The curious case of Indian marxists

For the past few days, there has been pandemonium in the country over the recently passed citizenship amendment bill. The much talked about bill gives citizenship right to the persecuted minorities of the three neighbouring countries i.e Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. The reason given for passing such an act is that these countries are theocratic states and discriminate their citizens on the basis of religion. After the bill became an Act, there has been widespread uproar and protests all over the country. The one major outcome of this protest has been led by the left coterie and the liberal cabal which has hijacked these protests and is trying to reclaim some clout in an otherwise politically obliterated scenario. The coterie along with their peers in the media have been trying to find their heroes and sheroes out of these protests. There have been many such instances such as Ladeeda and Ayesha Renna of Jamia fame. But the forerunner who has emerged out of this quest for finding a hero has been Kanhaiya Kumar. The 33-year-old student leader who recently lost Loksabha elections to Giriraj Singh from Begusaria by a margin of 4.17 lakh votes is again coming of age. There’s a covert attempt to relaunch Kanhaiya in the garb of these protests. The major reason for this is to garner the clout which Kanhaiya has among the certain elite bourgeois leftist student community. There have been reinvigorated attempts to portray this as students vs Modi fight along with an attempt to resurrect the political career of Kanhaiya Kumar. It is extremely agonizing to see someone who has been accused and punished for harassing a girl during his time at JNU. The administration fined the infamous Kanhaiya Kumar and gave him a stern warning for his inappropriate behaviour. The girl stated that the alleged molestation happened when the girl stopped the “great student leader” from urinating in public.

It is extremely hypocritical to see feminists who otherwise claim to fight for women rights see their idol in Kanhaiya Kumar. It is equally paradoxical that the leftists who claim to espouse the ideology of Marx are acting as a conduit of the Islamist extremists. The movement that is otherwise seen as a secular movement to protect the cardinal principles and values of the constitution is nothing short of an Islamist extremist resurgence. This has been quite evident from the slogans which are raised at the protests day in and out. The graffiti’s, the speeches, the leaders, the pitch and tone all point towards this fact. The Islamist tinge is quite conspicuous in an otherwise portrayed secular demonstration. “Religion is the opium of the people” is one of the most frequently paraphrased statements of German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. It was translated from the German original, “Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes” and is often rendered as “religion… is the opiate of the masses.” But it is amusing to see such a bond between the Islamists and the leftists who share no affinity in any other corner of the world. The left seems to have forgotten the basic tenets of their idol and see secularism as a one-way street. This has been confirmed when Shehla Rashid the Marxist leader from JNU tweeted:

https://twitter.com/Shehla_Rashid/status/1211522275750473729

This tweet was in response to Dr Tharoor’s tweet which criticized both Hindutva and Islamist extremism:

Antonio Gramsci a Neo Marxist distinguished between traditional and organic intellectuals. The traditional intelligentsia saw itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society. For Gramsci, it was the duty of organic intellectuals to speak to the obscured precepts of folk wisdom, or common sense (senso comune), of their respective politic spheres. These intellectuals would represent excluded social groups of a society, what Gramsci referred to as the subaltern. Kanhaiya Kumar, Arundhati Roy and her ilks don’t fit into this category of ‘organic intellectuals’ as described by Gramsci. The Marxists seem to have forgotten their core tenets and are hell-bent to change and mould Marxism to suit their own vested interests in the political discourse.