The only Fatherland-Communists, Ouit India and the Soviet Union (An Old and Rare Book)

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Are ideologies a pair of binoculars that enable us to see far? Or are they a pair of blinkers that keep us from seeing even that which is at hand?

How is it that the communists, equipped as they say they are with the one great Theory which explains everything, fumble so very often in seeing the obvious? How did the Theory lead them to advocate the creation of Pakistan? To declare in 1947 that India had not really become independent? To insist that Pandit Nehru was just "a running dog of imperialism? To launch an armed insurrection in 1949 on the premise that India was ripe for an armed revolution? To so consistently fail to see that the system they were glorifying had saddled East Europe, the Soviet Union, China, indeed every single State which had adopted it, with third rate, impoverished, bankrupt economies? To fumble so much in their responses to the Soviet coup?

Arun Shourie, one of the leading commentators on current affairs in India today, illustrates the malady by reconstructing what the communists did during the Quit India Movement. In the process he uncovers the secret negotiations they. though members of the All India Congress Committee at the time, conducted with the British, the secret understanding they struck with the British, the reports they submitted to the imperial rulers about the work they were doing to subvert the movement Gandhiji had launched.

Arun Shourie goes on to examine the verbal terrorism by which communists frighten those who attempt to examine their Theory and their practice.

He concludes with a review of the reactions of our communists to the recent coup in the Soviet Union, showing how the very genes of the Indian Communists compel them to stick by Stalinism, how their mental habits and their mentality are to this day what they were in the forties.

Arun Shourie is among India's best known commentators on current and political affairs and backs his distinctive writing with rigorous analysis and meticulous research. Born in Jallandhar in 1941, he obtained a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Syracuse, USA. He has been an economist with the World Bank, a consultant to the Planning Commission and the Editor of the Indian Express. His writings have gained him a vast following of readers as well as several national and international honours such as the Padma Bhushan, the Magsaysay Award, the International Editor of the Year Award, and the Astor Award. He has written nine books, and is at present at work on two.

To every question our communists have an answer. The answer accords with a line. The line they say flows directly from a theory. It is a Master Theory of course, a Revelation they would say, if only they could bring them selves to use the word.

If your answer does not accord with their line, they come down on you as an avalanche - of denunciation, of vicious abuse, of their sudden discoveries about your motives. "If your answer does not accord with their line..." is in fact too optimistic. For their line changes often, as often as their convenience. Actually it changes even more often: it changes as often as their perception of their convenience changes. And that is at least every few years. Hence, the sentence really should begin, "if your answer does not accord with their line of the moment..."

**Contents and Sample Pages**