November 22, 2012
by Saroj Giri
Right where Bal Thackeray was cremated, at Shivaji Park in Mumbai,
another event had taken place in June 1970: “a
twenty-five-thousand-strong funeral procession marched to Shivaji Park,
the Sena stronghold, shouting anti-Shiv Sena slogans,” reports Gyan
Prakash in his Mumbai Fables (Princeton University Press, 2010,
p. 247). The reason: the murder of Krishna Desai by the Sena in June 5,
1970. Bal Thackeray was supposed to be directly involved in it.
Desai was the sitting Communist Party of India (CPI) MLA from central
Bombay, a popular and militant working class leader. He was also one of
those who went beyond the diktats of the official CPI leadership, which
discouraged self-defence and direct action and could not integrate them
in its overall political strategy. That evening of the day he was
murdered, it is told that thousands of workers spontaneously came out to
avenge the murder. This could have meant they would have ‘liquidated’
Bal Thackeray and his cohorts.
Of course given the leadership’s ‘rule of law’ approach, this was not
to happen: the angry workers were told to disperse and the Hriday
samrat was born. Thackeray went to town boasting about the murder,
promising to carry out more such ‘actions’. Seeing that their leaders
can be murdered and nothing happens to the murderer, workers loose
morale and think that the communists are not serious about defending
their interests. So that when Desai’s widow Sarojini Desai contests in
the elections, even a sympathy wave for her dead husband who was a hero
for the workers does not fetch her victory. The tide turned: the Sena
wins, gets its first legislator from the jaws of communist hold. Large
sections of the workers ‘go with the winner’, while the loser, the
communists, increasingly fail to resist and retaliate and try to
foolishly seek protection of the law and courts.
Earlier, “on September 10, 1967, Thackeray declared in Marmik
that his object was the ‘emasculation of the Communists.’ Three months
later, the Sena activists attacked the CPI’s Dalvi Building office in
Parel. They burned files and threw out the furniture. It was an
audacious attack, brazenly carried out to strike at the very heart of
the enemy. What was the Communist response? Nothing.” (Prakash, p. 242)
It is out of this ‘nothing’, that void left by the communist
leadership, against the will of militant workers, that Thackeray and the
Shiv Sena come to life.
And yet today the progressives do not want to ask ‘why was the
communist’s response ‘nothing’’. Instead they are busy pointing out
Thackeray’s overt qualities, qualities that were anyways meant for
public consumption and moreover, for the Sena, proud display. We are
told that he epitomised the politics of fear and hatred, how he was a
fascist and communal and divisive and so on. There is over-reliance on
this kind of a ‘politics of exposure’, which is merely old rehashed
wisdom about the Sena and Thackeray. Such hollering is done so seriously
that one forgets that it alone changes nothing, does not weaken the
Sena, nor even expose it. Nor does it shame the Indian state and
security apparatus to now become an ally in your anti-communal or
anti-fascist struggle.
The ‘politics of exposure’ is moreover part of a tendency to then
present Thackeray as just a mad crazy exception, whom we just need to
‘expose’ and soon the rest of ‘democratic society’ and civil society
will shun him to hell. The hollering invests the political atmosphere
with such illusions. After all, it is not that the workers who joined
the Sena did so since they found the organization ‘democratic’ and
upholding the rule of law. Nor will they now leave it since they have
finally found that it is ‘fascist’, a gang of thugs etc.
Above all, this hollering tends to make us forget that Thackeray
emerges as a tacit ruling class response to a particular conjuncture of
the class struggle in Mumbai. So let us instead ask: what could the
Indian state and big capital have done when they were faced with the
kind of ‘enemy’ like the organised communist working class power which
had Bombay in its grips in the 1960s? The Indian state is, officially
speaking, bound one way or another by its secularism, labour laws and
things like that – which is all fine and creates no real hassles for the
ruling classes so long as you have a decrepit left but not fine if you
are confronted by a powerful working class movement. The movement was so
powerful that even the CPI leadership, given the illusions it had about
Indian democracy, feared its most militant sections and power.
Hence to deal with this communist monster you needed a force to
ensure two (contradictory) things at the same time. First, decimate or
liquidate the working class movement. Second, to maintain, at the same
time, the garb of democracy, secularism, and so on. A banana republic or
a Pinochet would have concentrated only on the first but here you had
the ‘idea of India’ too which had to be uphailed – and to which even
sections of CPI leadership not to speak of other progressives and
‘left-liberals’ were deeply attached.
An extra legal force like the Sena was exactly what fitted the bill.
Not the right wing vigilante armed gangs cut off from the society to be
found in Latin America but one which would have a deep organic connect
to ‘society’. Hindutva and the populism of the Marathi manoos
ensured this connect. A cross between a vigilante and a grass roots
populist movement. Put it this way: Thackeray and the Sena were
something like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) emerging from
within the underbelly of majoritarian society, articulating its latent
organic fissures. I mean, if it is war on terror or against
anti-nationals, the state is comfortable in sanctioning murder and
extra-judicial killings through extraordinary laws formally passed in
Parliament. There is no fear of losing democratic legitimacy in the eyes
of mainstream upper middle classes.
