Communist bigwigs like Sitaram Yechury were quick to jump to the defence of Newsclick, a digital website in India financed by Red China to spread anti-India propaganda. It was recently raided and shut down by the NIA, and its chief operators were taken into custody.
The other organisation that was quick off the mark to the same end was Congress, its leader Rahul Gandhi and the eloquent ex-diplomat Shashi Tharoor. They took to X, formerly known as Twitter, with alacrity. It is rumoured that both the CPI/CPM and the Congress are also financed by the Chinese now that the Soviets are out of business. And pleasing one’s benefactors is mandatory.
Both tried to paint the sedition of Newsclick in terms of an attack on press freedom, and freedom of expression and called it the action of an undeclared emergency by the ruling dispensation. Various Left-leaning journalists decided to sit in the decrepit Press Club yard in New Delhi on plastic chairs in silent protest.
In a series of efforts, national and international, to destabilise the NDA government and get rid of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, another programme is in the works. It is designed to stir the caste cauldron in a manner not seen since the Mandal Commission Report was released by an opportunist VP Singh 30 years ago. Fiery protests erupted then, soon after, and made short work of VP Singh’s prime ministership. But the new effort has learned nothing from that history. If it backfires, the Hindu voter could cling more desperately to the BJP for faith and succour.
Nevertheless, three decades later, Nitish Kumar hanging on to his chief ministership by his fingernails has released a caste census for Bihar. This is after many failed initiatives such as his leaky and farcical attempts at prohibition to please the female voter. Congress-ruled Karnataka may well be next to release a caste census that will annoy both the Vokkaligas and the Lingayats. Do they understand the implications?
This follows on from virulent attacks on Sanatan Dharma by MK Stalin’s son Udhayanidhi Stalin, and several other DMK ministers. The chief minister of Tamil Nadu meanwhile provides full support to the process. All of it is meant to attack the monolithic approach to the Hindu vote bank by the BJP. This has resulted in most Hindus voting for the BJP in 2014 and 2019. The looming election of 2024 is seen as a do-or-die contest by the Opposition alliance I.N.D.I.A.
The Ayodhya Ram Temple to be inaugurated in January 2024 is also deeply worrying for the Opposition. So is the possibility of a Uniform Civil Code and One Nation One Vote, all seen to favour the ruling NDA, if implemented.
So now, the idea is to shatter the perception of a unified Hindu vote bank into many caste shards. Rahul Gandhi is eager to woo the OBC and Dalit/Mahadalit sections, which constitute some two-thirds of the total in most states. This is apparently up from the Mandal Commission’s 52 per cent. He has coined a new slogan – Jitna Abadi, Utna Huq in more or less record time.
His haste has quite ignored his, and indeed most of the Opposition’s assiduous wooing of the Muslim minority vote since the very beginning. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quick to point this out and wondered what was to become of the Muslims under the Opposition rule. This, even as he promised to look after them as part of his Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas umbrella.
Is I.N.D.I.A abandoning the maximum of 17 per cent of Muslims nationally, in favour of the 66 per cent of Hindus under the various backward castes? Is the desire to wrest them away, particularly the Mahadalits who have been voting en masse for the BJP, now overwhelming? Or do they believe the Muslims have nowhere else to go anyway?
Can they possibly succeed? What will their credibility be if they fail, given their poor grassroots organisation, and not enough time left to make the new pitch stick? Could it all go horribly wrong, as it did for VP Singh by stirring up the aspirations of the neglected, without any of them being met?
It is true that reservations have only worked fitfully in all the years they have been used, with the creamy layer within the caste groups garnering the benefits. The concept of any of it reaching the last man has been no more than theoretically possible, so far.
Also, stirring up the demand for reservations may mean reservations for too many for any of it to be meaningful. Can reservations already given to some be withdrawn in favour of others? Cutting into reservation blocks — as is the demand from the Congress and others in the Women’s Reservation Bill just passed after 27 years of wrangling and non-starter attempts — could leave all sides disgruntled.
This entire caste census and its aftermath, reservations within reservations like so many Matrushka Dolls, could be the opening of a Pandora’s Box. Many analysts have begun to point this out.
The Communists have little to lose. They only control Kerala now and seem in no danger of losing it. So, taking a Trotskyist line on the means justified by the intended ends suits them. The Congress is taking a bigger and wilder gamble and could come unstuck. The TMC is not in favour of this caste ploy because it is well entrenched with the Muslim minority in West Bengal. The DMK is strong in Tamil Nadu and has cast the Sanatan Dharma calumny as a contribution to the I.N.D.I alliance for what it is worth, and a sneer at the Cow Belt North. It does not have ambitions outside the state and is not receiving any criticism over this overt attack against high-caste Hindus from its chief rival — the AIADMK. Besides the Stalins, others in DMK are quite largely Christian.
Leon Trotsky was the chief theorist of the early Russian Revolution known for his seeming ideological flexibility. After the early demise of Lenin soon after the Communists came to power, the pragmatic Joseph Stalin, from peasant and non-intellectual stock, had no use for Trotsky’s sophistry. Trotsky fled to Mexico fearing for his life, but Stalin’s goons found him there and killed him.
The Indian Communists practice a form of Trotskyism all the time, speaking against caste and religion when it suits their objective and the opposite at a time like this. They feel safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to be assassinated here in India. So why not exploit the benefits of democracy by calling it the worst kind of fascism? And why not take from the Chinese when they offer it? Trotsky once said, to paraphrase the cynicism of his thinking, lay out the various lies in front of me and I will pick out the truth from amongst them. His exact quote was “Tell me anyway- maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies”.
Sitaram Yechury, with the most Hindu of names, a Brahmin as it happens, is not only a survivor but a good student of Leon Trotsky.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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