Why is India’s Left backing farmers’ protests? It’s a kulak agitation

File photo of farmers's protest at Ghazipur border in Delhi | ANI

The term “farmers’ agitation” is a complete misnomer. It can at best be described as a landlords’ agitation. Those involved in the ongoing protest own tractors and harvesters—luxury goods that are not available to poor farm workers. They are allied with rich middlemen who are known as arhtiyas in northern India. They are already in a business where they are guaranteed a buyer and a minimum price for their principal products. In other words, the normal risks of business are reduced quite substantially for them. Now, they are looking for guaranteed offtakes and prices for all their products. They also want state-funded crop insurance cover to pretty much eliminate their risks. And they want the state to provide a monthly pension of Rs 10,000 a month to all farmers and agricultural labourers over 60, without farm owners making any contributions, unlike other businesses. One cannot blame the landlord-farmers for agitating. If they can arm-twist the rest of us taxpayers and get their way, why not?

The interesting thing is to try and understand why the Left is supporting this outlandish agitation. Coffee-drinking leftists are aware, or should be aware, that Comrade Stalin described these landlord-farmers as “kulaks”. Now anyone who has read Bolshevik primers knows that kulaks are considered an even greater class enemy than the bourgeoisie.

Why, then, would our home-grown comrades support these kulak reactionaries? Not emulating Comrades Lenin and Stalin is a sin. Even Cuthbert Banks can tell you that! The kulaks of Punjab live in big homes, they employ “outsiders” and pay them subsistence wages. They are hand-in-glove with middlemen, who are another class enemy for any true-blooded Bolshevik. Some have also reportedly ‘fixed’ Food Corporation of India officials, thus demonstrating that the bourgeois Republic of India is in cahoots with the enemies of the revolution. It seems surprising that the Leftists of India are being so counterrevolutionary in their behaviour. This is not how they behaved in Telangana or Naxalbari, let alone in the Ukraine in the 1920s or in China under Chairman Mao. What has gone wrong with them?

 

The Left’s paradoxical consistency

I kept thinking of my Leftist friends and wondering whether they had read Lenin’s The State and Revolution. And then it suddenly struck me: of course they have. Comrade Lenin was always pragmatic. He thought it quite proper to collaborate with Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany, enemies of his own country, to bring down the hapless Alexander Kerensky, who was foolishly trying to be patriotic. Chairman Mao went one step further. He allowed Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces to bear the brunt of the conflict with Japan, only to flex his muscles later against his own countrymen.

Our Leftists have figured out a similar strategy. Things are by no means perfect, but there is a positive breeze blowing in our country. The Indian economy is growing quite well, the middle class is expanding. Ay, there’s the rub! The middle class is unlikely to be pro-Bolshevik. So, it is time to derail the hated “system”. There are no German imperialists to ally with. But the rich landlord-farmers of Punjab can be the ‘useful idiots’ to wreck the bourgeois Indian state.

This unique ability to ally with anybody purely in order to destroy is in some respects the fundamental tenet of Bolshevik morality. Just look at the world outside India. Sections of the Left support the theocratic regime in Iran which persecutes Iranian women. This regime also successfully killed or exiled all the communists of Iran. But Iran is a useful tool to destroy the global neo-liberal capitalist order.  A few dead Iranian communist comrades or incarcerated women just do not matter. The Left supports Hamas. Now Hamas is an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, and everybody knows that the moment these folks come to power, the first thing they will do is to hang all the communists in their midst. Never mind. Hamas is an ally because it stands for destruction and all destruction is good.

Won’t succeed, can impede

 Even in our own country, the Left has supported the movement involving minor girls being brainwashed and arm-twisted by their families and friends to cover themselves in a hijab, attire that progressive Iranian women are trying to shed. But then, being progressive is not important. Anything that generates opposition to the hated bourgeois state is to be supported. Marx may have said that religion is the opium of the people. But opium is acceptable if it is anti-establishment.

On the economic side, the situation is even more bizarre. Government employees in India are, by any reasonable definition, not working-class members; they can properly be described as petit bourgeois. Yet, the Left supports these supposedly hated class enemies in their pursuit of extremely high, guaranteed pensions at the expense of the nation’s genuine working class. After all, government employees can create chaos, and chaos is what made the Great October Revolution possible.

Of course, we all know after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the Left is never going to win. Their current strategy, therefore, seems focused solely on derailing positive momentum and encouraging anarchic discourse. They are also trying to worm their way into previously moderate parties and infect them with Bolshevik ideas. The Left will not succeed, but they sure can do their best to impede.

Jaithirth Rao is a retired businessperson who lives in Mumbai. Views are personal.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)