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Kanhaiya Kumar "represents" Communists' Aryan Jatitva, not Dalits or Muslims

Counterview Desk
With just two days to go for polls (April 29), controversial Communist candidate from Begusarai, Kanhaiya Kumar, has come in for virulent attack from a section of the Left-of-the-centre ideologues, saying, he represents "caste arrogance" of India's organised Left, which is allegedly "neither free from the Aryan Jatitva nor it has understood Aryan Jatitva as the supremacist ideology that defines Indian fascism."
Mathew Kuriakose, a Kerala-based political scientist in a recent article, which has been published in few of the well-known sites owned by those dubbed as Left-liberals, has said that Kumar was "an average student activist from the brutally oppressive Bhumihar Brahmin caste", but is now sought to be projected as "the Grand Hero of Indian peoples."
"What is Kanhaiya compared to Chandrashekhar Azad who had successfully taken the anti-fascist fight to fascist citadels of Hindi heartless lands and made supreme sacrifices for mobilizing the Bahujans against BJP? But one hardly see any Leftist or liberal rooting for the Azad, the Proud Chamar!", says Kuriakose.

Excerpts:

Race denial in America and caste denial in India have been exercised through the supremacist group’s pretension of non-knowledge. Raise race to a White American or caste to an Indian Savarna, they immediately become innocent kids who do not know anything about themselves and the society in which they live in. This often has been wrongly described as ‘race blindness’ or ‘caste blindness’ by various scholars. Wrong because there is nothing ‘blind’ about it.
Rather, it is a conscious, collective enacting of a purely ideological move, to be repeated and reproduced ad verbatim by most members of the supremacist group, cutting across ideological lines. These are the usual one-liners of the supremacists: “I never experienced caste/race”; “Caste/race is a thing of past, isn’t it?”; “I have a Dalit/Black friend”; “its capitalism, not race/caste, stupid”.
While supremacism is constitutive of all fascist ideologies, all supremacist ideologies do not necessarily lead to fascism. Fascism takes some supremacist beliefs too seriously and attempts to forcibly create a new social and political order, to actualize the supremacist vision, which would obviously not correspond to the material reality.
In other words, fascism is an ideology of imagined group superiority, to be implemented by force, with enormous mass mobilization against the perceived inferiors. Such imagined group superiority may have no material basis; rather all material pointers may point against the imagination. Still, the group may hold onto their beliefs and attempt to mold the material conditions forcefully to prove their superiority.
That’s why fascism is against both capitalism and socialism, because it attempts to create a social and economic order based on a belief that has no material basis. Fascism is the most anti-materialist ideology, and any attempt to materialize it would require the physical destruction of the designated enemy-inferior.
Aryan Jatitva is the supremacist ideology that defines Indian fascism. White Aryanism was the supremacist ideology that characterized the Nazi Germany, which also attempted a quick construction of a modern caste system in Germany/Europe, which took thousands of years in India, by designing the Jew as the constitutive figure of Untouchable. Aryan Jatitva of Indian fascism is not content with the existing ‘Hindu’ Untouchables, they want to convert Muslim as the constitutive figure of Untouchable.

Supremacism of Indian Left

The Indian Left is neither free from the Aryan Jatitva nor it has understood Aryan Jatitva as the supremacist ideology that defines Indian fascism. Therefore they are unable to see the untouchablisation of the Muslims. Consciously or not, they propagate a Leftist Aryan Jatitva, wherein the Upper Caste comrades are considered superior and the Left understanding of the Indian situation as far better, against all evidence out there.
Indian Left, as it ducks and crawls now, is a spent force. Indian Leftists have not yet developed a decent critique of the Indian state and society, nor done a single significant class analysis of the ruling classes in India, and nowhere close to understanding caste too. Leftists have miserably failed to get close to Dalits and Muslims in opposing Indian fascism, the primary victims of Indian fascism (Leftists are still debating whether it is fascism, semi-fascism or neo-fascism).
The link that Leftists see between neoliberalism and fascism is the most misleading; neoliberalism has never been successfully implemented in India, despite the rhetoric, rather, India continues to be a wefareist economy, unequally in different regions though weakened.
It is the Leftists who mislead the whole country that fascism is a ploy of capitalists to divert attention from real issues; the reality is that fascism has almost ruined capitalist development in the country, and capitalists too have been the victims of fascist crimes, Indian economy is being dismantled sector by sector; individual (quasi)capitalists may have benefitted from Modi here and there, but capitalists as a class, especially the national bourgeoisie, are at the receiving end of fascist rule.
The Indian Left does not even represent ‘peoples’ interest’; it is limited to a few regions and the struggles of the proletarian and farmer aristocracy or even the concerns of the progressive sections of upper and middle classes.
When it comes to actual political struggle, what is the actual merit of the Left?
The Left has not been on the forefront of any important struggle in India for long; the Leftist trade unions and agricultural organizations are mostly composed of Upper Caste or Upper Shudra workers and farmers and their struggles are mostly limited to protecting their sectoral interests, for instance, bank workers, academics or farmers have not been mobilizing for the Bahujan working population.
The great majority of the workers are still in the informal sector, wherein the Left has no considerable presence, and the issues of landless Adviasi and Dalit peasants and the class aspirations of their children are being articulated by the Bahujan organizations or by the Maoists. The Left front governments have a history of unleashing state repression on such movements.
What the Left has actually done in the last five years to oust fascists from state power, except a farmers’ rally and a women’s wall in Kerala? Contrary to what the metropolitan intellectuals of the Indian Left claim internationally, the farmers’ mobilization was a work of hundreds of organizations and independent activists, mainly from Maharashtra, a great majority of them are not part of the Communist Left, and the great majority of the participants would not even vote for Left candidates! The farmers’ rally was more symbolic than substantive, as it did not succeed in forcing the government into policy change. 
The women’s wall in Kerala was a defensive struggle against the quick consolidation of fascists on Sabarmala issue, which too was possible because of an umbrella coalition of major caste organizations in Kerala; besides we are yet to see how much political capital the fascists have gained from Sabarimala, one thing we know for sure is that they have recruited thousands of cadres and tilted the state towards the right. In few pockets in Rajasthan and Himachal, the Left has been successful in mobilizing Upper Shudra farmers, which is not a small achievement.
But the failings of the Left are more glaring compared to whatever little they have gained or defended. The Left has terribly failed in Tripura and in West Bengal in countering the fascists. It has not been able to protect Dalits and Muslims, nor have they been able to create a political platform that would attract the Bahujan laboring masses or would highlight their issues.
In the 2019 parliamentary elections, the Left would not even bag more than 20 seats, even by the most optimistic projection. Besides, the armed Left, that cannot distinguish Congress from BJP, too, has been completely ineffective against defending people from the fascist attacks, they have miserably failed to punish even ordinary cow vigilantes who have lynched Muslims in public, even in a state like Jharkhand where Maoists have considerable sway, a point noted by Areeb Rizvi.
Despite all these failings, where this supremacist grand posturing comes from, if not from Jatitva? Are the bhakts of Indian Left any different from the bhakts of Modi?

