INTRODUCTION

Indian intellectual life has been dictated by a cabal of leftist intellectuals for the last 60 years. This leftist intellectual cabal views everything through the biased lens of what it claims is liberalism. These intellectuals are not swayed either by facts or by reason.

They have not been able to come up with a single original idea in the last 60 years. No one can accuse our leftist intellectuals of actually thinking for themselves. Only hypocrisy and complete bankruptcy are found to hold sway among these so-called intellectuals.

I give below two examples of such hypocritical and bankrupt leftist views. I have posted excerpts of two articles by "eminent" intellectuals and my comments on these articles.

EXAMPLE 1

A question marked in red

Sumit Sarkar

Posted online in Indian Express: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 at 0000 hrs

This is a critique from the Left of the CPM's industrialisation policy in Bengal. Is the violence, cadre brutality and lack of consent that runs through this strategy the only way to develop? How do Singur and Nandigram serve the people?

As a lifelong Leftist, I am deeply shocked by recent events in the countryside of West Bengal. On December 31, a group of us went to Singur, spent the whole day there, visited 4 out of the 5 most affected villages which border the land that has been taken over. We had conversations with at least 50-60 villagers. Almost all rushed to us and told us their complaints.

From this brief but not necessarily unrepresentative sample, three things became very clear, because of which the West Bengal government's version cannot be accepted. One, the land, far from being infertile or mono-cropped, as has been stated repeatedly, is extremely fertile and multi-cropped.

We saw potatoes and vegetables already growing after the aman rice has been harvested, some of them actually planted behind the now fenced-in area which the peasants had lost. Two, there is no doubt that the vast bulk of the villagers we met are opposed to the take-over of land and most are refusing compensation. It should also be kept in mind that at best the consent of the registered landholders as well as sharecroppers is being taken.

But agricultural production also involves sharecroppers who are not covered by Operation Barga since they have come in later, as well as agricultural labour. Under the government-announced scheme for compensation, such people are not being remembered.

What the villagers repeatedly alleged was that along with the police, and it seems more than the police, party activists, whom the villagers call 'cadres' which has sadly become a term of abuse did the major part of the beating up. Clearly, the whole thing had been done without consultation, with very little transparency, and in a very undemocratic manner.

[..............]

These mistakes, to put it mildly, are being repeated on a much bigger scale in the Nandigram region. This has become far more serious because a much greater area of land is being taken with the same lack of transparency, absence of consent and massive brutality.

Once again, one is hearing reports of CPM cadres engaged in an offensive against peasants. What is happening at Nandigram is a near civil war situation.

The West Bengal government seems determined to follow a particular path of development involving major concessions both to big capitalists like the Tatas and multinationals operating in SEZs. Yet the strange thing is that these, particularly the latter, are things which Left parties and groups as well as many others have been repeatedly and vehemently opposing.

No less a person than the CPM General Secretary in the course of last week made 2-3 statements attacking SEZs. The CPM has been at the forefront of the struggles against such developments in other parts of the country.

Surely there must be a search, at least, for paths of development that could balance necessary industrial development with social concerns and transparency and democratic values. Is this SEZ model that implies massive displacement and distress really the only way? If the West Bengal government thinks so, then it also has to accept that the inevitable consequences are going to be a repetition of Nandigram across the state. My Comments

The first thing to strike a reader of this article by Professor Sarkar is his shock at the brutality of the CPI(M) cadres. It reminds me of the Casablanca police chief who was shocked to hear of gambling in his city. Anyone who is familiar with the West Bengal political scene for the last 40 years knows that the path to CPI(M)'s rise to power is strewn with the blood of the innocents.

CPI(M)'s cadres even threw a 1 month old baby into fire in the 1960s. Was Sarkar sleeping through such bloody episodes? His conscience seems to wake up only when he is in disagreement with CPI(M). Of course this kind of hypocritical behaviour is not surprising.

Leftist intellectuals have had lot of practice being hypocritical.

The next striking thing about this article is his inability to understand the reasons for setting up industries in Singur and Nandigram. He even asks the question, "How do Singur and Nandigram serve the people?". He does not notice that the answer is right in his own article.

He himself writes that, "It should also be kept in mind that at best the consent of the registered landholders as well as sharecroppers is being taken. But agricultural production also involves sharecroppers who are not covered by Operation Barga since they have come in later, as well as agricultural labour". Sarkar in his sojourn to Singur has himself seen the immense number of surplus labor in the agriculture sector.

In a densely populated country like India with a still growing population, land reforms is not the end of things. We are not a small Eurpoean country. Land reforms will give us only breathing room. It should have immediately struck him that a huge number of labor-intensive manufacturing plants are necessary in rural areas to soak up this surplus agriculture labor.

He finds out about this surplus labor. He actually sees them. Yet, strangely, he does not see. He, in fact, questions the need for manufacturing!! He seems to be completely bereft of new ideas or thinking.Then again one can not expect original thinking from our leftist intellectuals.

They have had a lot of practice in not thinking for themselves.

What is so sad is that it is people like Sarkar who are teaching a new generation of students in India. No wonder India has not produced original thinkers in the last 60 years. EXAMPLE 2:

CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND

  • The thrill of saying something vile MUKUL KESAVAN mukulkesavan@hotmail.com

Posted online in Telegraph on line version; February 8, 2007

For an Indian, one of the most instructive things about the response of the West to 9/11 is how swiftly large sections of its liberal establishment circled their wagons against Muslims. Instructive because this manoeuvre illustrates the extent to which Western democracies are based on majoritarian assumptions, assumptions that override the liberal values that in easier times are invoked as the distinguishing features of countries like Britain, France and the United States of America. Even more interesting is the way in which the case for the illiberal, coercive and even punitive treatment of Muslims is made, the way in which the demonization of Muslims as a matter of public policy is presented as a properly liberal project for all but soft-headed, bleeding hearts.

A short essay that illustrates this tendency perfectly is Christopher Hitchens's review of Mark Steyn's book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It which can be read online at this url: http://www.city-journal.org/ html/ 17\1\urbanities-steyn.html. Steyn is a hawkish right-winger who argues in his book that the West, with the exception of the US, has surrendered to the jihadist tendency within Islam. Europe, in particular, with its doctrines of multiculturalism and its declining birth-rates, is doomed to be taken over by fast-breeding immigrant Muslims who see its woolly tolerance for the weakness that it really is.

Hitchens, who started his political life as a Trotskyist, decided after 9/11 that he had found a political project worthy of the rest of his life, namely, unrelenting opposition to the menace of fundamentalist Islam for which he coined a term, 'Islamofascism'. He supported the American invasion of Iraq for many reasons, one of which was Saddam Hussein's alleged alliance with al Qaida.

Hitchens likes Steyn's book, agrees with its main arguments, finds it admirably tough-minded, and praises Steyn for his pioneering work in making people aware of the menace of Islamism. For Hitchens, Steyn makes an ' immensely convincing case' for the imminent swamping of European civilization by Muslim migrants who breed much faster than the local white population. This quote from the book (chosen by Hitchens in his review) summarizes Steyn's argument from demography: 'Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two' In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent.

In a democratic age, you can't buck demography ' except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out ' as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosn-ia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.'

Hitchens has a few reservations about Steyn's conclusions: it's a reductionist explanation of the Bosnian violence because it doesn't account for Croation irredentism, and Steyn makes a Muslim-European clash seem inevitable because he mistakenly sees Muslims in Europe as a single monolithic community when, in fact, immigrant Muslims are hugely various. But Hitchens's differences with Steyn are minor ones: he agrees that Muslim birth-rates are a portent of disaster because Islamists publicly proclaim their intention to take over Europe by outbreeding the natives and these statements feed the paranoia of far-right parties and their adherents. Hitchens is persuaded by Steyn's main point that demography and liberal guilt (cultural masochism in Hitchens's words) 'are handing a bloodless victory to the forces of Islamization'.

