It persists with it attempts to suppress any voice it doesn’t like and banish any view it doesn’t approve of. The Inquisition-like mentality continues.
Opinion may be divided on whether Union Minister Babul Supriyo was so seriously attacked by the Left students at the Jadavpur University recently that Chancellor-West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar had to come to the campus to rescue him. It is, however, indisputable that Supriyo was severely heckled by the activists of pro-communist outfits; indeed it was so severe that he could not attend a seminar that was organised by the ABVP, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The incident proves, for the nth time, that the Left continues to be intolerant to anybody opposed to its views.
Come to think of it: this is the arrogance and petulance of our professional revolutionaries after their decline. The Soviet Union, the cradle of communism, ceased to exist about three decades ago. We now know that three to four million people perished in “the future” of mankind that was touted as heaven on earth. China, too, is communist primarily in name. In our country, communist parties are in the fast lane to extinction. The two main parties, CPM and CPI, have been reduced to single digits in Parliament; West Bengal, said to be impregnable Left fortress, fell a few years ago. The situation is so bad that the two parties were forced to accept donations from the “capitalist” Dravidian parties.
Concomitantly, the Left’s dominance over public discourse has also waned. Not long ago, the Left was always right, and the Right always wrong. No longer. The Economic Right has been there for quite some, pushing for small government and open economy, but in the last few years the Political Right and the Cultural Right have also made their presence felt. The new entrants may lack the class and cadence of, say, Romila Thapar and Amartya Sen, but they are here—and they enjoy political patronage.
And yet, the Left’s superciliousness has not come down a bit. As they say in Hindi, rassi jal gai par bal naheen gaya (the rope has been burnt but its coil is still there). It persists with it attempts to suppress any voice it doesn’t like and banish any view it doesn’t approve of. The Inquisition-like mentality continues, even as the paraphernalia to enforce it has vanished or is vanishing.
After the Jadavpur University incident, BJP leaders and workers organised a protest rally in Kolkata. West Bengal BJP vice-president Jay Prakash Majumdar said, he “was heckled and beaten by students of SFI [CPM’s student wing] and Naxals. There is no law in the state.”
That may or may not be true, but it is a fact that the Left students’ unions stopped the Minister for one-and-a-half hours, raised slogans “Babul Supriyo, go back,” and waved black flags at him. But why did they want him to go back? Why couldn’t they let him air his views? Whatever happened to the concept of free speech which the Left-liberals so vociferously uphold when it comes to the expression of the thoughts of Kashmiri separatists and Maoists? Do only jihadists and Naxals have the right to free speech?
It looks like that in the Left-liberals’ scheme of things, murderous thugs should have the right to freedom of expression but not a member of the elected government in the world’s largest democracy.
It needs to be mentioned here that the Left’s depravity and duplicity are not just Indian but global. In February 2017, violent protests were staged by Left students at the University of California, Berkeley, ahead of a speaking engagement by Right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, causing damage worth $100,000 to the campus.
Yiannopoulos described the stir against him as “an expression of political violence”. He said, “I’m just stunned that hundreds of people…were so threatened by the idea that a conservative speaker might be persuasive, interesting, funny and might take some people with him, they have to shut it down at all costs.”
Similarly, efforts were made to stop a speech by a conservative author, Matt Walsh, on 9 April this year at Baylor University, a prominent Texas Christian University. He, however, went on to present, as the university’s website said, “an altered and simpler version of his speech, ‘The War on Reality: Why the Left has set out to redefine Life, Gender and Marriage,’ because of the online controversy that emerged after the event was announced”. No prizes for guessing who triggered the row: the Left.
A year ago, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an essay in the New York Times, saying, “Liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most Left-leaning group on campus.”
Abrams too suffered violent protests; his office door was vandalised. Left students bayed for his blood; they maligned him. False accusations were hurled at him.
In a nutshell, what happened to Supriyo is not something new, either in India or elsewhere. Globally defeated, intellectually discredited, and morally hollowed, the Left can now assert itself only indulging in violence. Which is what it is doing.
Ravi Shanker Kapoor is Editor, www.thehinduchronicle.com