The working classes or even Naxals are however a different matter,
trickier to handle. It is difficult to paint the working classes in
textile mills of central Bombay as anti-national and hence for the state
to move against it – particularly, when the working classes are
consciously portraying themselves as a class in an organised fashion, as
a ‘class-for-itself’, and are also politically represented in
legislatures and are also largely ‘Hindu’. Decimating working class
struggle is of the highest importance and yet executing it demands
utmost discretion, a higher level of cunning.
The extra-legal decimating force cannot therefore take the shape of a
formal law, even an extraordinary one through an act of Parliament and
so on. ‘Society’ then has to ‘produce’ such a force from within its
organic underbelly – hence, while enacting the most general interests of
capital, Thackeray was not someone who could be a hired goon for the
capitalists and mill owners of Mumbai. A hired goon or henchman would
only defend particular interests of specific capitalists and
industrialists. Thackeray did that too – Rahul Bajaj recalls how
Thackeray ‘sorted out’ a workers-related issue at his manufacturing
facility. There must be many such cases of ‘sorting out’ by the Sena.
But beyond a point Thackeray ‘rises above’ these individual cases and becomes a higher presence, Hriday Samrat.
Or, ‘Maharashtra’s patriarch’, as HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh put it
and whose loss he wants to mourn. The point is clear: why would a banker
mourn the death of ‘a patriarch’? We have here a much deeper conduit
between the (upper caste Hindu) underbelly and (publicly acknowledged)
capitalist class interests – Hindutva and the general interests of
capital merge in Thackeray.
Moreover, Thackeray could enact all this in the name of the ordinary Marathi manoos.
What is not so common knowledge is that he also made liberal use of the
anti-Brahman language and symbolism from Jotirao Phule when “he
ridicules the pompousness of the Brahmin cultural establishment and
‘high society’” (Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence, p. 199). If this
was not enough, Blom Hansen reports that CPI leader Dange was once
invited to share dais with Thackeray, to tremendous applause. And that
the ‘socialist’ George Fernandes was a family friend of the Thackeray
clan. Further also that the Sena flirted for some time with the idea of
‘practical socialism’ in the early 1980s.
This deep nexus between the Sena and the Indian state and big capital
does not however seem credible to many progressives. The word they use
is ‘collusion’ between the state and the Hindutva forces. This suggests
that the nexus is not deep enough and you expect that when the fascist
thugs come for your life you can still be saved by the state – since the
state is constitutionally bound to do that for you! Thus when the Sena
came gunning for them, the CPI leadership was indeed looking for a way
to convert a clearly anti-communist offensive, nay a murder plan, of the
Sena and the ruling classes, into a case of a wider attack on the
so-called secular fabric of the nation and so on.
Well, did the secular fabric and the Indian state come to the rescue
of the communists? It didn’t: the secular fabric turned the other way,
just the manner in which Indian security forces often look the other way
when hapless Muslims appeal for help in a riot situation. The
difference with Muslims is that the communists are targeted first.
Indeed the Shiv Sena phenomenon is a clear case of ‘first they came for
the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a communist…’.
And yet there is today a veiled attempt to avoid probing the period when
communists were face to face with the Sena. We need to revisit the
communist strategy and find out why the response was ‘nothing’, above
all keeping in mind that an anti-communal front cannot be where
communists should be taking refuge.
But ‘revisiting communist strategy’ is not to now utter postcolonial
inanities like ‘the communists emphasized the class question too much
and never really understood caste, or religion or identities’. It is not
to validate what in ‘cultural studies’ is called ‘the problem of
translation’, that class is supposedly a Euro-centric category and
cannot comprehend Indian social reality. Instead it is to state that
there is really no problem of translation.
The problem of translation was not for the communists but for
Thackeray: isn’t it common knowledge that he had to resort to the
language and politics of class, that he had to take up the interests of
the workers and lower castes, in order to institute his ‘identity
politics’. He was forced to do that – he had to translate his identity
politics into class lines in order to gain entry into the ‘communist
stronghold’ of central Bombay. As the political scientist Aryama pointed
out to me, unlike ‘fascists’, the Shiv Sena did not really crush the
working class movement. It rechanneled the movement along ‘safe’ lines
of Marathi manoos, anti-Muslim politics and so on.
It was not emphasis on class and the problem of translation which
undid the communists but a half-hearted emphasis – there was emphasis on
the working class ‘issues’ but not on class power, on the organised
power of the working class led by the vanguard party. Working class
power would have given us a different scenario after Desai’s murder.
