Dear Didi: The Gravedigger

I
Mamata Banerjee not being recognized as a great Hindu Feminist in public itself is effectively nothing short of an unorganized Hindu feminist conspiracy. More than anything, it is her quasi-Bahujan politics that repels the fellow Hindu feminists – even a Hindu feminist with ‘opportunistic’ sympathies for Muslims and Dalits must be unwelcome for the elite savarna solidarity sistas.

Mamata is already the most experienced potential anti-fascist fighter in the country because she has decades of experience in fighting ‘Hindu Communist totalitarians’, that too without an organization worth its name.

She is by (political) character much less elitist than Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders and by (political) temperament more socialist than these two celebrated new socialists combined.
She deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for the great achievement of saving Bengal from communism with Bengali characteristics (After Nandigram, Jyoti Basu, the longest (self) serving Upper Caste Chief Minister of any Indian State, ingloriously remarked that CPI-M was pursuing ‘Communism with Bengali characteristics, like China’s Communism with Chinese characteristics.’).

It is no exaggeration to say that Communism as the future of the world is greatly indebted to her for decisively helping to save Communism itself from the irredeemable ignominy of Bengali communist genocides, which, in 2011, was just one election away. Don’t forget, if EMS Namboothirippad had ever become the Chairman of Communist India, Stalin and Mao would have been no match for his Aryan purges. It is the failure of a Communist revolution in India that actually saved Communism from its worst Brown Aryan genocidal urges.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Mamata did not join the ‘War on Muslims’ bandwagon, unlike Obama and Suu Kyi. She is rather instrumental in the increasing assertiveness of Muslims and Dalits in Bengal[/perfectpullquote]

When Mamata ousted CPI-M from its monopolistic rule, she was saving millions of Bengalis from the concrete possibility of being plundered, pillaged and purged by the Hindu Communists. Needless to say, the Bengali communist atrocities would have been primarily against Dalits and Muslims, which would have even put the Hindu Nazists of that time to shame. Imagine, if Mamata had not intervened in the right time, the fate of the liberals sincerely vouching for Hindu Nazists as a lesser evil than the Hindu Communists! At one stroke, she saved communists and Bengalis from their own worst instincts.

She not only preemptively prevented the mass primitive accumulative plunder of land in modern times (a thousand Nandigrams and Singurs) and the consequent industrial scale killings in the name of forced Communist industrialization of the red country. Preventing a civil war in a One Hundred-million people-strong Bengal, which is known for its lust for annihilation of class enemies was no mean achievement; Mamata should have got her Nobel for it – a half-baked peace process in Columbia, a country with less than half of Bengal’s population and forty times less population density, was rewarded with last year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Ironically a Nobel for Mamata would be the first Nobel Peace Prize for someone who has contributed immensely to the cause of World Communism by saving her people’s land and lives (literally) from the combined assault of genocidal communists and predatory capitalists.

Besides, unlike Obama and Ang San Suu Kyi, the very fact that Mamata did not take a U-turn either in her politics or principles, especially in the treatment of the Jews of the Twenty First Century- Muslims – should be a substantive moral reason for re-honouring Nobel Peace Prize by gifting it to her.

Yes, Mamata did not join the ‘War on Muslims’ bandwagon, unlike Obama and Suu Kyi. She is rather instrumental in the increasing assertiveness of Muslims and Dalits in Bengal; they are no more to be blackmailed into complete submission by the communist retailers of Hindutva in the name of ‘All-Fundamentalists-Are-Equal’ kind of Karat-Sitaram nonsense.

The conflicts during the Muharram-Durga Puja processions last year was not simply because of the rise of BJP in Bengal, as Communists propagated, the new-found Muslim assertiveness under Mamata’s projected inclusive rule was immediately translated into the community’s empowered claims for central squares in villages and towns for taking the Muharram procession, which immediately provoked a Bhadralok backlash.

Those days, every other Bhadralok Bengali, including leftist and liberal ones, was complaining against Mamata’s mindless Muslim appeasement! With the recent arrest of TMC MPs in a frontal counter-attack by Modi, she did not simply succumb. She rather fought back by asking the prohibited, which even most of the Muslims, forget leftists, do not dare to ask in public, for the jailing of Modi-Shah duo for their mass murders of Muslims in Gujarat. She characteristically did not limit herself to words and allowed the law into the hands of her own lumpen party members. Not even the headquarters of BJP in Kolkata was spared in the wrath of TMC workers. Billboards with Modi’s face were vandalized across Bengal; one of the most pleasant political scenes after 2014.

Mamata showed the way in how to fight fascists in mainstream political space. Unless dealt with in the streets, they will not budge. Mamata’s greatest political invention is her lumpen synthesis of means of law and means of lawlessness (utmost necessity in street fighting the fascists); she can traverse both realms smoothly, without falling under any. If anything, she had learnt from living as political activist under CPI-M’s totalitarian rule, it is that law is not aloof from the political deployment of human muscles in the streets. She knows that we have to invent a whole set of new constitutional measures, bordering between the formal and the informal, the violent and the non-violent, to save the Indian Constitution from its worst violators in authority.

