Articles by GPD

The Sixteenth Party Congress of the CPC has taken an ideological leap and effectively rejected the notion of permanent class struggle. Jiang Zemin's political and ideological tract Three Represents has brought together the formerly antagonistic classes.

A play was staged in this year's Ganesh festival in Delhi. The speaker of the Lok Sabha seemed to have liked it. Soon after the play was done in Mumbai. The current culture expert in the capital city of the Marathas, Uddhav Thackeray, did not like it. He wondered how such a play could have been performed in the festival. The episode is yet another example of a phenomenon of Maharashtra's cultural life - that of extragovernmental censorship, much more damaging than governmental censorship.

There have been three major appropriations of Lord Ganesha in the history of Pune. The first was by the peshwas. The second was when Lokamanya Tilak started the Ganeshotsava in 1893. The sublime is followed by the ridiculous. The third, and the ridiculous, appropriation of Ganesha has been by Suresh Kalmadi, the politician.

While opposing the naming of the airport at Port Blair after Veer Savarkar, the Leftists could and should have argued that Savarkar was no patriot and nationalist. Anyone who writes a book like the one he wrote on Hindutva cannot be a patriot and a nationalist - even if the issue of Savarkar's apology to the British had not been there. This would have, of coruse, meant taking a view of nationalism which is different from that of the national bourgeoisie.

The gravest danger to the country's polity todate has been drowned in legalities and rhetorical cleverness. This is what happens when the defence of the secular polity is not understood primarily as a function of people's movements and struggles.