivided
Communist Party of India, stood for. Many of the
problems Bengal has
to grapple with today are a result of Dasgupta's
emphasis on mass
action. The CPI(M) alone may not be responsible for
the decline of
the educated gentleman in Bengal politics. But the
Dasgupta line that
banished "intellectualism" from mass politics
institutionalized the
trend.

In Bengal, Dasgupta was the prime mover of the
hardline faction, led
by B.T. Ranadive and P. Sundaraya, that tormented and
eventually
hounded Joshi out of the leadership. Although Jyoti
Basu became the
public face of the party in Bengal, it was Dasgupta
who laid down the
rules of the party games, chose the players and
assigned them their
roles. This was so even after Basu became the chief
minister. And
also after Dasgupta died in Beijing in the winter of
1982: because
the party in Bengal continued to be controlled by the
PDG boys.

Of their many differences, let me consider what I
believe to be the
two most important ones. The first is related to the
debate on what
political line the Indian communists would take about
the Congress;
the second, on what kind of people would provide the
best leadership
for the CPI.

But it was the debate on the qualities of communist
leaders that left
the PDG stamp on the party in Bengal. Joshi was in
favour of the best
and the brightest young men coming into the party and
eventually
leading it. That explains why the earlier generation
of CPI leaders
included so many people educated at Oxford, Cambridge
or the London
School of Economics. Joshi's approach on this was best
illustrated
when he inducted Mohit Sen, a bright young man from
Cambridge,
straight into the 'party centre' in Delhi. In short,
Joshi was an
'elitist'. Soon after the Left Front came to power in
Bengal in 1977,
Dasgupta launched a feverish "anti-elitist" campaign,
which Basu was
powerless to oppose and which has had a crippling
effect on education
and other aspects of life in Bengal for the past
thirty years.

In contrast to Joshi, Dasgupta represented the section
of leadership
that was sceptical or even suspicious of the
English-speaking,
Western-educated comrades from affluent middle-class
families. I
never met Joshi, but I knew of Dasgupta's disdain for
such comrades.

Soon after the Bengal government abolished the study
of English from
primary education in 1982, I and a senior colleague
from the
newspaper with which I then worked met Dasgupta at the
CPI(M) office
on Alimuddin Street. The newspaper planned a
three-part report on the
possible impact of the government's decision on the
study of English
in higher classes and on higher education in general.
Who needed
English, Dasgupta shot back when we questioned him on
the wisdom of
the government's decision. But his most vitriolic
comments came when
we referred to reports that it was more the party's
(that is,
Dasgupta's) than Basu's decision. He paused for a
brief moment, drew
a heavy breath and snapped, "We can do without
English-speaking
people."

We have known the devastating effect of this
'anti-elitism'. The
cynical demolition of Presidency College as a centre
of excellence
only symbolized the process. If the Naxalite violence
of the late
Sixties and the early Seventies drove the best and the
brightest out
of Bengal, the Dasgupta brand of anti-elitism made it
impossible for
most of them to come back to the state in the
subsequent years. The
government opened new schools and colleges in villages
and small
towns. Education was said to have reached the masses.
But teachers,
both in schools and in colleges, came to be used for
party work as
never before. Loyalty to the CPI(M) became a prime
consideration for
the appointment of teachers. Mediocrity and party
loyalty together
made it impossible for better-quality people to work
in this
suffocating atmosphere. It was a case of bad money
driving away good
money.

The irony is that the CPI(M) itself gradually began to
discard the
Dasgupta line. English was brought back to the primary
classes in
stages. The duplicity of the party's 'anti-elitist'
approach was
evident once again in its handling of the affairs of
Presidency
College. On the one hand, the party delayed granting
the college an
autonomous status. On the other, party leaders
admitted their sons
and daughters to the college, hoping to gain an upward
social
mobility for the next generation. In other words, they
now sought
'elitism' for their children. It is another matter
that the quality
of education at the college is now marginally better
than in other
colleges. Party leaders now actually aim higher - some
even send
their children abroad for higher studies.

At the national level, the party now has a
Western-educated general
secretary in Karat and a number of 'English-speaking'
members in the
politburo, such as Sitaram Yechuri and Brinda Karat.
The problem is
that the party is now incapable of repairing the
damage it has
inflicted on Bengal's education and politics.

Joshi would have loved the other signals of the
CPI(M)'s change,
particularly the reformist zeal of Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee. The chief
minister's transformation would have pleased him for
another reason
as well. Bhattacharjee, like most other party leaders
of his
generation in Bengal, has always been a PDG boy. Joshi
would have
liked to see the PDG legacy being demolished by the
latter's chosen
ones.

The ultimate defeat of the PDG line is, of course,
signalled by the
CPI(M)'s support to a Congress-led government at the
Centre. If Basu
had managed to persuade the party to join this
government in 2004,
that would have been his ultimate victory against the
long,
inner-party battle against Dasgupta. I have no doubt
that he would be
happy with his party's rehabilitation of Joshi because
it means that
PDG is finally dead.
  



      ___________________________________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail is the world's favourite email. Don't settle for less, sign up for
your free account today 
http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/mail/winter07.html 

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism