jamahir
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When you have a weapon you have to use it sometimes. If you don't people don't respect you or it anymore.
That is quite a ruthless, dismissive, war-mongering and imperialist statement.
British Raj was beneficial: PM
Dr. Singh said India's struggle for independence was more an assertion by Indians of their 'natural right to self-governance' than an outright rejection of the 'British claim to good governance.'m.rediff.com
We have to see this in context.
Even I an anti-imperialist, Communist agree that the British did bring a few good things to India, not only those that Manmohan Singh mentioned but also those like the banning of the Upper Caste Hindu ordained practice of Sati where a Hindu widow would be burned alive on her dead husband's pyre. And the British system allowed for Dalits like Ambedkar to become better educated and organized. Ambedkar later became the co-writer of modern India's Constitution and this work was an advancement over much of India's previous socio-economic structure and Ambedkar was in a good position to understand it having suffered by it through being a Lower Caste Hindu, a Dalit, an "Untouchable".
However, Manmohan Singh, when PM, wrongly said that the biggest internal threat to India was not the right-wing Hindutvadi thought but the long-standing left-wing Naxalite guerrilla movement who are fighting the state in the jungles and mountains of India. The Naxals are also called Maoists because of their inspiration from Mao's revolution. And tragically for India it is currently the Hindutvadi thought governing India which has maintained India's socio-economic injustices like Mukesh Ambani's 27-storey "house" in Bombay, which has an internal Hindu temple, while in rest of India people are thrust upon with things like hunger, homelessness, curable blindness and other such things.
Indians will never understand the ground-shaking, nerve-racking, and history-changing effects of a revolution. They just lack the vigor and rigor.
They are soft, passive, submissive and darwish-like in their domestic political attitude. Hence, Gandhi. That's the best they can have.
Sorry you are incorrect. India has had socialist / communist activism almost as old as the revolution in Russia, and one manifestation of which is the Naxalite movement I wrote of above. I will give the example of Bhagat Singh who was hanged by the British in 1931 at the age of 23. He was much inspired by Marx and Lenin and had individual thought as well. I will quote from a recent thread of mine on him :
Please read the rest of the OP and the thread.I will conclude with the last moments of Bhagat Singh’s life, as reported by his close associate Manmathnath Gupta, he writes:
“When called upon to mount the scaffold, Bhagat Singh was reading a book by Lenin or on Lenin. He continued his reading and said, ‘Wait a while. A revolutionary is talking to another revolutionary’. Bhagat Singh continued to read. After a few moments, he flung the book towards the ceiling and said, ‘Let us go’.” [Emphasis added]
And this is also a thread of mine about British-time pre-1947 socialist / communist activism among the Muslims in India.
At present since the 2016 events in left-dominated JNU university in Delhi, socialism / communism has seen a resurgence in India, especially among the youth. This has also been driven by the tragic suicide of a Dalit student Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad University campus. And the leftists have been joined by other progressives.
And on PDF I do my best to speak about Socialism and Communism, Indian and global, which you too know. I have recently proposed a new economic system whose basis is Communism and which you can read in this thread.
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