INTRODUCTION

Indian intellectual life has been dictated by a cabal of leftist intellectuals

for the last 60 years. This leftist intellectual cabal views everything

through the biased lens of what it claims is liberalism. These intellectuals

are not swayed either by facts or by reason. They have not been able to come

up with a single original idea in the last 60 years. No one can accuse our

leftist intellectuals of actually thinking for themselves. Only hypocrisy and

complete bankruptcy are found to hold sway among these so-called

intellectuals. I give below two examples of such hypocritical and bankrupt

leftist views. I have posted excerpts of two articles by "eminent"

intellectuals and my comments on these articles.

EXAMPLE 1

A question marked in red

Sumit Sarkar

Posted online in Indian Express: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 at 0000 hrs

This is a critique from the Left of the CPM's industrialisation policy in

Bengal. Is the violence, cadre brutality and lack of consent that runs through

this strategy the only way to develop? *How do Singur and Nandigram serve the

people?*

As a lifelong Leftist, *I am deeply shocked by recent events in the

countryside of West Bengal.* On December 31, a group of us went to Singur,

spent the whole day there, visited 4 out of the 5 most affected villages which

border the land that has been taken over. We had conversations with at least

50-60 villagers. Almost all rushed to us and told us their complaints.

From this brief but not necessarily unrepresentative sample, three things

became very clear, because of which the West Bengal government's version

cannot be accepted. One, the land, far from being infertile or mono-cropped,

as has been stated repeatedly, is extremely fertile and multi-cropped. We saw

potatoes and vegetables already growing after the aman rice has been

harvested, some of them actually planted behind the now fenced-in area which

the peasants had lost. Two, there is no doubt that the vast bulk of the

villagers we met are opposed to the take-over of land and most are refusing

compensation. *It should also be kept in mind that at best the consent of the

registered landholders as well as sharecroppers is being taken. But

agricultural production also involves sharecroppers who are not covered by

Operation Barga since they have come in later, as well as agricultural labour.*

Under the government-announced scheme for compensation, such people are not

being remembered.

What the villagers repeatedly alleged was that along with the police, and it

seems more than the police, party activists, *whom the villagers call 'cadres'

which has sadly become a term of abuse* did the major part of the beating

up. Clearly, the whole thing had been done without consultation, with very

little transparency, and in a very undemocratic manner.

[..............]

These mistakes, to put it mildly, are being repeated on a much bigger scale in

the Nandigram region. This has become far more serious because a much greater

area of land is being taken with the same lack of transparency, absence of

consent and massive brutality. Once again, one is hearing reports of CPM

cadres engaged in an offensive against peasants. What is happening at

Nandigram is a near civil war situation.

The West Bengal government seems determined to follow a particular path of

development involving major concessions both to big capitalists like the Tatas

and multinationals operating in SEZs. Yet the strange thing is that these,

particularly the latter, are things which Left parties and groups as well as

many others have been repeatedly and vehemently opposing. No less a person

than the CPM General Secretary in the course of last week made 2-3 statements

attacking SEZs. The CPM has been at the forefront of the struggles against

such developments in other parts of the country.

Surely there must be a search, at least, for paths of development that could

balance necessary industrial development with social concerns and transparency

and democratic values. Is this SEZ model that implies massive displacement and

distress really the only way? If the West Bengal government thinks so, then it

also has to accept that the inevitable consequences are going to be a

repetition of Nandigram across the state.

My Comments

The first thing to strike a reader of this article by Professor Sarkar

is his shock at the brutality of the CPI(M) cadres. It reminds me of the

Casablanca police chief who was shocked to hear of gambling in his city.

Anyone who is familiar with the West Bengal political scene for the last 40

years knows that the path to CPI(M)'s rise to power is strewn with the blood

of the innocents. CPI(M)'s cadres even threw a 1 month old baby into fire in

the 1960s. Was Sarkar sleeping through such bloody episodes? His

conscience seems to wake up only when he is in disagreement with CPI(M).

Of course this kind of hypocritical behaviour is not surprising. Leftist

intellectuals have had lot of practice being hypocritical.