That is, in a bizarre twist, it was the Sena which would mobilize
workers’ ‘militancy’, now misdirected, rather than the CPI leadership
which ditched both ground level leaders like Desai and other workers by
instead relying on the supposed rule of law and Indian constitutional,
legal protection and so on.
So when did ‘direct action’ become a purely fascist trait, as the
progressives are telling us today? Here is today a left which turns its
back on working class history apparently because class is not an
adequate category for Indian reality and so on – something which does
not follow from actual facts. Perhaps, it was such a decrepit left which
convinced those like Namdeo Dhasal to join the Sena rather than the
left – for the Dalit Panthers did also use direct action as a way to
defend the interests of Dalit working classes. The communist tradition
has a strong place as much for direct action as for direct democracy –
you however cannot have one without the other. This needs to be
reasserted.
Direct action can be critiqued. But such a critique cannot be geared
towards suggesting that we should now come under the mediation of the
rule of law and the constitution – and then refuse to see how these
latter cannot be upheld at the expense of the workers’ power.
Thackeray’s direct action was to ultimately defend the mediation of the
rule of law, facilitate its normal functioning and preserve the status
quo. It was an exception meant to reinscribe the rule. It was the
Hindutva thug’s AFSPA – extraordinary law to ensure the return to
ordinary laws, to ‘peace and development’.
The communist workers and the Dalit Panthers’ ‘direct action’ is
merely a (Hegelian) move to recognize the Sena’s ‘direct action’, the
Hindutva thug’s AFSPA to be an integral part of the normal functioning
of the law and the norm. The pro-state (or democratic/parliamentary)
left, including many social movements, fails to recognize it as such and
is in denial. It treats the Sena’s ‘direct action’ as an aberration
from ‘our constitution’ or ‘democratic tradition’ or ‘the idea of India’
– it hence rushes to the state and the rule of law to seek ‘correction
of this aberration’, seek legal protection and in the process claim to
be democratic and peace-loving and so on. It would have been fine if
this was done to strategically build a powerful wider movement. Instead
it reduces the entire movement to just this. This is clear, for example,
from the way it equates ‘direct action’ by the communists with that of
the fascists.
This has historical parallels. After the collapse of Nazism, western
liberals tried to present Nazism as an aberration, as something which
just happened – if only we would not forget how horrible fascism was, we
could stop it from repeating itself. Marxists, in particular the Soviet
countries, treated fascism as a live possibility so long as the
bourgeoisie was in power. So the Soviets would not merely build
memorials to the victims of a past event, which we should not forget,
but emphasise that the war against fascism is an ongoing one. Fascism is
not in that sense a historically singular aberration.
Moreover when it came to the communist resistance to Nazism, the
Soviets were equated to the Nazis. So we are told you have the Nazi
concentration camps, but you also have Soviet concentration camps! We
cannot take these claims at face value as simple statement of facts. At
another level, we must seriously take Slavoj Zizek’s provocation: “in
today’s era of hedonist permissivity as the ruling ideology, the time is
coming for the Left to (re)appropriate discipline and the spirit of
sacrifice: there is nothing inherently “Fascist” about these values” (‘The True Hollywood Left').
The rejection of direct action by equating it with fascist tactics
therefore is not just a simple and sincere way to counter the Sena
offensive. It conceals a refusal to open up a whole history of communist
and working class resistance in Mumbai which used ‘similar’ tactics –
including by the Dalit Panthers. We are very good in upholding the
cultural heritage of the left movement, right from tamashas to nukkad nataks
to the poems and songs from IPTA. If these are not to become mere
cultural artefacts and floating images, we must uncover the history of
very real battles that have been fought, street by street, factory after
factory, chawl after chawl.
Perhaps lot of the questions about organization, agency, mass
mobilization, vanguard; about class struggle and identity/caste and so
on can be better addressed through an account of these struggles. Meena
Menon and Neera Adarkar’s work is highly commendable in this respect but
we need more work in this area which would directly tell us about
communist organizing rather than provide only an ‘ethnography of labour’
(One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices: The Millworkers of Girangaon, An Oral History,
Seagull, Kolkata, 2004). An elementary aspect of workers insurgency is
waiting to be written. Perhaps this will also help us expand our
approach to understanding revolutionary struggle beyond the Tebhagas and
Telanganas and the Naxalbaris – particularly, if one is really serious
about ‘the urban perspective’.
To start with, we might want to find more about Krishna Desai’s Lok
Seva Dal about which we are told by Prakash: “Desai founded the Lok Seva
Dal as much to counter the Sena’s ideological appeal as to confront its
physical force. With these twin purposes in mind, the Lok Seva Dal held
political-education classes as well as organized physical exercise
programs and games. Since the party leadership offered no support, Desai
raised money locally to pay for expenses” (p. 245). Now, are you about
to tell me that the “organised physical exercise programs and games”
reminds you of a RSS shakha?
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