[The trend was initiated by India
By Hari Kumar
The trend
was initiated by India
It was an
unusually high number of oaths in a language hardly known by most Indians, let
alone used in daily life, aside from the work of Sanskrit scholars. Just over
14,000 people recorded Sanskrit as their mother tongue in the 2001 census,
though the number more than tripled in 2011, to almost 50,000.
But it’s a language that is at
the root of Hindu culture, the language of its ancient texts, including the
Bhagavad Gita, and aligned with the muscular religious and cultural nationalism
that the B.J.P. espouses.
In its election manifesto, the B.J.P. referenced the
language obliquely, referring to “Indian languages” as “repositories of our
rich literature, history, culture, art and scientific achievements.”
Though
largely unused, Sanskrit is included in India
“This
is a symbolic act by the B.J.P. to identify themselves with Hindutva,” or
Hindu nationalism, said Ramesh Bhardwaj, the head of the Sanskrit department at
the University of Delhi Varanasi
Ramesh Pandey,
the head of research and publication at a Sanskrit university in Delhi, said
that he was heartened by the oath-taking gesture, and that Sanskrit’s further
use would “halt moral degradation” in the country. He said it was not the
language of Hindu priests, but rather “the language of Indian-ness.”
[This dogmatic strain within the party, obsessed with notions of purity and fearful of ideological dilution, meant the Communists lost the chance to make a greater national imprint through governance. In 2011, the historian Ramachandra Guha criticized the decision in a debate with the Communist supremo Prakash Karat, played out in the pages of The Caravan, a magazine in New Delhi CPI (M) does not join coalitions where it is not Big Brother — which is why it stayed away from multiparty governments at the Centre in 1996 and 2004. The decision, both times, cost the party, and perhaps cost the people of India
By Vaibhav Vats
One afternoon in April in Baruipur, a rural
expanse on the edge of Kolkata, Sujan Chakraborty, a leader of the Communist
Party of India (Marxist), presided over a meeting with party workers before he
set out to campaign on foot, days before the parliamentary election vote was
held there.
Mr.
Chakraborty was the Communist Party’s candidate from Kolkata’s Jadavpur
constituency, and as campaigning entered its last weeks, Mr. Chakraborty was
making a last push against his main rival, Sugata Bose of the Trinamool
Congress party, which is in power in the state.
At the
meeting, a short, stocky man -— one of Mr. Chakraborty’s colleagues -— launched
into sharp attacks against the Trinamool Congress party. But his fiery speech
drew little response from the squatting workers, and his attempt to rouse
spirits was failing. Sitting in a plastic chair, Mr. Chakraborty quietly
observed the meeting.
Later, as
we traveled in a car, Mr. Chakraborty said that the Communist Party was on the
verge of a resurgence in the national elections. The graffiti on Baruipur’s
walls suggested otherwise: The three-colored flower, the symbol of the
Trinamool Congress party, was everywhere, while the hammer and sickle of the
Communists appeared only occasionally.
It was
inconceivable that Mr. Chakraborty had not taken note of this himself, an
ominous sign of things to come, but he put on a brave face. “We will do very
well in the national elections,” he said. Pressed to specify how many seats the
Communists expected to win, Mr. Chakraborty evaded the question. “I would not
like to go into numbers,” he said.
Mr.
Chakraborty lost the election to Mr. Bose by 125,203 votes. His Communist
Party, which had governed West
Bengal for 34 years, was
decimated in the state and reduced to just two seats out of a total of 42. The
news from the rest of the country was of no consolation, either: The Communists
won nine seats in all, their worst performance in decades.
It was a
precipitous decline for a party that had garnered 60 seats, while leading a
front including smaller leftist parties, in 2004. But a series of mistakes over
the past decade have meant that India
In 2004,
the Communists stayed out of the Congress-led coalition government in New Delhi
This
dogmatic strain within the party, obsessed with notions of purity and fearful
of ideological dilution, meant the Communists lost the chance to make a greater
national imprint through governance. In 2011, the historian Ramachandra Guha criticized the decision in a debate with the
Communist supremo Prakash Karat, played out in the pages of The Caravan, a
magazine in New Delhi CPI (M) does not join coalitions where it is not Big Brother
—— which is why it stayed away from multiparty governments at the Centre in
1996 and 2004. The decision, both times, cost the party, and perhaps cost the
people of India
While the
party held firm to a non-pragmatic position at the national level, in the
states the Communists were mired in ideological confusion. In 2006, after
leading a Communist-led coalition to power for the seventh successive time in West Bengal ,
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee decided to reverse the course set by his
party for the previous three decades.
When Mr.
Bhattacharjee was re-elected in 2006, Kolkata, a once-thriving metropolis, had
fallen into steady decline and felt removed from the energy and ambition of
cities such as Bangalore New
Delhi West Bengal ,
one of India
In a break
from Communist tradition, Mr. Bhattacharjee decided to aggressively woo back
capital to the state in an attempt to resurrect its ailing economy. But reports
of land grabbing by the government led to the 2007 incident at
Nandigram, a village in West
Bengal , where 14 people were
killed and dozens injured in a police shootout as they resisted the handover of
their farmland to an industrial conglomerate. The killings galvanized the
opposition Trinamool Congress party, which stormed to power in the state in
2011, and dealt a grievous blow to the Communists, previously seen as caring
for the poor and disenfranchised. It is a blow from which the Communists have
yet to recover.
After
humiliation in 2014, the Communists’ road to resurgence faces two major
obstacles: a more competitive political landscape and the larger ideological
churn in Indian politics reflecting the shifting desires of the country’s
populace.
Their
abysmal performance in West
Bengal makes returning to power
in the state in 2016, when the next local elections are scheduled, all the more
arduous. After the lost opportunity of 2004, the Communists’ ambitions of
making an impression at the national level are now more difficult to realize
than ever. The rise of fresh entrants such as the Aam Aadmi Party, which seek
to occupy the same space as the Communists while being less ideologically
rigid, poses a new challenge.
Meanwhile,
in a country in the throes of aspiration and quest for material betterment, the
Communists’ uncritical dedication to Marxist tenets place it ever more firmly
in the past. “Being Communist in the 21st-century India
Finally,
there is the specter of a party being hollowed out from the ground up. Much
like the Congress party, leaders lacking a mass base populate the top rung of
the Communists. Led by the British-educated Mr. Karat, the male-dominated
politburo consists of a number of leaders well versed in the theories of the
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but singularly incapable of connecting with
voters and winning seats.
Since the
results of the national election were declared in mid-May, much attention has
been paid to the fall of the Congress party’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. But the
results are also a perilous omen for the Communists.
Though they
remain in government in Tripura, one of India West Bengal means that
the Communists no longer have a significant national voice. It raises the
possibility that the Communists, once a permanent fixture in the country’s
political landscape, may now forever become marginal players in Indian politics.