The next striking thing about this article is his inability to understand the

reasons for setting up industries in Singur and Nandigram. He even asks the

question, "How do Singur and Nandigram serve the people?". He does not notice

that the answer is right in his own article. He himself writes that, "It

should also be kept in mind that at best the consent of the registered

landholders as well as sharecroppers is being taken. But agricultural

production also involves sharecroppers who are not covered by Operation Barga since they have come in later, as well as agricultural labour". Sarkar

in his sojourn to Singur has himself seen the immense number of surplus labor

in the agriculture sector. In a densely populated country like India with a

still growing population, land reforms is not the end of things. We are not a

small Eurpoean country. Land reforms will give us only breathing room. It

should have immediately struck him that a huge number of labor-intensive

manufacturing plants are necessary in rural areas to soak up this surplus

agriculture labor. He finds out about this surplus labor. He actually sees

them. Yet, strangely, he does not see. He, in fact, questions the need for

manufacturing!! He seems to be completely bereft of new ideas or thinking.Then

again one can not expect original thinking from our leftist intellectuals.

They have had a lot of practice in not thinking for themselves.

What is so sad is that it is people like Sarkar who are teaching a new

generation of students in India. No wonder India has not produced original

thinkers in the last 60 years.

EXAMPLE 2:

CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND

  • The thrill of saying something vile

MUKUL KESAVAN

mukulkesavan@hotmail.com

Posted online in Telegraph on line version; February 8, 2007

For an Indian, one of the most instructive things about the response of the

West to 9/11 is how swiftly large sections of its liberal establishment

circled their wagons against Muslims. Instructive because this manoeuvre

illustrates the extent to which Western democracies are based on majoritarian

assumptions, assumptions that override the liberal values that in easier times

are invoked as the distinguishing features of countries like Britain, France

and the United States of America. Even more interesting is the way in which

the case for the illiberal, coercive and even punitive treatment of Muslims is

made, the way in which the demonization of Muslims as a matter of public

policy is presented as a properly liberal project for all but soft-headed,

bleeding hearts.

A short essay that illustrates this tendency perfectly is Christopher

Hitchens's review of Mark Steyn's book, America Alone: The End of the World As

We Know It which can be read online at this url: http://www.city-journal.org/

html/ 17\1\urbanities-steyn.html. Steyn is a hawkish right-winger who argues

in his book that the West, with the exception of the US, has surrendered to

the jihadist tendency within Islam. Europe, in particular, with its doctrines

of multiculturalism and its declining birth-rates, is doomed to be taken over

by fast-breeding immigrant Muslims who see its woolly tolerance for the

weakness that it really is.

Hitchens, who started his political life as a Trotskyist, decided after 9/11

that he had found a political project worthy of the rest of his life, namely,

unrelenting opposition to the menace of fundamentalist Islam for which he

coined a term, 'Islamofascism'. He supported the American invasion of Iraq for

many reasons, one of which was Saddam Hussein's alleged alliance with al

Qaida.

Hitchens likes Steyn's book, agrees with its main arguments, finds it

admirably tough-minded, and praises Steyn for his pioneering work in making

people aware of the menace of Islamism. For Hitchens, *Steyn makes an '

immensely convincing case' for the imminent swamping of European civilization

by Muslim migrants who breed much faster than the local white population.* This

quote from the book (chosen by Hitchens in his review) summarizes Steyn's

argument from demography: 'Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in

Europe since World War Two' In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian

Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while

Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic

age, you can't buck demography ' except through civil war. The Serbs figured

that out ' as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't

outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosn-ia's

demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.'

Hitchens has a few reservations about Steyn's conclusions: it's a reductionist

explanation of the Bosnian violence because it doesn't account for Croation

irredentism, and Steyn makes a Muslim-European clash seem inevitable because

he mistakenly sees Muslims in Europe as a single monolithic community when, in

fact, immigrant Muslims are hugely various. But Hitchens's differences with

Steyn are minor ones: he agrees that Muslim birth-rates are a portent of

disaster because Islamists publicly proclaim their intention to take over

Europe by outbreeding the natives and these statements feed the paranoia of

far-right parties and their adherents. Hitchens is persuaded by Steyn's main

point that demography and liberal guilt (cultural masochism in Hitchens's

words) 'are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization'.

