A Bengal Tiger

 First, read the following lines from a New Yorker essay:

When, starting in 1919, Vladimir Lenin convened the first congresses of the Communist International, some Bolsheviks were disappointed by the characters who turned up—old-fashioned socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists, coming with false papers, in disguise, under aliases, and all apparently expecting hotel rooms. The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge observed, “It was obvious at first glance that here were no insurgent souls.” Lenin kept a blinking electric light on his desk to cut meetings short. But one of the arrivals made an impression. “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair,” Serge recalled. It was Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian who was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party.

Did you catch that?

One of the arrivals who impressed Lenin was an Indian.  And, this Indian was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party!

As one with leftist leanings in my younger phase, I had heard of a name M.N. Roy.  But, I had no idea how big he was in the history of Communism.

Who was this M.N. Roy?  "Born into a Brahmin family in West Bengal in 1887, he left India in his twenties on a series of missions to secure funds and weapons for an uprising against the British Raj."  

Roy was one of the many thinkers from there, which prompted Gopal Krishna Gokhale to put it succinctly more than a century ago: “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow.” 

Such rich stories were why I was fascinated with Bengal and Calcutta, and when the opportunity presented itself, I left for Calcutta.  I am surprised that I didn't fall in love with a Bengali girl! 

But, to think is one thing.  For a thinker to end up in Mexico and Russia in the early years of the 20th century is completely another.  How did M.N. Roy manage to do that?

Roy’s parleys with contacts in Java, China, and Japan yielded almost nothing. In Tokyo, he resolved to press onward to the United States: “I decided to take the bull by the horn, pinned a golden cross to the lapel of my coat, put on a very sombre face, and called at the American consulate.” Disguised as “Father Martin” and having, he said, “reinforced my armour with a morocco-bound copy of the Holy Bible beautifully printed on rice-paper,” Roy arrived in San Francisco in 1916.

Damn, they should make a movie out of this guy's life!

Roy promptly fell in love, got married, and the couple's political activities invited trouble.  That is when he changed his name from Narendranath Bhattacharya and became Manabendra Nath Roy.

A name change doesn't fool anybody.  The couple fled to to Mexico.

There Roy witnessed a revolution, learned Spanish, and co-founded the Communist Party of Mexico—one of the first national Communist Parties outside Russia. One day, a Russian man from Chicago asked to meet Roy at a hotel: Mikhail Borodin, one of Lenin’s top lieutenants. Before long, he invited him to the Kremlin. It was the start of a journey that led not only to Moscow and Berlin but also to China, where Roy became a leading Soviet envoy during the Chinese Civil War.

Head-spinning!

So, with all these accomplishments, whatever became of Roy?  Why did we never read about him in our history textbook?

Roy got disillusioned with the international communist movement. 

Shortly after Roy returned to India, in 1930, in a deluded attempt to influence the independence movement, he was arrested and imprisoned by the British. Few people had any reason to remember him once he quit the Communists and became a radical humanist, living out his final years in a cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Aha!

His radical humanism lost against the Gandhian humanism and Nehru's socialism.  Like most of us, M.N. Roy too was soon forgotten even when he was alive.

In 1946, Roy established the Indian Renaissance Institute at Dehradun in order to develop the Indian Renaissance Movement. 

Roy died of a heart attack on 25 January 1954.

What a life!

Source
Notice the “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair”? And, oh, Lenin too ;)

Today's California and yesterday's Bengal

One of the main reasons that I had a fascination for Calcutta was this: I had been exposed forever to "what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow." 

Though it was in the context of independence struggle to kick the bastards out of India, even after the country became free, it seemed like many of the leading intellectuals came from there.

And, of course, my commie teenage sentiments also favored the principled leftists like Jyoti Basu.

Throughout history, different regions have served as the leading lights, diffusing their ideas through other regions.  Here in the US, in recent years, it has been California.

To outsiders, California might come across as a liberal (as in left-of-center) state.  Which is not entirely true, if one pauses to think about it.  Two easy exhibits that everybody can relate two: Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.  But, there is more.

When I landed in Los Angeles, George Deukmejian was the governor.  He was a Republican.  Yep, a Republican governor, and for two terms.

His successor was also a Republican--Pete Wilson.  By the time Wilson ran for the office, I was well versed in California's and America's politics, and I hated the thought of him becoming governor because of his crazy ideas, and how he and the GOP were beating up on immigrants.  He successfully fueled an anti-immigrant hysteria.  The asshole continued to influence the political scene in the state, and helped another entertainer--Arnold Schwarzenegger--become another (perhaps the final ever) Republican governor.

What California thinks today, USA thinks tomorrow!

The epicenter of 2018’s version of conservatism, and of American Trumpism, isn’t Washington, DC. It’s California.
Breitbart News was founded in Los Angeles, and its headquarters remains in the city’s Brentwood Heights neighborhood. Its founder, Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012, met former White House adviser Steve Bannon in LA. Ben Shapiro, whom Breitbart mentored and who worked at his eponymous publication, now runs his own conservative media empire, DailyWire.com, out of a nondescript office building in LA.
The Claremont Colleges, located on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, were the birthplace of intellectual Trumpism and the “Flight 93 Election” — an influential essay published in the Claremont Review of Books that stated that electing Trump was the only way to save the country. The author of that missive, Michael Anton, went to the University of California Berkeley and Claremont Graduate University, and then went on to work in the Trump White House, alongside White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a native of Santa Monica, and Trumpist trade adviser Peter Navarro, who taught at the UC Irvine.

