This article I wrote many years ago a few days after the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court delivered its landmark judgment on the long-festering Ayodhya title suit. As I did not have it published then I think it can be presented now as things have remained unchanged with the tangle having again usurped the prime place in the political discourse of the country. The write-up was about the Communists’ attitude to religion, in general, and Ayodhya tangle, in particular. Things have remained relevant as the Communists do not seem to have changed a bit since the time this article was written as the Sabarimala episode has clearly revealed.
“As expected, the Communists have taken a tough stand regarding the recently pronounced verdict on the Ayodhya tangle, pillorying it as a betrayal of the Muslim cause and violation of the Supreme Court ruling on the issue. According to the CPI-M Politburo members, the Apex Court had ruled way back in 1995 that the title suit could not be adjudicated on matters of faith. “But this is what the Allahabad court has done,” a CPI-M Politburo member said.
It is another matter that the party reeling under strings of poll debacles in its redoubts in West Bengal and Kerala would try to milk it electorally. Particularly so as the Marxists’ support base among the minority keeps sliding irreversibly. The evidently beleaguered party would leave no stone unturned to shift the blame onto the courtyard of the Congress, slamming the charge of political vacillation of the premier party vis-à-vis the Ayodhya tangle.
However, apart from the political calculations, there is an ideological view entangled with it. On maters religious, the party cannot deviate from its long held view.
The CPI-M general secretary, Prakash Karat made a candid confession in Cambridge, saying that the Communists had remained prisoners of the past. ‘They have failed to move with the times, stuck as they are in the 1940s grooves,’ he said.
The Communism is based on the dialectics of history. So changing with the time is an imperative. Grappling with the dialectics is considered by the Communists as a proud portion of the homo sapiens. And so changing tacks from time to time keeping the ideological contour intact is in keeping with the Communistic worldview.
But religion is a subject which they religiously shun. Save for occasionally denouncing Islamic fundamentalism and the exploitation in the name caste, they maintain a studied silence on the matters religious.
It is said by many that the Communists have failed to dent into the country’s political landscape because of their aversion to religion.
True, in a country like India which remains deeply religious for ages, bypassing it for mundane economic and class issues would not carry one far. Dissents keep coming to the fore from within their ranks, asking the party to review its rigid stance vis-à-vis religion. Many have deserted the party on the issue. Yet they have chosen to remain firm in their avowal of indifference.
Karl Marx called religion opium for the exploited. This is perhaps the hardest denunciation of religion. But there is a tendency to quote it out of context to bolster an individual standpoint. Marx in fact did not deal with the question of religion as a separate subject. In his large oeuvre of writings, religion steps in only a part of the superstructure the base of which remains the economic substance-the productive forces, production relations and the class struggle. Either his obsession with things economic restrained him from dealing with religion in details or, maybe, he was not against religion itself but against its exploitative potential. He attacked religion on two fronts -firstly as an aid being used by the exploiting class to coerce the mass of the working people into remaining tied to exploitative order and secondly as an idea fostering a stoical acceptance of the unjust order as a divinely sanctioned decree of fate.
True to the Marxian axioms, the Communists tended to view the Hindu-Muslim problem and its culmination in the gory partition from the economic point of view. They were strongly inclined to the view that had the Congress embarked on a revolutionary movement, stressing on emancipation from the foreign yoke as a means to a better life the Muslims who were falling prey to the spell of fanaticism could still be won over and the partition could have been avoided.
According to late Hiren Mukerjee, respected as one of the tallest Marxist ideologues, the situation in the country in the years just preceding the partitioned independence was conducive to an all out call for revolutionary programme as anti-imperialism mood of the people was palpable.
The crux of the Communist argument remains hidden here. The partition could have been avoided had the Congress leadership been inclined to an economic solution which would have blurred the communal divide among the working masses of the people.
This is something, which they seemed to have derived from the Marxian worldview. And this is where the theory had floundered. The excessive stress placed on the economic aspect of man seems to have denied the access to the wider spectrum of subjective workings. Those abiding by the Communism never take pains to understand the import of religion in moulding human personality.
If they really thought that through building unity on the economic (read class lines) the partition could have been avoided it must be said that they had been prisoners of a myopic vision heavily biased for the superficial to the deliberate ignorance of the deeper.”
I am ending the article with an amusing development which happened in the CPI-M. An influential Marxist minister Abdur Rezzak Molla who is now in Trinamul Congress tossed a debate in the Communist circles. He went on a pilgrimage to Hardwar and Rudraprayag to seek divine blessing. “I stayed in an Ashram in Hardwar and took prasad daily. Form Hardwar I went to the small town of Rudraprayag where the Alakananda and the Mandakini meet in a confluence of great religious significance. There is nothing wrong in visiting these places for seeking divine blessing when one is in the grip of a crisis,” he averred. The party, however, sought to undermine the gesture, saying that he was on sightseeing.
