In 2018, one of the defining moments in recent Indian politics occurred when the BJP managed to end the 25-year old rule of the Left-front government in Tripura. Post which, a statue of Vladimir Lenin, the Russian communist leader, which was erected in 2013 in the centre of College Square in the Belonia town was razed to the ground with a bulldozer following which, certain opposition parties spoke about a sense of disrespect for a rival ideology and one of its proponents that the BJP demonstrated.
But then, who was Vladimir Lenin? He was the one who supposedly took on a lot keener interest in active politics apart from just being a Marxist activist after the execution of his elder brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov. And why was Aleksandr Ulyanov hanged? For conspiring to assassinate Alexander III (hopefully the names would not confuse), the King of Russia who succeeded Alexander II, who was successfully assassinated by the revolutionary political organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will).
Ulyanov was a member of the Narodnaya Volya, who after successfully assassinating Alexander II, planned the assassination of Alexander III (known by the title of ‘Peacemaker’ for Russia’s non-participation in major wars during his reign), the bomb-maker of the bombs hurled at the Tsar, and was among the five people who the Tsar chose to not grant pardon for the crime. The reason to dwell upon Lenin’s brother to this extent is this – that Lenin swore to avenge the execution of his brother, who chose to spearhead the crime to assassinate the Tsar, and belonged to an organization which had in the past assassinated the previous Tsar.
From here, we fast forward to the late 1910s and early 1920s. After rejecting alliances with other leftist parties which differed slightly with his Bolshevik version of communism after the reign of Tsars was ended, he used the state machinery to unleash what came to be later known as the ‘Red Terror’, in which as per most reliable estimates, between 100,000-200,000 Russians fell victim to the oppression, an exercise which Grigory Zinoviev, a close aide of Lenin justified in the following words — To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.
It was the statue of such an oppressive leader that the Communist Party of India (CPI-M) had erected! Now how is the demolition of the statue of such a violent man to be categorized as intolerance? Would we similarly tolerate the erection of statues of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler by the same line of argument? The fact that the CPI was motivated to erect the statue of Vladimir Lenin should be indicative of the means that the party must believe in adopting to meet their ends, something that would be covered in a bit more detail a little later in the article. But for a while, we turn our attention back to Russia, where the leftist ideology had in the past managed to establish itself most firmly.
Part of the inner circle of Vladimir Lenin was Joseph Stalin, who as a youth, was the editor of Pravda, the newspaper of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (focus on the words Marxist, Social, Democratic, Labour) and raised funds for the Bolsheviks through conducting robberies and kidnappings, and extracting money for providing protection. While he was the person chiefly responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany, the man was far sinister than his mentor, Lenin.
By displacing his rivals within the party in the 1920s after the death of Lenin, Stalin established himself as a supreme leader of the Party. Around 1927, Stalin began to push for his policy of dis-empowering the affluent peasants to establish popularity among poor peasants in a move called ‘de-kulakisation’ to later collectivize agriculture. The de-kulakisation exercise led to few million among the several million Russians that saw themselves marched off to the Siberian Gulags, which were concentration camps where the workers worked themselves to death.
His policy of exterminating his rivals within the party, real or alleged, continued, and one of the casualties of it was Grigory Zinoviev, who was mentioned earlier in the article. This continued until the outbreak of WWII, an event that Prashant Bhushan described as the Stalinist Purge as he attempted to draw parallels to his and Yogendra Yadav’s ouster from the Aam Aadmi Party by Arvind Kejriwal. What Stalin achieved through de-kulakisation was control of the grain supply, which he could control at whim, and triggered a famine in Ukraine leading to between 3-5 million peasants dying of starvation (similar to what Winston Churchill effected in Bengal in 1943).
The total deaths that Stalin effected on the population that he governed far exceeded the number that Hitler is alleged to have caused to sections of the German population during the Holocaust. In India, the DMK party supremo, M Karunanidhi, saw some reason to name his son by the name Stalin – people the world over do not name their kids as Hitler but let’s not cast aspersions on the thought process of the father of the son in question.