Why Kanhaiya?

The bhakts of the Indian Left now want Kanhaiya, an average student activist from the brutally oppressive Bhumihar Brahmin caste, to be the Grand Hero of Indian peoples. What is Kanhaiya compared to Chandrashekhar Azad who had successfully taken the anti-fascist fight to fascist citadels of Hindi heartless lands and made supreme sacrifices for mobilizing the Bahujans against BJP? But one hardly see any Leftist or liberal rooting for the Azad, the Proud Chamar 
The Hindu Communists and their bhakts have a double identitarian problem; first, they are trapped in their own savarna identity concerns (marked by anxieties over reservation and Bahujan assertion) and second, in the identity concerns of traditional communism (marked by symbolisms of red, party, hammer-sickle etc.). Both enable them to feel and propagate that they are the superior opponents, against all evidence, of Modi regime.
What Kanhaiya has got in him other than being a good orator, which Indian college doesn’t have one? Electing someone for his oratory skills is as good as choosing a pet dog for its biting skills. In 2014, many were smitten by someone else’s oratory skills and the entire country has got bitten by mad dogs.
It seems that the Indian Left is trying to project the 2019 elections as a Kanhaiya vs. Modi battle. It satisfies their need for symbolic victories, and enables them to evade the question of actually defeating the fascists. This is their battle of ego.
The Jawaharlal Nehru University episode that brought fame to Kanhaiya itself was a fascist ploy to dilute the raging spirit of the Rohit Vemula Movement which was being fast consolidated across India. Rather than focusing on the goals of the Rohith Vemula Movement, the Left fell flat for the fascist trap and opportunistically used the witch-hunt to further divert the attention from the Bahujan cause.
Being completely insensitive to the ongoing fascist process of untouchablisation of Muslims, CPI has even dared to, in an ultimate supremacist gesture, demand the RJD-led Mahagathbandhan to withdraw its Muslim candidate, Dr Tanweer Hassan from the contest! The same was repeatedly demanded by their Left-liberal bhakts too. What these Left supremacists fail to see is that having one more Muslim in Indian parliament in fascist times is a thousand time more revolutionary than getting an accidental politician elected.
However, the Indian Left is so hungry for identitarian symbolic victories, it has squandered a lion share of its intellectual and material resources on Kanhaiya’s victory, why? Leftists want to celebrate the victory of Kanhaiya as the symbolic victory of the Left supremacism; if he is defeated, the blame would go to the backwardness of the Bahujans. Both ways, the Bahujan politics would irreversibly be discredited and crucially, the anti-fascist fight would be further misguided.
To defeat the fascist idea of untouchablisation of Muslims, and to save the Indian Left from its identitarian symbolic politics, the Bahujans, especially Muslims, have a moral and political responsibility to defeat Leftist and Rightist Jatitvavadis in Begusarai.

Comments

Meera Velayudhan said…

I do not understand why one persons opinion or write up
Is generalised and case made against Kanhaiya .
Is it because he is a popular Modi critique?
Chitra Kannabiran said…

He belongs to an upper caste and hence is being questioned as a suitable leader
Sutheeshna Babu said…

Any reader with a reasonable understanding of the Left movement and modern political history of India would trash the very narrative that it's author tries to project. He is more at ease in arguing that a 'Muslim' candidate of RJD who is contesting against Kanaiya Kumar should be supported as it would add one more Muslim to Lower House of the Parliament. One can figure out more instances of polarising, casteist and communal narratives in this very write up. If this is the way his ideological persuasion advances the 'fight against the State', fair enough !! But, should claim anything beyond, it's no radicalism, revolutionary or ideologically different' !!
Xavier Dias said…

Seems you are a working for the victory of BJP Giriraj Singh. all the best to you !

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