On the third day of Kerala Literature Festival, the beach shores of Calicut witnessed a new perspective of communist ideology straight from the words of the present popular student politics leader of JNU, Mr. Kanhaiya Kumar in conversation with Sashi Kumar.
Sashi Kumar started off by asking what is it that distinguishes our time or what makes our time special.
Kanhaiya began by conveying a humble ‘namaskaram’ and said revolution is not dependent on any individual or any particular political party. Revolution is the evolutionary process of the society and it comes with the collective efforts or charisma of an individual. The society contains revolution in itself.
I’m no more a student leader in my campus. There are new leaders, presidents, general secretaries. I think even in mainstream politics, new people should enter routinely.
And what I feel is a distinguised feature of our time is, right now at Calicut beach at such a beautiful venue we are discussing about dissent in Democracy which is not even necessary.
What we need is to strengthen our democracy.
The word anti-national is being to overrated and used too much that it feels like the ‘idlis’ you all get every morning. If anybody speaks anything against the policies of the government, they are labeled as anti-national. We see so many examples of that like Prakash Raj and even noble prize winner Amartya Sen is termed as anti-national. The sanctity of the word national is dying here.
He spoke high of the political conditions of Kerala with its communist ruling scenario and even the times before that. When he compares his state Bihar or any north Indian states with Kerala, it is a much better situation here, where there is good healthcare facilities, woman have equal rights, quality education and rights for people.
He then says “I am not a spokesperson of CPIM or CPI. So I will not take any official position of any political party and I want to clear another thing. Yes I am left. Because there is a dream, a dream of development that I ‘left’ because I cannot visualize the idea of that ‘Acha Din’.
There are three types of left in India- communist, socialist and Ambedkarist. Where there is a left there we should decide which left we should be.
He gave a beautiful insight of what an ideal communist society should be and how students in politics can be liberating and how we have to raise our voice for what we feel is right. He shattered all our cliché ideas about the communalism we come across daily. He pointed out that capitalism is never related to communalism. He opined that all political ideologies should converge and work together to create an ideal democratic society.
It was a truly insightful and worthy discussion. The audience too raised their questions and opinions to which he constructively answered.
In the end a lady from the audience requested Kanhaiya Kumar to sing the ‘Azadi Antham’ which he did with the whole crowd shouting out the chorus ‘Azadi’ (freedom).