Sitaram’s Weapon

Sudhanva Deshpande

In the mid-1980s, as the Sangh Parivar started ratcheting up the communal temperature in India on the issue of Ram Janmabhoomi, many young people, like myself, were perplexed. 

How could educated adults fall for such an illogical argument that mocked rationality? After all, surely it could hardly be contested that Lord Ram was a mythological, not historical figure, and the Ramayana the product of centuries of accreted storytelling genius. For the believer, Lord Ram was an ideal to aspire to in the conduct of their own life, a figure that inspired reverence and piety, a figure that represented the accumulated wisdom and sense of morality of the Indian people. No historical evidence of any credibility had been put forward by anyone that pinned the identity of this mythological figure on any single person who could have been shown to have lived.

How, then, could the Sangh Parivar claim that they knew the exact spot where Lord Ram was born? Moreover, the archeological evidence too did not conclusively show that the base of the Babri Masjid contained the remains of an ancient Hindu temple, much less a temple marking the birthplace of Lord Ram. It all sounded absurd.

And yet, there it was – the Sangh Parivar were riding the Ram Janmabhoomi chariot to regain their footing in Indian politics after their worst-ever performance in the Lok Sabha elections, and it was clear that their rhetoric was gaining increasing traction. Even more alarmingly, the chariot was leaving a trail of destruction and blood in its wake, and the Congress, then in power at the Centre, was increasingly compromising with communalism of both the Hindu and Muslim variety.

I was in college in the mid to late 1980s, and was trying to make sense of the world I found myself in. I was pursuing a degree in modern Indian history, and while I had read books on the emergence of communalism as a political force in the colonial period, most of those analyses seemed to implicitly or explicitly culminate in the Partition. And while communal violence had punctuated the growing up years of my generation, I, like many others, saw communalism as a vestige of the past, that will gradually fade away as we got rid of poverty and lack of education.

The late 1980s were, therefore, a confusing time for us. Up until that time, communalism was combatted by appeals to brotherhood, decency and humanism. It was the unstated, implicit premise of such appeals that communal disturbances, when they occurred, were either because people were misled by vested interests, or because some economic friction or contradiction lay beneath. Somehow, these assumptions did not square with the kind of communalism we were faced with now. It appeared that communalism had moved from being a cottage industry to becoming a vast, decentralized but disaggregated, industrial-scale operation. 

What was rising up before our eyes was clearly not a vestige of the past, but a new phenomenon that, even as it appealed to history and utilized older fault lines, was indisputably modern. Suddenly, new words and phrases began circulating. Hindutva was one, as was Hindu Rashtra. What were these, and how had they captured the minds and emotions of so many in what appeared a very short time?

Two books helped me begin to understand what was unfolding around me. Both were published in 1993, right after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the horrific communal violence that followed. One was Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, a brief, 116-page tract jointly authored by Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen on the RSS and the VHP and the conglomeration of organisations around them. The authors were professional academics teaching history and literature, and had used their expertise to produce a text based as much on textual scholarship as fieldwork in a style that was free of jargon, accessible to the layperson. As I read this book, the architecture of the organizational structure of the Sangh Parivar began to become clear to me.

The other book that was formative in my understanding of the Hindu Right was Sitaram Yechury’s What is this Hindu Rashtra?: On Golwalkar’s Fascistic Ideology and the Saffron Brigade’s Practice. This was an even briefer text, barely 25 pages long. The book pulled no punches. It was a frontal attack on the ideology of Hindutva. It was bold, unafraid, uncompromising. It named the most revered RSS leader in the subtitle itself, and showed his ideology to be fascistic by, among other things, showing how much he admired Adolf Hitler and the idea of the ‘final solution’.

Comrade Sitaram’s booklet was a shot of adrenalin in our veins. We had a text that we could read, study, share, and use directly in our confrontations with Sangh Parivar zealots on college and university campuses as well as in bastis and on the streets. It energized the anti-communal struggle. It explained the Indian version of fascist vocabulary to us, and gave us a vocabulary to counter it. An entire generation joined the fight, and each one of us was influenced, whether we knew it or not, by Comrade Sitaram’s intervention. The ideas contained in that booklet spread far beyond its direct readers. They became the common sense of the anti-communal struggle. That little booklet was a weapon.

” In addition to his charm, his sense of humour, his quick wit, it was his defence of the idea of India that won him admirers far beyond the political influence of the Left movement.”

Comrade Sitaram was an eloquent speaker and writer, and he could discuss nearly every topic under the sun, but his interventions against communalism and for a secular and inclusive India are among his most influential. In addition to his charm, his sense of humour, his quick wit, it was his defence of the idea of India that won him admirers far beyond the political influence of the Left movement.

When Prakash Karat asked me to join LeftWord Books when it was being set up in 1998, I was excited to learn that among the people I was to interact with included Comrade Sitaram, since he was one of the founding directors of Naya Rasta Publishers Pvt. Ltd., the company that owns the LeftWord Books imprint. He was an active participant in the meetings of the Editorial Advisory Board, which included, apart from Prakash and Sitaram, N. Ram, Prabhat Patnaik, Indira Chandrasekhar, Aijaz Ahmad, V.K. Ramachandran and P. Govinda Pillai. Comrade Sitaram would read proposals and comment on them; he would propose ideas for new projects we could pursue; he would give feedback on books we published. Above all, his presence meant that the meetings would be full of humour, good cheer and optimism.

Sadly for us, he stepped down from being a director of the company after he became a member of parliament. This was because he himself had raised the issue of conflict of interest when parliamentarians owned or led private companies. This was particularly galling, he argued, if they also wormed their way into parliamentary committees that oversaw the sectors that overlapped with their business interests, as Vijay Mallya had done. Even though Naya Rasta Publishers was minuscule as compared to giant conglomerates that operated across sectors, it was for Comrade Sitaram a matter of principle that as a parliamentarian he should not be seen as having private business interests, even though he had never been paid by the company nor derived any pecuniary advantage from it.

For years, along with my co-editor at LeftWord Books, Vijay Prashad, I had been asking Comrade Sitaram to write a book for us. He would smile and promise that he would, soon. We knew as well as he that this was a false promise, based on the unreal hope that he would get a little bit of leisure to write. As he crossed the halfway mark of his final term as the General Secretary of the CPI(M), I once again broached the topic with him. We wanted him to revisit that important early booklet, What is this Hindu Rashtra?, and update it for our times, taking into account the rise of Narendra Modi and the ascension of the RSS and the BJP to a dominant position in Indian politics. We also wanted him to reflect on the relationship of the liberal centre with the Hindu Right.

On his desk, after his death, we found that Comrade Sitaram had several LeftWord titles that he had been reading. We had hoped that apart from writing for us, he would also get a little more time to advise us on our publishing programme, particularly on our new Hindi imprint, Vaam Prakashan.

His untimely death has made that impossible. It is a loss not so much for LeftWord Books as for the entire generation of young radicals, who are fighting to build a more humane world. Without a doubt, Comrade Sitaram’s reflections on the nature of contemporary communalism would have energised them just as that earlier booklet had done in its time.

What we are going to do, therefore, is to put together his most important writings on communalism and bring out a volume sometime early next year. It can never replace what he would have written, but who can argue with death?

– Sudhanva Deshpande is Managing Editor, LeftWord Books. He is also an actor and director with Jana Natya Manch, and the author of Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi.