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Ladder of lies

Two recent statements from Communist Party of India-Marxist general secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet deserve our attention. He wondered why the Left had not stuck roots outside Kerala, West Bengal, and Tripura "despite its glorious role in the freedom struggle." And he slandered the Bharatiya Janata Party as "the men who killed Mahatma Gandhi."

A man's memory is the first faculty to start withering. But I suspect Surjeet's speeches sprang from malice rather than age. They are, in any case, easily disproved.

"I have kept myself almost in daily touch with the progress of Bapu's assassination," Sardar Patel wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru on February 27, 1948, "It emerges clearly that the RSS was not involved in it at all."

Whom would you rather believe, Surjeet or the Sardar?

Why was the Iron Man's statement ignored? Simple, Sardar Patel was feared and hated by Nehru-Gandhis and Communists alike, and they joined to bury his memory. Surjeet, however, may recall the Sardar as the man who vowed to uproot Marxism from the soil of his Gujarat.

The Sardar has a right to be wary. The Communists spewed poison against everyone else in the late 1920s and early 1930s. (Even the Congress Socialists, a group within the Indian National Congress, were described as "social fascists.") This wasn't original; the Communists were simply parroting the line laid down by Stalin at the sixth congress of the Communist International.

This changed abruptly after the seventh congress was held in Moscow in 1935. Stalin decided to infiltrate socialists into the country. The Sardar wasn't fooled. He acidly described the Socialists as nothing but "the sappers and miners of Communism" and did his best to keep them out.

Simply put, Sardar Patel didn't trust Indians who owed allegiance to foreigners. His suspicions were well founded. When Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, the Communists abruptly reversed themselves, even acting as British informers during the Quit India Movement.

Yet at the CPI-M's Calcutta session, Surjeet accused BJP leaders of not participating in the freedom struggle! Not only is this demonstrably wrong, it is a blatant method of hiding the Left's own horrible record.

Communist hostility continued even after 1947. Vijayalakshmi Pandit, India's first envoy to Moscow, recorded Stalin's refusal to believe that India was truly free. And not a single Russian bureaucrat signed the condolence book after the Mahatma's death.

Their Soviet masters' attitude was echoed in the 'Calcutta Thesis' formulated by the Communists in February 1948. Repeating the charge that India was still a British colony, it vowed to continue the ''liberation struggle''. The practical expression of this philosophy came in the form of the Telangana peasant struggle (a fancy name for guerrilla warfare).

Telangana was part of the then Hyderabad state, a princely state refusing to join the India Union. The Nizam had given free rein to a group called the Razakars. Their leader Kasim Razvi vowed that "if India invaded nothing but the bones and ashes of 10.5 million Hindus would be found". Hindus were openly killed in Marathwada (also part of the princely Hyderabad).

This was the gentleman with whom the Communists allied. It was said in Warangal and Nalgonda that "the Razakars rule by day and the Communists at night." But Nehru's government didn't react, a stance encouraged by Lord Mountbatten (India's governor-general at Nehru's invitation).

Hyderabad took advantage of this idiocy. It loaned 200 million rupees to a Pakistan teetering on bankruptcy. It appealed to the Americans and sent a delegation to the United Nations. Nehru's response was to send a counter-memorandum, but Sardar Patel's patience was exhausted.

"You referred Kashmir to the UN when victory was at hand," he said, "What happened?"

On June 21, 1948, Mountbatten finally left, and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari took over as governor-general. Nehru continued to plead for a softline as late as September 8, 1948. However on September 13, 'Operation Polo' began. It took just 108 hours before Hyderabad was forced to lay down arms on September 17.

The Communists, however, fought on for three more years. The Sardar died in December 1950, but his work was continued by Rajaji who succeeded him as Union home minister. (He described the Communists as "Public Enemy Number One.")

I wouldn't normally use this column to talk about events that took place half a century ago and more, but comrade Surjeet is trying to rewrite history six hundred and one months after the Nizam's fall.

You cannot ascend the pinnacles of power by standing on a ladder of lies.

T V R Shenoy