Former comrade chronicles communist trajectory in Bengal

At that time, communists were men of a special mould. But after the transfer of power, once they entered the Assembly and Parliament, we saw that these men were men of straw,” says Jolly Mohan Kaul.

After all, at 89, Kaul has seen the rise and now, the steep fall of Communism in West Bengal, ab intra. In the 1940s, he joined the movement and eventually rose to become the Calcutta district secretary of the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI).

In his personal life, too, Kaul's involvement with the Left movement was intimate. He married Manikuntala Sen, one of the first woman activist of the CPI.

 

Today, though Kaul likes to call himself a Gandhian; all but mirroring the disillusionment with the communist system, rather than the ideology itself that is sweeping through the state. The agenda, he believes, has changed, not unlike the agents themselves.

“When I joined the Communist Party, our constituency was the poor. Now, it seems that they have changed that and are chasing after GDP. The two things are contradictory,” he explains.

Indeed, the hurried industrialisation drive of the incumbent Left Front government came to a dramatic halt as Nandigram and Singur revolted, though not without encouragement, when enterprise was thrust into the egalitarian paradigm. Then too, the protest was against the method, rather than the ideology itself.

But Kaul's entry into the communist movement was in itself a reaction to another ideology: fascism. “This generation does not realise the threat to humanity and civilisation that the rise of fascism posed. And at the forefront of the fight against fascism was the communist movement. So, I thought I must go the whole hog,” he states.

In 1963, however, he left the party as the country reeled from the Indo-Sino war. He felt dismayed that his comrades had supported the neighboring communist — China. In effect, Kaul was a communist between wars, and a pacifist all through.

Unsurprising then, Kaul posits that the Naxal war of attrition that is burning through the Indian heartland is self-destructive. “If they (Naxalites) had not taken up violence, they could have done more for the tribals. But the State is doing even more harm,” he says.

In a sense, it was the State that Kaul had attempted at altering through his pursit of communist, and later Gandhian, ideology. But now, without exception he says, “that a better world is only possible with better human beings.” And possibly, with better leaders, too.

Jolly Kaul's memoirs In Search of A Better World was releaesd in Kolkata recently.