Western liberals who can't see this, argues Hitchens, are disabled by a knee-

jerk, politically-correct reflex: 'Any emphasis on the relative birth rates of

Muslims and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of

eugenics.'

The problem with this is that the reason the liberal ear responds the way it

does is because Steyn, Hitchens's hero, explicitly makes a eugenic

prescription: 'The Serbs figured that out ' as other Continentals will in the

years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em (italics mine).'

To an Indian, this isn't language that even the Bharatiya Janata Party would

use in public. It's the rhetoric of explicitly fascist parties: the Vishwa

Hindu Parishad, the Shiv Sena, the Bajrang Dal. This ideological convergence

in the ideas of the muscular European liberal and the militant Hindu fascist

isn't an aberration.

The one real disagreement that Hitchens has with Steyn, is his dismissal of

Martin Amis as a Western surrender monkey rabbiting on about global warming,

when the main threat to the world is overheated Muslims. Hitchens defends

Amis's credentials as a liberal soldier in the war against Islamism by

offering the following quote from an interview with Amis in the London Times:

'There's a definite urge'don't you have it''to say, 'The Muslim community will

have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering' Not

letting them travel. Deportation ' further down the road. Curtailing of

freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or

from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and

they start getting tough with their children... They hate us for letting our

children have sex and take drugs ' well, they've got to stop their children

killing people.'

This little manifesto for persecuting Muslims is, for Hitchens, an admirable

ability to think outside the liberal box. With that 'Don't you have it'' Amis

is enjoying the thrill of saying something vile and simultaneously reassuring

other white, non-Muslim people that it's okay to think this way. But Hitchens

sees this as a sign of intellectual courage, a recognition that extraordinary

threats call for extraordinary responses.

[....................]

Towards the end of the review, Hitchens offers the West a ten-point programme

for resisting Islamism. High on the list is this suggestion: 'A strong, open

alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and

economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate

solidarity with the other great multi-ethnic democracy under attack from

Muslim fascism.'

In Hitchens's bizarre world, the world's largest pluralist democracy, home to

the third-largest Muslim population in the world, would make common cause with

the likes of Amis and Steyn whose prescriptions for saving civilization

include systematic discrimination against Muslims, collective punishment,

deportation and strategic 'culling'. Hitchens argues that it's important for

liberals to stake out this rhetorical position because he doesn't want anti-

Islamism (his term for being anti-Muslim in a respectable way) to become the

monopoly of fascists. Muscular liberals like Amis and Hitchens would deny them

that space.

By a grotesque ideological sleight of hand, Hitchens would join the West to

this great 'multi-ethnic democracy' using arguments that are only used in

India by parties that would, if they could, create an ethnic, Hindu

supremacist state. This convergence is not an accident: by making prejudice

respectable, by short-circuiting due process, by presuming collective guilt

instead of affirming the presumption of individual innocence, Hitchens and

Amis have become what they pretend to pre-empt.

It's not a nice picture: Milosevic, Le Pen, Nick Griffin, Bal Thackeray,

Praveen Togadia, Narendra Modi, Mark Steyn, Martin Amis and Hitchens bringing

up the rear. [ .......... ]

My Comments

A thread running through Kesavan's article is that he is opposed to any

raising of the very important issue of the higher birth rate of muslims

compared to non muslims. Kesavan, like other of Indian leftist intellectuals,

is worried about the demonisation of the muslim minority. He never asks the

reasons why non muslims are afraid of being swamped by the muslim minority. He

like other leftist intellectuals never shows any concerns for non muslim

minorities in muslim majority lands. He is worried about prejudice against

muslims while he shows no iota of concern about muslim prejudice against

non muslims. It is always a one-way road as far as muslim-non muslim relations

are concerned. It is amusing that while he has a long list of names of muslim

baiters, he does not find a single muslim name of nonmuslim baiters. This kind of

hypocrisy and inability to think seems to be a crucial requirement for joining

the ranks of leftist intellectuals.

Conclusion

These two examplesencapsulate all that is wrong with the Indian left. The hypocrisy and the utter moral bankruptcy positively shine through. It is a sad thing to contemplate that these people have dictated the culture of the Indian republic for the last 60 years.