Book Review : Leninism, Gramsci, culture: predicaments of Indian Communism — I — By Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed
Struggle for Hegemony in India
Authors: Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh
Publisher: Sage Publications, New Delhi; 2011 (first published in 1992)
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc countries, the metamorphosing of the People's Republic of China into the bankers to global capitalism are cataclysmal events of such gigantic proportions that it would take a very long time before one can begin to understand how and why the communist project proved ultimately to be a house of cards.
A major contribution to understanding the failure of communism, as theorised by Vladimir Lenin, to successfully mobilise the masses to overthrow through class struggle imperialism and the colonial state, and subsequently to capture the successor Indian state, is this trilogy. This is a compilation of three earlier works — A History of the Indian Communists: The Irrelevance of Leninism (Shashi Joshi); A History of the Indian Communists: From United Front to Left Front (Bhagwan Josh) and Culture, Community and Power: A Critique of the Discourses of Communalism and Secularism (Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh) — by two leading Indian scholars at India's premier Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi: Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh. Both have their intellectual roots in the Indian communist movement. It is seldom that one comes across such a vast body of theoretical literature reviewed and facts evaluated in a single study. It is surely the magnum opus of these gifted life-partners.
Two concepts are at the core of their analytical apparatus: hegemony and culture. Deferring to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Bhagwan Josh writes in the second volume: "Hegemony is a relation not of domination by means of force, but of consent by means of political and ideological leadership (vol. 2, page xxi). Gramsci had argued that instead of the revolutionary insurrection that Leninism prescribed, it was necessary for Italian communists to work within the bourgeois democratic state based on the rule of law, rather than go it alone, in order to fight fascism which was then on the rise in Italy.
The second core concept in their analytical framework is their notion of culture. According to Joshi and Josh, economic and social interests no doubt fuel all movements that aggregate individual desires and discontents. However, they wonder why some ideologies and not others attract people. They believe this is determined by culture. Reviewing a number of approaches on culture they settle for one that combines "culture as a battleground on which competing groups struggle to define symbols and meanings" (volume III: xviii), with "culture as a process inevitably involving contradictions, conflict and accommodation, and emphasising the actors' agency" (ibid). A great degree of emphasis is laid by them on the notion of "internality of culture". By this they mean the way culture circumscribes the choices of diction and symbols as well as delimits those who can choose them and use them successfully.
In the first volume covering the colonial period, Shashi Joshi demonstrates that the strategy to attempt a violent overthrow of the state was a non-starter from the very onset. The colonial state was not, unlike Czarist Russia, a brute machine that could be confronted head on by mobilising all sections of the people against its domination. It was a sophisticated ideological-political-military apparatus that was, on the one hand, fully prepared to crush any violent challenge to its authority, and on the other, through limited constitutionalism and skilful management of social tensions such as those deriving from religious differences between Hindus and Muslims or through legal measures regulating relations between workers and capitalists or tenants and landowners and those deriving from the divisive caste system, it could impede mass mobilisation.
At the bottom of their argument is that one could not transplant lock stock and barrel the conditions that obtained in Czarist Russia that resulted in the Bolsheviks coming to power through an armed revolution in October 1917. The hegemony of the colonial state had to be challenged from within the cultural and political conditions peculiar to India. In sharp contrast to the communists' class-based armed insurrection strategy, Gandhi was convinced that a violent overthrow of the colonial state was impossible. He, therefore, devised a challenge to imperialism, which combined the moderate path of constitutionalism and legal protest with mass, non-violent agitation that very prudently evaded a head-on collision with the colonial state. It was, therefore, both constitutional as well as extra-constitutional. The insistence on non-violence steered it away from a head-on collision with the British. Such a sophisticated challenge the British could not combat successfully, because the colonial state was bound by its culture of constitutionalism and recognition of basic civil liberties such as the right peacefully to protest government policies. Thus the Gandhian approach was dialectically more effective in challenging the hegemony of imperialism.
In this regard, Joshi makes the important point that Jawaharlal Nehru, who was generally considered left of Gandhi, did not betray the idea of a revolutionary transformation of India to socialism as was maintained by orthodox communists during 1929-34 when they accused Nehru of eclecticism and of being a "despicable betrayer and beheader of the revolutionary movement" (page 162), but a strategy that sought to combine the Gandhian strategy with socialism.
In the second volume, Bhagwan Josh focuses on the failure of the communists to successfully join the politics of a united front against imperialism. He refers to a statement of the general secretary of the Communist Party, Ajoy Kumar Ghosh, to the effect that although the communist party tried to forge an anti-imperialist front under its leadership, it was the national bourgeoisie led by the Congress Party, which succeeded in doing so. Josh disagrees with Ghosh that the Congress Party was merely a bourgeois party. He considers the Congress a historic multi-class bloc, with its left and right wings being balanced in Gandhi's strategy to create a broad front against imperialism. Rigid adherence to Leninist theory meant that instead of devising policies and strategies to work with the objective reality, the communists saw the reality through an economistic and deterministic prism.
