Communication

Kuldeep Kumar’s uncharitable and sweeping remarks in his article ‘Divisive and Fractured’ (Seminar 539, July 2004) on Dr. Rammanohar Lohia and the ideological strand he represents prompts me to register the following comments. Before doing that let me briefly recapture the central arguments of Kuldeep Kumar, as I perceive them.

Briefly stated, Kumar raises three types of objections against the kind of politics that the socialists pursued in India. The first is that the socialists in India, given their deep and ideologically embedded hostility towards the Congress, have often entered into alliances that have proved to be ideologically regressive and politically disastrous. George Fernandes’ association with the BJP and the supposed vulnerability of the socialists in general towards Hindutva, provide Kuldeep with handy illustrations to highlight the inbuilt contradictions of Indian socialism. Second, socialists in India, have amply demonstrated their personality-centred political endeavours and highly disorganized way of functioning. This, to him, is an indicator of the ideologically fuzzy ways in which the socialists have behaved in Indian politics. In the third place, he observes that owing to the overemphasis by the Indian socialists on caste, their politics remains basically casteist in nature. Indian socialists, in this view, are always caught up in the contradiction between pursuing politics on caste lines and forging an ideological resistance to it. Finally, to Kuldeep Kumar, all the problems and contradictions of socialist politics in India could be traced back to its most important ideologue, Rammanohar Lohia who, according to him, showed subtle signs of fascination for racism.

1. At the outset, Kuldeep’s charge that Lohia’s intellectual attitude smacks of an admiration for racism looks brazen and outrageous. He takes a passage from Lohia’s introduction to ‘Marx, Gandhi and Socialism’ and asks us to re-read it by altering the word Hindu in place of Black and Muslim in place of White. Kuldeep’s argument is that by these alterations the passage reads like an extract from a RSS pamphlet. However, he refuses to recognize the simple fact that any text if removed from its context can invoke different meanings, depending upon who reads it and in what context. Lohia is no exception. Needless to say that Lohia’s introduction to ‘Marx, Gandhi and Socialism’ (from which Kuldeep takes his passage) is written in the postcolonial context, during the period in which American economists used their alarming population theories to frighten us.

2. Kuldeep Kumar’s charge that while in Germany Lohia developed admiration for Hitler and Nazism is without any evidence. On the other hand, there is counter evidence available to argue that Lohia’s concern for democracy and democratic rights of the people got strengthened due to his stay in Germany in the wake of the rise of Hitler to political prominence. Evidently Lohia was closely associated with radical socialist groups in Germany with whom he had occasion to exchange his views. Consequently, Lohia returned to India with an extremely nuanced notion of nationalism in which the ideas of freedom, justice and rights occupied a prime place. Besides, one can cite innumerable passages from the vast corpus of Lohia’s writings that are extremely critical of all forms of fascism and authoritarianism. Lohia’s forthright opposition to passports and visas and his deliberate violation of rules concerning them clearly reveals that he never upheld any rigid and militant version of nationalism. I wonder how Kuldeep Kumar fails to recognize this immensely significant aspect of Lohia’s thought.

3. Kuldeep Kumar’s focus on non-Congressism or anti-Congressism as the central idea of Lohia’s socialist politics also appears misplaced. Non-Congressism was an electoral political strategy that Lohia tried to develop in the context of the fifties and sixties vis-à-vis Congress dominance. It was never a substantive normative agenda of socialist politics. Kuldeep Kumar confuses strategy for a substantive ideological stance. Similarly his attack on Lohia for encouraging caste politics is unwarranted. Lohia was well aware that caste is not an exclusively Indian phenomenon. He repeatedly argued that caste, as a social system, is a South Asian phenomenon and held that no transformative politics can ignore caste. Incidentally, Lohia is one of those few thinkers in India who paid enormous attention to the question of caste and provided a normative response to it. Quite significantly, academic scholarship in India has, in recent times, begun to pay attention to some of the insightful reflections of Lohia on the issue of caste and its impact on Indian politics. Due to the ideological stance that the socialists took on the question of caste some of the leaders that socialist politics threw up are not only caste but mass leaders.

4. Kuldeep Kumar’s attempt to downgrade Indian socialism and highlight its contradictions by focusing on George Fernandes as an illustration is not convincing. The vulnerability of some of the erstwhile socialists towards Hindutva cannot be straitjacketed as failure of the ideology. If George Fernandes is one instance of soft-peddling Hindutva, there are other well-meaning ‘former’ socialists (who may not be at the centre-stage of Indian politics today) who continue their silent battle against the all-encompassing power of communalism. Socialists can be accused of being anarchic and having highly disorganized ways of doing things. However, it would be entirely unfair to characterize them as communalist or soft Hindutvavadis.

The personal failure of a few leaders need not necessarily mean the failure of the ideology that they are supposed to have represented. If Lohia is to be accused for what the socialists are doing today, then by the same logic Gandhi or Nehru could be accused for the misdeeds of today’s Congressmen.

The problem here is not that Lohia has been criticized, for no one is above criticism. The painful and disheartening fact is that Lohia has been criticized for matters which neither he nor his ideas are responsible. If such criticism were to be made against Nehru or Ambedkar, it would meet with screaming opposition. With Lohia, people tend to think that they can make any comment and get away with it.

Rajaram Tolpady

Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Delhi