Understanding Left, the crucible of resistance

Shelley Walia

Shelley Walia
Professor Emeritus, Panjab University

The recent weeks have been exceptionally volatile. Democracy and freedom are under siege. The public, students and teachers, are at war with an increasingly broad-based commitment to a new kind of activism, horrified at the indefensible vilification by the xenophobic workings of the State.

To equate the Left with mayhem or disorder is to lack a comprehensive understanding of politics. To dismiss the uprising as a ‘Left-propagated’ movement is to overlook the bona fide roots and the significance of resistance movements that have at stake the dynamism and new-found energy of the youth equipped to fight collectively for a pedagogical, cultural and social space. This space is inherently accompanied by the integral feature of a political imagination to wage an ongoing censure of subjugation and unaccountable authority.

It is repeatedly observed that in case you disagree with the merits of a policy or an enactment, you are labelled as the ‘Left’, an ‘anti-nationalist’, or an ‘urban Naxalite’ even though public values of trust and compassion buttress every aspect of your ideology. If you speak of self-determination and liberty, you are indicted of belonging to the ‘tukde tukde gang’.

The establishment, through the recurring use of the word ‘intellectuals’ for any dissenting voice, has succeeded in establishing the connotations of a derogatory negative disposition that engages in hollow unpatriotic hogwash geared to rabble-rousing. Amusingly, the word ‘intellectual’ has become a swear word with those who ideologically sustain the far-right, fed as they are on a fantasy diet of lies and deception.

To speak in favour of democracy or freedom in Kashmir is to be booed as cohorts of the jihadists. To support a non-discriminatory and inclusive policy that ought to underpin any amendment to the eligibility of citizenship is to provoke the wrath of the State that insists on using religion as the basis of determining citizenship.

Understandably, a sharp decline in the way language is used, has become the acceptable political lexicon. George Orwell’s famous essay Politics and the English language explains the manner in which bad politics debases language and misused language coarsens political thought.

The Left has been decimated in the country over the years and necessitates its reinvention.

However, to say that the student agitation is instigated and managed by the Left is a cognitive error, especially when mature, thinking youth from some of the best institutions are waging a spirited struggle to espouse the inviolability of the Constitution. The incontestable intention is to unveil the post-truth mindset and deconstruct the existing right-wing narratives for a deeper understanding of the subterranean agenda of the establishment.

In the context of the widespread debate on the question of nationalism and ‘othering’ raging across the world, there is a resurgence of the temperament of revolt aspiring for the defence of constitutional democracy. Time has finally arrived to speak truth to power.

Behind such unrest lies the 1960s decade of counter-culture. In the wake of two European wars, Fascism, Nazism and a critical appraisal of capitalism, the angry youth demanded instant answers to the evils of oppression and poverty.

Charles de Gaulle, the powerful president of France, was almost brought down by the student revolt. Stalin’s and Mao’s advocacy of the exclusion of cultural relativism spurred both intellectuals and students across the world to oppose authority, sectarian violence and unbridled materialism. Their support for the civil rights movement through a non-violent anarchy was optimism for days of liberation and equality, of co-existence and social justice. These were provocative poetic years giving birth to songs like The answer my friend is blowing in the wind and The times, they are a-changin, which set the tenor for the future of student power and a revolution that would dismantle authoritarian systems out to smother not only creativity, but intellectual freedom and confidence.

This adversarial stand is fundamental to a liberal university education that inculcates the undying spirit of inquiry and debate, underpinning an intellectual response to authoritarianism of any complexion. The allegation of being co-opted by the Left is unsubstantiated when evidently the predominant values of justice, inclusiveness and equity are central to the larger resistance movements for social transformation. The agitating community branded as the ‘Left intellectual’, indeed, has the commitment for a sharp and judicious intervention where unilateralism is unacceptable.

The vision for tomorrow underpinned by a rational and an open knowledge-driven society lies in the condemnation of the systems that usurp socialism and progressive movements. Such revival in the public response to far right wing fervour, a racist, foul-mouthed and vapid demagoguery, replicates the drive for participatory democracy from the 1960s up to the Occupy Movement, echoed recently in the aborted struggle to occupy the Gateway of India.

Scripted on the pattern of liberal socialist democracies of Western Europe, the message that goes out to the world is resistance to state dominance and social injustice. All institutions of democracy that we enjoy today are undeniably the gift of liberal thinkers, without whom civilisation would have remained in a state of subjugation through the long history of oppression.

Whatever be the semantics of the Left, it cannot be denied that its significance matters now when the administration’s animosity toward activism is so open and retrogressive. Social liberal initiatives, like the struggle for cheap education or preserving the secular character of the nation, cannot be, therefore, brought under criminal prosecution. The ‘Left’ cannot be edited out of history, ridden as it is with matters of communalism, caste oppression, environmental degradation besides gender discrimination and poverty.

In an over-regulated political system run by a low-trust government, the only bulwark lies in the public intellectual or the Left-leaning individuals who fearlessly critique the official discourse or the doublespeak of the State narrative.