The Young and the Restless by Gurmehar Kaur

Author:Gurmehar Kaur [Kaur, Gurmehar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353055325
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2019-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

The left as a political ideology is very complex, and I wonder out loud what can be done to make it more accessible. I’ve always felt the left had intellectualized itself way more than required and has lost touch with the masses. I wondered out loud what the left needed to do to get back in a position of relevance.

‘What the left needs to do is to come out of organized communist parties and go to the people. Because in the end what we want is a more equal society, not the most perfect communist party on earth. How are we going to make that point to people, if we are like the communist party of so and so, or that communist party of so and so. Even the nomenclature is the same, so how are you going to convince a common person who doesn’t understand communism that my party is the best. Because a regular human being would be like, why should I believe you? There is another communist party with the same name.’

I have always found it hard to understand communism and the various fragments of the theory. I studied Marx in grade eleven and while I understood the basic idea of it, I couldn’t relate to it. I didn’t immediately see it being applied to India. I understood how it may have worked for a smaller, more homogenous, society in Europe or smaller countries, but in India, where the issues do not only relate to class but caste, religion and language, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

‘What is communism? I really want you to define it for me because while I agree with everything that it stands for, I, not as a writer or a to-be academic but as a layman, need to know, what’s the hook? What is this ideology selling? I know that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is selling an anti-minority, anti-Muslim, pro-upper-caste Hindu hyper-nationalistic narrative and I know the Congress is trying to sell its secularity, we need to have a working definition of communism. And it has to be simplified for people. Like having done left politics for four years, even I don’t know what communism means because it has deliberately been jargonized and no one really understands. Even members of the same party will have a different understanding of what communism is. If we don’t understand then how will we make people understand? We need to have our progressive principles in place but mass politics has different demands.’

But explaining communism to people isn’t her biggest task. Apparently that’s not a task at all for her and many a times it is people, especially from the right, who explain to her what communism stands for and write scathing opinion pieces for online journals such as the Swarajya or Opindia whenever she does something that doesn’t fit their opinion of her or her ideology. When Shehla went on Twitter to exclaim in excitement about Sinead O’Connor converting to Islam, all of

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