Surely Stalin was evil, and surely it was his evil nature that allowed him to win for the Allies, the World War II against Germany (do not be fooled by American propaganda; without Russia’s participation in WWII, the allies did not have much of a chance against the Nazis, by 1945 by which time the A-bomb was used, Germany would have occupied the whole of Europe, but for Stalin’s Russia.).
But was Stalin the person responsible for maximum punitive deaths of the people he led? You wish he was, but unfortunately, he ranks second in the list of most brutal dictators. The top spot goes to Mao Zedong, and no marks for guessing – another Communist (read Leftist) dictator, who engineered China’s revolution. As part of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, which was Mao’s version of de-kulakisation (unsurprisingly, Mao had the support of Stalin), an even bigger number of peasants (reported to be around 50 million, because Mao got a larger population to experiment than Stalin) perished and the country experienced a similar fall-out (famine and all). Essentially, Mao did everything evil that Stalin did, he just did it at a scale several times that of Stalin.
Another god of the godless leftists, Fidel Castro, who died recently, did not go without his share of causing large-scale human casualties for ensuring his existence as a dictator. But this article is not intended to be an enlistment of global human massacres by Communist leaders, but to understand why leftism as an ideology in practice necessarily leads to such occurrences.
A common thread which you would notice in the behaviors of leftist mass-murderers mentioned above is their demonization of the affluent class. By assuming themselves as the voice of the poor, the downtrodden, and the ‘oppressed’, they seek to incite a larger mass-base to act against the rich, by perpetrating the idea that the rich have earned wealth, necessarily on the back of oppression of the poor. But because such persecution complex is easy to cultivate among masses, there will be several other politicians in the same polity who would want to attempt to use that methodology to rise to power.
Yes, read that – a communist leader’s ultimate goal will necessarily be to rise to a position of power, a position from where he will want to displace its existing occupiers, by being the Pied Piper of the masses through whom he would hope to do perpetrate his personal cause. A Communist leader who manages to reach the zenith of the power that he craves for, through using democracy in an undemocratic spirit or subverting democracy itself, will necessarily be the antithesis of what he would promise to be – he would be a highly oppressive, murderous dictator reigning over the very proletariat who he promises to emancipate from the clutches of the bourgeoisie, and the scenario that plays out when a leftist ideology-driven revolution strikes a polity is almost always if not always similar to what George Orwell would describe in ‘Animal Farm’ – All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Marxism, be it economic or cultural, from which various hues of leftism draw inspiration from, is a fundamentally flawed ideology. It is inherently against human social nature, and will always flop because of its idealistic views with no consideration to behavioral economics. But as has been proven, it is the perfect tool for someone who can be a charismatic orator, to grab power for themselves.
As to what implications this has for India? Here are the names of some of the Indian leftist parties:
- Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)
- Marxist-Leninist Committee
- Communist Party of India (Marxist)
- Communist Party of India (Maoist)
- Communist League of India (Marxist-Leninist)
There are several other groups, but look at the names that these parties draw inspiration from, and ask yourself whether such parties would then have the right intentions. Here are some of the noteworthy ‘achievements’ of communist governments in India that would make Lenin, Mao, and Stalin proud:
1. The Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979
3. Bijon Setu massacres of Anand Margi monks in 1982
These are a few of the instances through which we can conclude that the leftist liberal politicians, activists, and ideologues are only liberal as long as their supposed liberal opinions are not contradicted. If you counter or oppose the subjective opinion of a leftist liberal, you could expect reactions from the benign dismissal of your opinion and ad hominem attacks to the scarier ones where you could end up paying with your life in a gruesome manner. While dealing with the problems that leftism brings in its wake is a very complicated issue, both on a technical front and on a practical level, something that I hope to write upon on this forum in the near future, what this article seeks to do is to expose the hypocrisy of leftist liberals, although for now, only in a superficial manner. More will follow in due course.