On a side note, in Macaulay’s own writings among many other colonial writings, Bengali masculinity was under massive attack, which Vivekananda tried to repair without much success. We are no one to comment on the vicissitudes of Bengali masculinity; however, Mamata proves it without an iota of doubt that Bengalis are vertebrate, at least some of them, unlike President Mukherjee, he would most probably sign the declaration (if at all it happens, no doubt about emergency-but the declaration!) of next emergency not from his bathtub, but from Modi’s own closet.

II
Bengalis, being economic determinists of the worst kind, can be explained by the fact that while the political repression in British Indian Empire was predominantly concentrated in Punjab, economic repression was at its zenith in Bengal. Therefore, Bengalis tend to equate oppression with economic exploitation with comprador bureaucratic opportunities. This may also partially explain the success of Communism in Bengal because they mistook Communism for economic determinism with a human (implicitly Bhadralok) face and Party for bureaucracy and Lenin’s designation of professional revolutionary for professionally profiteering from the business of revolution (the second most successful industry in Bengal after the Guruji-Swamiji Chamcha Complex), in addition to the Brahmin dream of eternally eating without working and preaching “ideology” (only Hindu Marxist use it as a positive desirable self-description) to the oppressed while being the oppressors themselves. Perhaps Bengali Bhadralok white-collar workers are the only set of workers who exploit their employers; they draw their salary for doing paid adda.

Mao famously said Communist China is not devoid of capitalist roaders and called for ousting the capitalist-roaders who have infiltrated the entire party. It is true that there will always be capitalist roaders in Communist parties anywhere. However, the obverse of which often goes unnoticed; there can be radicals among seemingly reactionary forces. Mamata is one; she is a communist ghost possessed in the bhadralok body politic- a radical, a rootless and ruthless radical, in the midst of a reactionary political formation.

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]If Hindus waste human potentials, Hindu Communists waste revolutionary potential.[/perfectpullquote]

She is a Communist like Gorbachev; they are Final Communists who take it upon themselves the honorable but thankless job of burying the already-dead; the melancholic work of grave-digging, so the living can continue to live their ordinary lives, not the suspended life of everyday ritualistic mourning while living with the dead! Mamata’s poribortan was Bengal’s perestroika; it was destined to fail, exactly like Gorbachev’s perestroika because all their constructive posturing aside, such reforms are poised to destroy the old order, not to construct a new one.

One reason for which the remaining Leftists in India continue to ceaselessly mourn the fall of their Stalinist comrades is their lack of daring to bury the politically-dead Stalinists. What prevents them is their necrophilia for the dead communist organization that refuses to leave? And, they get their ‘terminal excitement’ each time another possibility for a proletarian revolt is killed under the weight of their dead organization. Yechuri, the Communist Comprador in Chief, after proving his Brahmin mettle in collaboration (for a cut) in Nepal and Kashmir for the Hindu Indian Empire, successfully immobilized his party’s bank workers’ unions when the country needed them most. In the last week of November, when the cash crunch was at its peak and salaries were waiting to be credited, a country-wide indefinite labour strike led by Bank Unions would have finished the fascists off. In Mao’s words, it was exactly like ‘Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.’ What wastage of a crisis which was gifted in abolished currencies!

If Hindus waste human potentials, Hindu Communists waste revolutionary potential. It is not simply their yet another ‘historical blunder’; like the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 (for dividing Eastern Europe between them), Yechuri might have had his promised cut in Bengal, against Mamata. Her war cry against demonetization would be marked in history book in the columns of glory and Yechuri’s criminal rejection of her call, in the fifth columns of pusillanimity.

Mamata, a feminist who actually does her trinamool work, is quite unlike them. She is not ready for stalling life for the dead. Her politics is not zombie politics. She was not just trying to project herself onto the national realm, like most of our dreaded columnists ‘think’. Her call was for ‘national unity’ against financial war from Delhi. She was trying to create a new ‘national space’ in Bengal. She is a realist to the core. She knows she will have more chances to become the Prime Minister of a New Bengal than getting the Indian prime ministership. She is already the trailblazer of azadi in Bengal. Because the ideology of the class that she represents has azadi at its core, although in a lumpenised version. Her political fortune is her unique ability to emotionally appeal to a new class of lumpens across caste and class in Bengal. Her parochialism is her biggest strength because it helps her to organically connect with all her lumpen supporters vis-à-vis the pretended cosmopolitanism of the bhadralok. Instinctual enmity and confrontational existence are the two qualities that define her charisma, unavoidably lumpen in character.