Western liberals who can't see this, argues Hitchens, are disabled by a knee- jerk, politically-correct reflex: 'Any emphasis on the relative birth rates of Muslims and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics.'

The problem with this is that the reason the liberal ear responds the way it does is because Steyn, Hitchens's hero, explicitly makes a eugenic prescription: 'The Serbs figured that out ' as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can't outbreed the enemy, cull 'em (italics mine).'

To an Indian, this isn't language that even the Bharatiya Janata Party would use in public. It's the rhetoric of explicitly fascist parties: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Shiv Sena, the Bajrang Dal. This ideological convergence in the ideas of the muscular European liberal and the militant Hindu fascist isn't an aberration.

The one real disagreement that Hitchens has with Steyn, is his dismissal of Martin Amis as a Western surrender monkey rabbiting on about global warming, when the main threat to the world is overheated Muslims. Hitchens defends Amis's credentials as a liberal soldier in the war against Islamism by offering the following quote from an interview with Amis in the London Times: 'There's a definite urge'don't you have it''to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering' Not letting them travel.

Deportation ' further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children... They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs ' well, they've got to stop their children killing people.'

This little manifesto for persecuting Muslims is, for Hitchens, an admirable ability to think outside the liberal box. With that 'Don't you have it'' Amis is enjoying the thrill of saying something vile and simultaneously reassuring other white, non-Muslim people that it's okay to think this way. But Hitchens sees this as a sign of intellectual courage, a recognition that extraordinary threats call for extraordinary responses.

[....................]

Towards the end of the review, Hitchens offers the West a ten-point programme for resisting Islamism. High on the list is this suggestion: 'A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multi-ethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism.'

In Hitchens's bizarre world, the world's largest pluralist democracy, home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world, would make common cause with the likes of Amis and Steyn whose prescriptions for saving civilization include systematic discrimination against Muslims, collective punishment, deportation and strategic 'culling'. Hitchens argues that it's important for liberals to stake out this rhetorical position because he doesn't want anti- Islamism (his term for being anti-Muslim in a respectable way) to become the monopoly of fascists. Muscular liberals like Amis and Hitchens would deny them that space.

By a grotesque ideological sleight of hand, Hitchens would join the West to this great 'multi-ethnic democracy' using arguments that are only used in India by parties that would, if they could, create an ethnic, Hindu supremacist state. This convergence is not an accident: by making prejudice respectable, by short-circuiting due process, by presuming collective guilt instead of affirming the presumption of individual innocence, Hitchens and Amis have become what they pretend to pre-empt.

It's not a nice picture: Milosevic, Le Pen, Nick Griffin, Bal Thackeray, Praveen Togadia, Narendra Modi, Mark Steyn, Martin Amis and Hitchens bringing up the rear. [ .......... ] My Comments

A thread running through Kesavan's article is that he is opposed to any raising of the very important issue of the higher birth rate of muslims compared to non muslims. Kesavan, like other of Indian leftist intellectuals, is worried about the demonisation of the muslim minority.

He never asks the reasons why non muslims are afraid of being swamped by the muslim minority. He like other leftist intellectuals never shows any concerns for non muslim minorities in muslim majority lands. He is worried about prejudice against muslims while he shows no iota of concern about muslim prejudice against non muslims.

It is always a one-way road as far as muslim-non muslim relations are concerned. It is amusing that while he has a long list of names of muslim baiters, he does not find a single muslim name of nonmuslim baiters. This kind of hypocrisy and inability to think seems to be a crucial requirement for joining the ranks of leftist intellectuals. Conclusion These two examplesencapsulate all that is wrong with the Indian left.

The hypocrisy and the utter moral bankruptcy positively shine through. It is a sad thing to contemplate that these people have dictated the culture of the Indian republic for the last 60 years.