The Hindu : In praise of the Mohit Sen tradition

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, May 06, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

In praise of the Mohit Sen tradition

By Harish Khare

NEW DELHI MAY 5. Mohit Sen rang up about a month ago. He wanted to know how soon was I going to review his autobiography, "A traveller and the road: the journey of an Indian communist". I told him that I had just begun reading the book and hoped that by the time I was finished I would be sufficiently inspired to do a critique. He urged me to feel "inspired" and, then, added: "Oh, please, do be trenchant and fair, just the kind of thing you wrote on Bishen Tandon's book."

That summed up Mohit Sen, a public man, working within the discipline of a communist party, yet always confident of his ideas and his understanding of events and history.

More than a confidence in his ideas, he was always willing to pit them against yours. The last major argument I had with him was on the state of the Congress and the nature of its leadership. We agreed on the usefulness of the Congress but disagreed on the leadership issue.

Mohit Sen was one of those rare (and almost vanished breed) individuals in our public life who had the gift, training, education and skills to think about grand national issues yet were not contemptuous of the political class or the political processes. He had the correct temperament to engage with political leaders, willing to listen and ever eager to convert his interlocutor to his passion of the moment.

A life-long communist, Mohit Sen was also a quasi-Congressman. Though he never joined the Congress, he had as much (and probably more) influence with the Congress leaders as he had within his own nominal party. But he never made the mistake of joining the Congress; he knew the party had an institutional disdain for men of ideas. Had he ever joined the Congress, he would have been reduced to an AICC spear-carrier without any clout.

Nonetheless, he was an admirer of Indira Gandhi. As long as he was part of the CPI, he passionately argued for close ties between the Congress and the communists, as the only bulwark against the international imperialism and its local allies.

After the Bangladesh war, admiration for Indira Gandhi became more and more pronounced, even to such an extent that Mohit Sen was willing to disagree with the commissars within the communist hierarchy. And, when the Emergency came, he was willing to understand and even appreciate Indira Gandhi's reasons for that inelegant break with the democratic edifice.

It was in the last few years of his life that Mohit Sen liberated himself from the bondage of party labels, and was enjoying his stature as an elder "public intellectual". And he was the compete anti-thesis to the current national mood of flippant ahistoricism.

As a trained Marxist, he was deeply conscious of the past and its triumphs and tragedies; for him, the present could not be understood without an understanding of the past.

His death would not cause, to use the traditional cliche, any "void" in the political world, but his departure is a definite loss to all those who believe that there can be no politics without ideas. We are all suspicious of men with ideas; the preference is for conformism. In a country of one billion people, we unfortunately cannot even boast of 10 Mohit Sens. Let us hope the Mohit Sen tradition survives Mohit Sen.

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