trump and his party are playing the California tunes from two decades ago.  Since then, California has moved on.  Its current demographics, economics, and politics, appear to be the key to the future.  Which means, if California continues to think today what the rest of the country will think tomorrow, well, the party of Reagan will die the same way that the party of Wilson has died in California.  And that is one hell of an awesome thing to celebrate! ;)

A big day for two Bengalis, on opposite sides of the planet

Rajat Gupta, who was born in Calcutta, and who went on to head the famed McKinsey, and served on quite a few prestigious corporate and non-profit boards, was found guilty of insider trading:

Count 1 – Conspiracy to commit securities fraud — Guilty
Count 2 – Securities Fraud – Not Guilty – Goldman Sachs ahead of the investment bank’s March 2007 earnings.
Count 3 – Securities Fraud – Guilty – Goldman Sachs ahead of Warren Buffett investing $5 billion.
Count 4 – Securities Fraud – Guilty – Goldman ahead of Buffett deal.
Count 5 – Securities Fraud – Guilty – Goldman Sachs ahead of its December 2008 earnings.
Count 6 – Securities Fraud – Not Guilty — Procter & Gamble ahead of its January 2009 earnings.
The conspiracy count carries a prison term of up to five years and a fine of at least $250,000. Each securities fraud count carries a maximum of 20 years and a fine of $5 million.

Not looking good for Gupta:

U.S. Atty. Preet Bharara has called trading on nonpublic inside information "rampant" on Wall Street.

"Having fallen from respected insider to convicted inside trader, Mr. Gupta has now exchanged the lofty boardroom for the prospect of a lowly jail cell," Bharara said.

 Bharara, as I noted before, was the attorney in the Raj Rajaratnam case, and all the people being of South Asian origin.  Not to forget the "Indian mafia!"

We people have truly arrived in the US, from technology to Wall Street to politics to prison time!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, another Bengali is looking at an uptick in his fortunes:

India's ruling Congress party on Friday nominated Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee for the largely ceremonial post of president, capping several days of dramatic negotiations that exposed a frail government coalition. Congress President Sonia Gandhi announced the party's decision, praising Mr. Mukherjee for a "long and distinguished career of public service" over more than four decades and urging all parties to back him.

It used to be said that Bengal was so ahead of everybody else that whatever happened in Bengal today happened elsewhere a few days after.  If that is true, then ... oh, maybe that is the end of the world that the Mayans predicted :)

Women rule in Bengal and Tamil Nadu! Communism dies!!!

Jayalalitha (left) leads her party to one ass-whooping victory over the geriatric Karunanidhi.  Not that I am a supporter of either, but the margin of victory is simply awesome.
The defeated Karunanidhi said, “The people of Tamil Nadu have given me rest.”

All the way across, Mamata Banerjee routs the Commies from power.  A 34-year rule by the same folks.   She said it was "a victory for maa, mati, manush [her party slogan that translated reads: mother, soil, people]”  I suppose all over the world we love alluring alliterations :)

Perhaps the end of "democratic" communism in India?

Somewhere down the line in a fast-changing world the communists, many believe, began losing their way. After the first wave of farm reforms had exhausted its potential, they needed fresh ideas as governments cut back on spending, and private capital was touted as the main driver of growth and jobs. Land reform had run its course in Bengal, and farm produce prices were falling. Peasants, with enough food in their bellies, now aspired to better lives.
But a largely gerontocratic and hidebound leadership - already stunned into stasis by the break-up of the Soviet Union - "lost its way coping with the pressures of a globalised market", says social scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya.

Well, in my part of India, communist leaders were never exciting anyway.  In Tamil Nadu, elections were simply way too fascinating for me when I was a kid.  It was fantastic rhetoric and theatre. Even at local campaign speeches, the guys--rarely a woman leader those days--would go on for hours, and even throw in more than one challenge to the United States.  Literally, sentences such as "I am warning the US President ..."  But, boy, some of those politicians had wonderful command of the language, with quick and biting wit.  When I watch the C-Span speeches at Congress, I can't believe our politicians are as boring as the fabled Soviet leaders were!

The family lore is that as a four year old kid, I wanted to go watch MGR (Jayalalitha's boss, co-actor, lover, ...) at an election rally.  This was in Sengottai, where I spent most of my upper-kindergarten years.  With grandma saying no, apparently I sneaked out while it was raining, stood at a corner lost for a while, until somebody brought me back home.  Promptly, it was a high fever the following morning, which was then referred to as "MGR fever."

 So, to mark the occasion, here are MGR and Jayalalitha, who were both movie idols before switching over to politics, in one of my favorite songs featuring them

How Winston Churchill starved India. Literally :(

Soutik Biswas writes in reviewing Madhusree Mukherjee's Churchill's Secret War:

Some three million Indians died in the famine of 1943. The majority of the deaths were in Bengal. In a shocking new book, Churchill's Secret War, journalist Madhusree Mukherjee blames Mr Churchill's policies for being largely responsible for one of the worst famines in India's history.

Why is the war time prime minister, Churchill, to be blamed?  Well, the acute shortage of food

was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy - which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy - in coastal Bengal where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks.

And, what was Churchill's response when this was discussed at cabinet meetings?  The soon to be appointed Viceroy, Archibald Wavell, writes:

"Apparently it is more important to save the Greeks and liberated countries than the Indians and there is reluctance either to provide shipping or to reduce stocks in this country," writes Sir Wavell in his account of the meetings. Mr Amery is more direct. "Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country," he writes.

As Shakespeare wrote, "And Brutus is an honourable man" .... :(