(To be continued)
The reviewer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at: billumian@gmail.com
Book Review : Leninism, Gramsci, culture: predicaments of Indian Communism — II — By Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed
Struggle for Hegemony in India
Authors: Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh
Publisher: Sage Publications, New Delhi; 2011 (first published in 1992)
Professor Bhagwan Josh develops a sophisticated appreciation of Nehru's left bloc, which rejected Leninism but not socialism. Instead of relying on the working class crushed by wage slavery, and thus unable to lead the struggle, Nehru broadened it to include the peasantry, the youth and anti-imperialist intellectuals and others. Subhash Chandra Bose was on the left of Nehru, but his bid to capture the leadership of the Congress was thwarted because he predicated armed insurrection that stood no chance of winning. The communists did begin to work towards a united front in 1939-40 but one under their class-based hegemony. That ended in just the opposite and alienated them from the mainstream when they joined hands with the British after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
Since independence, the communists have been displaying the same rigidity in making alliances. Thus in Bengal, where the breakaway Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) emerged as a major player and took up a clear anti-communal stand against the BJP, it nevertheless evaded forming a stable alliance with the Congress. In Kerala, which is a CPM stronghold, no serious attempt to forge a left front with the Congress was attempted either. The ultimate failure of the communists to partake in the building of a progressive Indian nation was when Jyoti Basu of the CPM was not allowed by his party to become the prime minister of India because that would entail major concessions to the capitalist economy that existed in India.
The third volume is jointly authored by Joshi and Josh. Although they take great pains to assert that by culture they do not mean religion, this is not entirely convincing because they identify Hindus and Muslims as heirs to two different cultures and culture codes, phraseology and symbols that essentially disqualify one group from drawing upon the 'culture' of the other group. We learn that the two cultures could never merge to create a strong Indian consciousness — by the same token in the Punjab, religiously-demarcated cultural boundaries remain intact and an overarching Punjabi identity could not develop. They provide evidence of communal riots going back in history many centuries, and, therefore, question the rather widespread notion of communalism being the brainchild of colonialism and imperialism, and a product of colonial modernity. They give the example of the song Bande Mataram, which the Congress chose as its party song. The song was written by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and later appeared in his novel, Anandamath (1882), portraying the Muslims and the British as oppressive foreign invaders. Nehru took the position that the first two stanzas could be accepted as they were not communal, the Indian Muslims who saw it as an integral part of a hostile anti-Muslim novel, remained unconvinced. It was a choice made within the broad Hindu culture and appealed directly to the Hindus but alienated the Muslims who could not identify with it.
Ironically, when the communists in the Punjab tried to work within the cultural framework and Dr Adhikari and P C Joshi spoke of the Muslims as an oppressed nationality, they strengthened the separatist bid of the Muslim League while alienating the Sikhs of Punjab. What comes out of their massive study is that while Gandhi, or Gandhi and Nehru together, could trump the hegemony of the colonial state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah could trump their use of culture with a powerful invocation of Islamic symbolism and cultural vocabulary.
Now, this may very much be true. Perhaps culture is the independent variable that defines the choices and consciousness of people. The authors do point out that this happens within particular contexts, but their argument suggests the primacy of culture over class consciousness and solidarity. In other words, the communist project of a class revolution, howsoever attractive to those subscribing to the rationalist logic of class, is largely delusional when it comes to attracting the mass of people.
One can, however, always wonder how and why western culture has transformed in the last two hundred or more years so that Christianity is no longer the defining feature of European politics. Of course, Europe's reluctance to let in Turkey suggests that the religion factor is still important, but within European politics a secularised culture based on civic nationalism is now the norm, though violent encounters with Islamism may still halt or alter that direction of cultural change.
On the other hand, working within culture to create hegemony as attempted by states such as Pakistan, Iran and indeed Israel are reasons to worry about all the talk about cultural authenticity. In India, Hindutva calls are a dangerous proposition for democracy, and both authors are very much aware of that problem. They show that whereas the colonial state was religiously neutral when it came to communal riots, the Indian state post-Nehru is definitely not: the 1984 slaughter of Sikhs in Delhi and of Muslims in Gujarat are horrible examples of a state pandering to a majoritarian culture.
One can therefore argue that 'Culture Realism' and culture as an undifferentiated whole can be a dangerous premise to base politics on. Within cultures there are social classes and strata and powerful interests. Consequently, a broad-based left alliance comprising the progressive forces, oppressed sections of society, non-dominant minorities and nationalities can develop a programme and strategy to challenge reactionary culture, and instead promote secular culture and democratic values that seek to establish a pluralist and fairer society — a social-democratic political community and order.
(Concluded)
The reviewer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at: billumian@gmail.com
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