Definitions and Usage

Roy Lictenstein-Fear2

Definitions and Usage


McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled-up.

Joseph McCarthy

Definitions and usage change with time. This is evident in language, with so called shudh Hindi sounding odd, archaic and difficult to understand. Ditto for the languages spoken and written around the globe, otherwise one wouldn’t need an interpreter to understand Shakespeare, billed as he is as the greatest dramatist and poet of all time.

Similarly, ideological content too changes with time, sometimes entirely, with a veneer of the original subject matter used as a wrapper, like old buildings in Rome totally transformed on the inside. That is also why the name-plate on the door often remains the same and why dead icons are not removed from plain sight.

Communism, as the most ambitious 20th century alternative, has changed beyond recognition in practice. At least in the hands of its more successful practitioners. China today has acquired mercantilist, imperial, militarist and arch-capitalist overtones. These are now menacing the world, let alone India. And this belligerence, however inscrutably disguised, is a far cry from the People’s Revolution of the Long March with ragged millions in tunics and cloth caps.

And this turnabout is all the more ironic for the fact that China has suffered true humiliation, far greater than India, at the hands of imperial powers. They not only destroyed the “Middle Kingdom” with opium and conquered it with ease, but carved up the supine country into “spheres of influence” to do with as they pleased. But then, it is a truism that the brutalised do tend to take after their oppressors in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.

Some of the ideological revision, the hardening of hearts and diplomatic stances, the power-play, the crushing of insurgencies, the expansionist forward policies, comes about because of increased confidence. It is based on prosperity and the desire to upgrade status in the comity of nations. The other part is a simple manifestation of the corruption of all power.

And unfortunately, apart from cultural influence that seeps into areas and psyches unseen, most alpha assertion demands a show of strength. And, it raises some very interesting questions about the value of ideology in the ultimate struggle for raw power.

Ideology on this escalator is like a guest that has outstayed its welcome. But this is true only if there is great success. There is very little ideological deviation, except as a tool for dissidence, when things are static or not going well. Cuba hasn’t changed its ways that much. Neither has Burma except for changing its name to Myanmar. And the hatred and animosity we face from a crumbling Pakistan is as fresh as the first blood drawn in the wounds of partition.

America, at the height of the Cold War, encouraged an infamous witchfinder-general called Joseph McCarthy, a right-wing Republican, of the type now extinct. He rose to prominence in 1950, heading an inquisition called The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This was a sub-set of The House Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives. Its mandate was to root out Communist infiltrators and sympathisers from positions of power.

Not only was McCarthyism emblematic of the insecurity of the times, post WW II, when people doubted the efficacy and survivability of “The American Way”, but it led to much intemperate smearing of decent people and attempts at thought control.

McCarthy, who died in 1957, at the age of 48, of alcoholism, used to say things like: "You are seeing today an all out attempt to marshal the forces of the opposition, using not merely the communists, or their fellow travellers-the deluded liberals, the eggheads, and some of my good friends in both the Democratic and Republican Parties who can become heroes overnight in the eyes of the left-wing press if they will just join with the jackal pack".

But the abiding fact is, where people vote, in democracies, such as the biggest, namely America, or the most populous, being India, most voters, says New York Times contributor Sam Tanenhaus, discussing his new book The Death of Conservatism, are “not ideological”. And besides, says Tanenhaus, “the tonal difference between a Joe McCarthy in 1950 and a Reagan in 1980 is enormous.”

India, in search of a new birth for the Right, and its own survivability in the face of internal and external threat, may have to look at what former US Ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the politics of stability”.

The USSR spent decades being decried, blocked and mocked for its politics of confrontation rather than engagement, and present day Russia is in some danger of reverting to the old stance under Prime Minister Putin and Premier Medvedev. But this, clearly, is not the road to influence.

For India, the Right Wing may have to change the abrasive edges of Hindutva, particularly its antipathy to Muslims, left over from the lead up to, and fact of, partition, in recognition of today’s successful multi-religious ethos.

This is how it can hope to gain the support of the majority community, particularly the young and the middle classes currently lost to it, let alone the trust and respect of the minorities.

But this shift in definition and usage need not be looked at as a betrayal of its core beliefs. Instead, it must be viewed in the context of politics being “a theater of ideas” that cannot afford to stagnate into dogma. As Tanenhaus puts it, it must be, “a place where intellectuals now and again exert some visible influence.”

The Americans, after all, are no longer afraid of Communist subversion, not after Reagan’s great success in dissolving the Iron Curtain and bringing down the USSR. And not even after the grave economic crisis it has faced over the last two years.

But this doesn’t stop Right-Wing ideologues like Rush Limbaugh calling President Obama a Socialist. They called President Herbert Hoover similar names as he undertook massive government spending to pull America out of the Great Depression.

But today’s Limbaugh is no McCarthy. So what should the Indian Right do to reinvent itself? And though Ahimsa is laudable, Nehru did underplay it and sideline many of Gandhi’s ideas. India will have to check the ambitions of a resurgent China in the South Asian theatre sooner than it realises. And to do so effectively, it has to stop being a house divided against itself.


(1,057 words)

10th September 2009
Gautam Mukherjee


Published in The Pioneer as OP-ED Page Leader on September 16th, 2009 entitled "Communist belligerence". Ditto online at www.dailypioneer.com and is archived there under Columnists.