Capitalism means Marxism

One would have expected better reasoning from an ex-Naxalite such as Sumanta Banerjee than he displayed in his long-winded article (December). One suspects that he is playing to the gallery, rather than to a discerning audience. He starts off promisingly by stating an extremely important fact of Indian history: that the Congress party reneged on its promise of implementing land reforms, even while the early Indian communists kept their own promise of shunning armed struggle when a compromise was reached and the Telengana struggle was defused. The net result of this was that the communists and socialists were continuously packed into jails and tortured – or were bumped off entirely – while land and other reforms were given the go-by.

The Indian state and those who control it have a consistent history of anti-people governance. That is why the Maoist uprisings since the late 1960s have stressed the centrality of armed struggle to overthrow the state – because the latter does not respect its own laws. Howsoever much the Maoists can be faulted on practical grounds for choosing such a path, given the military might of the Indian state, they cannot be faulted on ideological grounds. Even mature democracies such as the UK and US consistently violate the rule of law, so as to favour the rich and stifle the poor – the current sub-prime meltdown in the US is a prime example of this.

So, while one can understand the apprehension of most intellectuals with the Naxalites’ violence, one finds it difficult to understand why someone such as Banerjee has also joined this prim but hypocritical bandwagon. ‘Going down to the basics’ was an axiom first propounded by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who said that because property is theft there will always be violence in acquiring and protecting it. In other words, as long as there is capitalism there will also be Marxism, in one form or another. If you do not want Naxalites, then you will first have to get rid of the Tatas. As long as the Tatas and Ambanis and Essars multiply their wealth, so too will the Naxalites swell their cadres. It is high time that people begin to swallow this bitter pill, rather than churning out mishy-mashy prose such as Banerjee’s.

Rahul Banerjee
Indore

Pluralism and modernity

There is so much to respond to in Pervez Hoodbhoy’s recent article (October-November). Hoodbhoy writes half truths – some of which are easy to agree upon, while others use some pretty insidious definitions and frameworks to in order to complete the analysis. The writer’s recommendations to the West are mostly old hat of noblesse oblige. It is easy to agree with lines such as, “No ‘higher authority’ defines the leftwing agenda, and no covenant of belief defines a ‘leftist’. There is no card to be carried or oath to be taken. But secularism, universalistic ideas of human rights, and freedom of belief are non-negotiable.”

I agree that that is the leftist way, but Hoodbhoy defines the conflict of today without using a secular optic at all – by writing that the world, when viewed from above, would be one “where imperial might and religious fundamentalism are locked in a bitter struggle.” With this I completely disagree. Rather, I think that the conflict is one between imperial might, which is coupled with religious fundamen talism and the forces of pluralism and modernity. I also think that the advice Hoodbhoy gives to the so-called Muslim world as to how to model itself incorrectly attributes qualities to the West that were actually hallmarks of Muslim societies and thinking. Each individual Muslim today who thinks that being Muslim is his or her identity should uphold and hold sacred the notions of science, enlightenment, questioning and logic.

Maniza Naqvi
By e-mail

Beware the higher echelon

Aseem Shrivastava’s opinion (December) makes one want to go back and re-read the interview with Amartya Sen published in The Telegraph in late July. During the first reading, this interview had merely appeared to reveal Sen’s political predilection. But given the incidents of late, Sen’s words seem more to reflect a series of fundamentally false moves: considering India (and Bengal) to be a full-fledged market economy; not being able to delineate the correct role for a government in such an economy; and the greatest fallacy of all – giving incorrect historical relevance to the issue of industrialisation and land acquisition in Bengal. This is just one more instance that proves that such sentiments, just because they emanate from some ‘higher echelon’, can never be taken at face value.

G Narasimha Raghavan
Coimbatore