That oft-quoted line from the German poet and playwright Heinrich Heine’s play "Almansor" is engraved on the Bibliothek memorial at Bebelplatz in central Berlin. It commemorates the Nazi book burning of May 10, 1933, when members of the German Student Union, backed by university professors, burnt and destroyed more than 25,000 books they deemed “un-German”. Marxist and communist literature was among the prime targets of that state-supported campaign of censorship and cultural destruction. Heine’s own works went into the flames, along with copies of more than 4,000 other titles, including those of Karl Marx.
By sending in bulldozers and armed police personnel, along with goons and hoodlums, to attack bookstalls run by the CPI(M) and other Left organisations during the Puja festival in West Bengal, the BJP-RSS repeated what their ideological forefathers made infamous in the 1930s. Left and progressive bookstalls faced demolition, vandalism, arson and intimidation during the state’s first Sharadotsav under BJP rule. These attacks strike at the heart of a long-standing cultural tradition of public reading, political debate and the freedom to encounter ideas that challenge those in power.
A Cultural Tradition Under Attack
The bookstalls run by Left parties and other organisations are not an incidental feature of Bengal’s festive season. They belong to a tradition dating back to the 1950s, when the first festive bookstall was set up by Comrade Muzaffar Ahmad. Stalls offering political literature, progressive writing, books on history and society, and the works of Marxist thinkers are part and parcel of the festivities and the cultural activities that accompany them, and people across the state look forward to visiting them. It is this rich tradition that the BJP and the RSS are attempting to undermine through political interference, intimidation and rank thuggery.
The target of the Hindutva brigade is the space these stalls offer visitors — for conversation, political exchange and encounters with ideas that challenge the dominant discourse pushed by a media landscape controlled by the corporate-communal nexus. The stalls take ideas beyond universities, classrooms and private libraries to places frequented by one and all. Behind the fig leaf of municipal regulations and permissions lies an exercise in political intimidation, using state power and muscle power, aimed at suppressing the right to occupy public space, circulate ideas and participate in the cultural life of society. The aim is to silence ideas that challenge a preferred political and ideological order, and to impose a narrative by force.
Fahrenheit 451, Joseph Goebbels and Suvendu Adhikari
François Truffaut’s 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, based on Ray Bradbury’s novel of the same name, imagines an authoritarian society that seeks to eliminate books because it fears the questions they provoke. Books are forbidden, firemen are tasked with burning them, and people are discouraged from thinking critically — exposed instead to a narrow range of approved ideas and conditioned to regard independent thought as disruptive. Books are dangerous in this society because they preserve competing accounts of the world and enable readers to imagine alternatives to the existing order.
The Nazi book burnings sought to eradicate works and intellectual traditions deemed incompatible with the regime’s worldview. Addressing the crowd in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s chief propagandist and Reich Minister of Propaganda, hailed the “action against the un-German spirit” and dismissed the authors whose books were burning as “intellectual filth” and “Jewish asphalt literati”. Placards at the site proclaimed the need to purify German language and literature and to affirm traditional German values.
West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s words, while defending the attacks on Left bookstalls, sounded eerily similar. He declared that no one would be allowed to publish “anti-nation or anti-Sanatan writings”, and likened the volunteers running the stalls, and those defending them, to “cockroaches, bedbugs, dimaagi naxals, tukde tukde gang” that needed to be eliminated. He had set the tone on the floor of the state assembly in September, directing Puja committees not to allow CPI(M) bookstalls outside pandals.
The Sangh Parivar’s destruction of books, and its attacks on those manning the stalls that sell them, are a continuation of its hostility towards freedom of thought and expression. The assaults on M F Husain’s exhibitions and on Sahmat’s Hum Sab Ayodhya come to mind. The demolition of Lenin’s statue in Tripura and the recent demolition and removal of Rahul Sankrityayan’s statue in Raniganj were part of the same playbook. The deployment of a huge police force in Jadavpur to destroy books — even as 19 people, including a child, lost their lives in Chorbagan owing to inadequate arrangements to control crowds and ensure public safety — starkly revealed the priorities of the BJP government.
The Answer To Intimidation Is More Books
In Fahrenheit 451, the preservation of books becomes an act of resistance against a society determined to erase its intellectual inheritance. In Bengal, the answer to those who destroy bookstalls is to protect them, rebuild them and keep the books circulating. And this is what our comrades have succeeded in doing.
In many locations, such as the 8B stall in Jadavpur, spirited people’s resistance forced the state machinery to retreat. Despite attacks unprecedented in scale and ferocity, 100 more bookstalls came up this year than last, and almost every stall demolished by the goons was functioning again by the next day. The reported 60 per cent surge in book sales suggests that, rather than extinguishing interest in Left and progressive literature, the attacks have drawn attention to the stalls and their readers.
Modest though the structure is, a bookstall allows a passer-by to pick up a book, question an argument, discover an unfamiliar history or engage with a political perspective they might never otherwise encounter. Thousands of people thus come to progressive politics through such stalls. This is why the British seized our books and shut down our bookshops then, and why the RSS attempts to do the same now.
The books we read, the ideas we hold dear and the unity of our people must prevail over the fascistic Sangh brigade and its attempt to impose a single narrative. The future of our people depends on it.
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The writer is the General Secretary of the CPI(M) and a former MP
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