The role of the Left in India is not necessarily to capture power, but to act as a pressure group against the anti-people policies of those in power, Sashi Kumar, mediaperson and the chairman of Asian College of Journalism, has said.
“If there has been pro-people policies bearing a democratic mark and the stamp of welfarism, they all are the results of the outside pressure from the Left,” he said, inaugurating the delegate meet of the 33rd State conference of the Students Federation of India here on Friday.
Addressing the student delegates, he said a student forum such as the SFI should discuss the relevance of Marxist principles and contextualise it.
“Today we have a lot of communists who do not know Marxism. You can be a Marxist without being communist but you cannot be a true communist unless you are a Marxist,” he said.
Undeclared Emergency
Applauding the LDF government’s decision to legitimise politics in all colleges, he said India was currently under an undeclared Emergency with the same sense of fear and trepidation looming large.
“Of late, there has been a tendency to depoliticise our campuses and this is not just an attack on democracy. By removing politics from campuses they are creating space for an ideology against progressivism, they are asking the students to go back to an obscurantist philosophy.”
He said there had also been an effort to relegate socialism as something obsolete, “but as Engels put it, it is either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism. And if you look around now you can see socialism under attack and the rise of barbarism. We see people being killed by lynch mobs for what they eat, how they look and what religion they profess. Long after Engels made this proposition we are seeing this happening. So the role of a student organisation as a thinking, critical, and dynamic force is all the more relevant”.
Mr. Kumar said though Indian democracy had never been perfect, today it was far less perfect than it was ever before. “If the BJP, one main political party of this country, is using religion to to mobilise public opinion against the minority, Congress, the other, is only different in terms of degree. When you scratch the skin of the Congress you find soft saffron, the very reason why we had to witness this terrible, almost comic situation of a former president of the country standing at attention while an RSS march-past goes by and its flag is hoisted,” he said.
“The relevance of the situation is that the RSS has never accepted the tricolour as the national flag of this country. The BJP is not just an insult to modernity, progressivism or democracy. First and foremost it is an insult to Hinduvism, it has destroyed the value, the philosophy, the profundity of the religion,” Mr. Kumar said.
