In Light of India by Octavio Paz

Author:Octavio Paz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781784870706
Publisher: Random House

NATIONALISM, SECULARISM, DEMOCRACY

The Congress Party was always pluralistic, even in its most combative phase. Alongside a religious figure like Gandhi were agnostics like Nehru and nationalists like Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose was extremely popular, as Tilak had been. He was inspired by traditional Hinduism, but, like the extremists in the previous generation, he injected the explosive element of nationalism into it. Bose represented the most aggressive and militant wing of the Congress Party. His virulence brought him close to Fascism, and during the Second World War he fought on the side of the Japanese. He died in Taiwan, in an airplane accident. Although excluded from the official pantheon of the Republic, his memory is venerated by many; at festivals and other popular gatherings, one sees his photograph in the stalls where knickknacks and images of movie stars and the gods are sold.

None of these revolutionaries had direct contact with the international socialist movements. The exception was M. N. Roy, another Brahman from Bengal. His real name was Narendranat Bhattacharya (1887–1954). Although he is little known in Mexico, one period of his life was connected to our political history. Roy joined the nationalist extremists quite young; pursued by the British police, he escaped to Chicago. Later, when the United States entered the First World War, he sought asylum in Mexico, along with many American pacifists and socialists. Those were the years of the Mexican Revolution, and Roy did not take long to associate himself with the most radical groups. He was instrumental in the founding of the Communist Party in Mexico. Impressed by his activities and skills, Lenin—through Mikhail Borodin, the Communist agent in Mexico—invited him to participate in the Third International. Roy traveled to Moscow on an official passport issued by the government of President Carranza and was protected by the Mexican consuls in various countries. He worked as an agent of the Communist International in Central Asia and China, but broke with the Comintern in 1929 and finally, some years later, with Marxism itself. He returned to India, fought for independence, and spent years in prison. During the Second World War, understanding the threat posed by the Nazis and the Japanese, he supported collaboration with England and the other democratic nations—the opposite of Gandhi and Nehru’s policy of noncooperation. Convinced that the totalitarian system founded by Lenin and the Bolsheviks was a disaster, he invented a revolutionary response to the crisis of socialism: “radical humanism.” His answer was inadequate, but the motives that inspired it were legitimate. The life and work of Roy are an example of the fate of the revolutionary intellectual in the twentieth century.fn10

With a figure like Jawaharlal Nehru, who declared himself a socialist but was the leader of a nationalist movement like the Congress Party, it is legitimate to ask what his true ideology was. He was a socialist if one considers his earliest political activities, his efforts to steer the Congress Party toward the left, his differences with Gandhi and Sardar V. Patel, and his public declarations and pronouncements.

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