Her ideology represents a great synthesis of lack of ideas/civility of lumpens from all castes and classes in Bengal. She is a person of unity because her primary political task was to unite all lumpens, irrespective of their social affiliations, who were resisting the CPI-M totalitarianism. There is no surprise in a bhadramohila who genuinely does not speak, act or live like a bhadramohila coming to the leadership of the lumpen Bengal. She is the product of organized lumpenisation of rest of Bengal by the perfectly exclusionary, impossibly tiny and unbelievably homogenous ruling dynasty in the state, whose greatest expertise is in trivializing people using left-liberal ideological rhetoric on high platforms and well-nourished strong arm tactics at the ground. It is her mis/use of the lumpen resistance to the powers that defines her political existence. It is this instinctual lumpenism, mixed with authentic paranoia and subaltern subversiveness that almost automatically pits her against the consolidation of fascist power. If we are to go by the innermost of her ideology, she is a Fanonian with Bengali characteristics. She blends a peculiar ideology from the scrap materials of populist welfare, bhadralok feudal modernity, secularism without substance and federalism based on Bengali chauvinism. [perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]the war against fascists will not be fought by purists.[/perfectpullquote]

Like Stalin with Hitler, she too had a time being hand in gloves with Modi, so did Mayawati and Nitish Kumar. This is something the Hindu Communists encash most; that they have never touched BJP, though they are the ones who brought and planted BJP in power at Centre for the first time. Communists are the high Brahmins who could afford not to compromise on their untouchability, unlike the parties of Lower Castes. This assumption of ‘purity highground’ completely hides the fact that it is the communist betrayal (by isolating caste warriors) that created the conditions for the very rise of fascists in India.

Anyway, the war against fascists will not be fought by purists. The fact of collaborators turning into arch-enemies is more than common under fascism; so does the possibility of enemies allying with enemies against fascists. If Stalin could turn deadly against Hitler, if America and Soviet Union could fight together against Nazis, the anti-fascist fight here will not be without Mayawati, Mamata, and Nitish Kumar. It is also important to defeat fascists first at the East-North Belt (Bengal-Bihar-UP), the most unruly (in the positive sense) lands of the country. (The North-West belt of Haryana-Rajasthan-Gujarat will be their last strongholds until defeat. In Maharashtra, Shiv Sena plus RPI lumpenism will finally finish them off. The opportunists in South India, North East and Punjab will turn away the moment the tide turns against the fascists. The Maoists will take over the central India)

III
What Bengal thinks today India thinks tomorrow. Great M.S.S Pandian corrected it as ‘What Bengal thinks today, India has to unthink tomorrow’. Permit us to offer another twist – what Bengal stinks of today, India will stink of tomorrow, because Bengal is always one step ahead in its rottenness than the rest of India. From Vivekananda to Tagore to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, India still stinks of Bengal stench. Now from Bengal you can get some fresh stink of fascists getting beaten back, the rest of the country shall stink of it, sooner or later.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]what Bengal stinks of today, India will stink of tomorrow, because Bengal is always one step ahead in its rottenness than the rest of India.[/perfectpullquote]

If you are not pretending to fight fascism, fight it like Mamata does. One is not arguing that everybody should ally with Mamata to fight Hindu Nazists but try to emulate the Mamata Path of fighting fascists. What we need is not alliance with Mamata, with she at its centre, but repeating what Mamata did in Bengal in the rest of the country, against both Hindu Leftists and Hindu Nazists.

If Modi is the unconscious gravedigger of Hindu Indian Empire, Mamata is the gravedigger of the stinking Old Bhadralok Bengal. Like the old CPI-M, old Bengal too is dead; Mamata has taken it upon herself to bury the stinking corpse. She too obviously does stink of all that was rotten in old Bengal. Perhaps she too may be buried with it. She will not only be known as the gravedigger of the Old Bengal but also (not ironically) as her own too; the New Bengal which she is singlehandedly trying to give birth to will surely dig the final grave for her.

The unleashing of the Bengali Bahujan forces, which she was an ‘unconscious tool of history’ (in Marx’s own words), will sink her too. But that would be a tragedy with all its moral dignity.

But the future will mark her in history as the gravedigger of the Hindu Nazists, if the pretentious anti-fascist fighters do that important thing which she is so fond of doing while others daydream of doing; confronting the enemy head on, with nothing other than a guttural sense of unabashed emotional enmity against the haters of humanity, using the weapons of your enemies’ enemies (like Mamata defeated Marxists using Maoist arms).
We are all illegitimately indebted to Dear Didi!
We have failed her more than she has failed us.

 

Raiot

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Both authors are doctoral scholars at IIT Bombay

2 Comments

  1. Saifuddin Hossain
    March 10, 2017
    Reply

    A completely idiotic article. Bros, you have no clue about Bengal politics. Have you ever visited and studied Bengal, or are you pontificating from a distant shore?

  2. Soham
    March 10, 2017
    Reply

    Worthy analysis. Agree with the authors on their positionug of Didi, though I do think she still has national possibilities. But there is a lot of “essentialist” biase and outright hatred against Bengal and Bengali’s. Bengal despite its many flaws is where BJP is struggling to gain ideological followers , mostly because of a history of Communist practice. All states have the same or similar flaws of “white collar hindu supremacy” isolating Bengal is unfair. ( Declaration: commentor is Bengali and Swavarna)

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