Book Review | An Angry Riposte Of A Leftist Apostate

Kavita Krishnan does not mince words. If she did, she would have written an academic work, and not a political pamphlet. The pamphlet can only be written from the political trenches. Krishnan does that. She starts off with a political confession where she stands: “An urgent instinct to defend a democracy under siege led me to organised Left politics in the early 1990s. And the same urgent instinct caused met to break with it 30 years later.” Her disillusionment with the Left in India, and in the West, is the easy acceptance of the old thesis that opposing American hegemony equals to resisting Western capitalism and imperialism. And extending the logic, it becomes sensible to support Russia against Ukraine, China against the Uighurs. She argues with chapter and verse that Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi are on the same page. What binds them all is the concept of a multipolar world. She shows that Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) is not an argument for a unipolar world led by America, but it is based on the acceptance of a multipolar world, Krishnan reveals the folly of the traditional Left standpoint in India and in Europe that what is more important is to oppose Trump’s unilateralism that rests on a unipolar world. She says that Putin, Xi and Modi are ideological partners in the idea of a multipolar world.

What is this multipolar world and what are its underpinnings. Krishnan cites abundant evidence in the intellectual changes in the major polities. It is the rightward swing in politics. The right-wing view is based in nationalist supremacy, which asserts the pre-eminence of the majority and rebuts the liberal democratic notions of universal human rights and freedoms, and by implication the rights of minorities. Trump is against Latin Americans, Putin thinks that Ukraine is ruled by Nazis, Xi assiduously marginalises the Uighurs in Xinjiang, and Modi is the champion of Hindu supremacist position. And all of these leaders take refuge in the high-sounding vacuity called “civilisational state”.

She points out that while the Left in India sees the majoritarian worldview of the Bharatiya Janata Party, it falls in line with the Western Left in supporting Putin against American dominance, and seeing it as a way of defending democracy. While the Left in the West is right in calling out the hypocrisy of liberal democracy systems, it errs in not recognising the far-right agendas of the right-wing leaders dominating national politics across the world.

Krishnan reveals the old dilemma and agony of a person who has broken with the Leftist Establishment, that of pointing out in vain that liberal democracy, universal human rights are an important political inheritance, and they should not be abandoned because of blinkered anti-Americanism. Moulded as she is in Left intellectual traditions, she digs out evidence for every bit of critique she offers of “illiberal multipolarity”. The book is an angry riposte to received Leftism, but also a passionate plea for democratic values and freedom.

De-democratisation, a Global Story: Scripts, Actors and Enablers

By Kavita Krishnan

Context

pp. 333; Rs 799/-