Vijay Prashad's obit-piece A Marxist and a Gentleman on Jyoti Basu, arguably one of the few balanced Marxists, makes for depressive reading, beginning with an artificial separation between a Marxist and a gentleman.
Prashad seems to have bantered Dr Ashok Mitra who said – when he was the finance minister of the first Left Front government in West Bengal – "I am a communist, not a bhadralok". The fashion of using 'bhadralok' or gentleman, was a borrowed from the neo-colonialist historian of Cambridge School, J H Broomfield who criticized the section of intellectuals who expressed solidarity with peasant protests against zamindars (in league with the colonial rulers) in the 19th century Bengal – as exploiters and described the British ICS officers as 'ma-baap' (parents) of natives. Marxist historian Narahari Kaviraj exposed the neo-colonial school, discovering that the word 'bhadralok' was used in anger in a report of a divisional commissioner in 1871. Those who were inciting the poor peasants are ' privileged bhadralok', the British civilian wrote.
Prashad's comment on Naxalism–"reckless Naxalites undone by their misreading of the historical moment"– is incongruent in an obituary, as are his sweeping observations about Basu's service to Communism in Bengal or for that matter for India. The moment the CPI(M)-led Left Front government in West Bengal entered into a joint sector project in 1985 with the RP Goenka group for a petrochemical venture at Haldia in West Bengal, it represented CPI(M)'s collaboration with monopoly capitalism (it must be noted that Lenin in Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism, termed monopoly capital as "the economic essence of imperialism"). In the early 1970s, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi mooted the 'joint sector', both CPI(M) and CPI vehemently criticized her for an anti-people and rightwing drift. Even then, the debate about whether the joint sector was a 'strategic retreat' or reformist-shift must be carried out elsewhere, rather than in an obituary.
Prashad's exercise is contaminated with suppression and distortion of facts in order to denigrate the opposition. He does not seem to endorse Rosa Luxemburg's perception of democratic practice "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently". Which is why he mentions like a devout poster-boy of CPI(M) how many CPI(M) members were killed in 1970-71 but is silent about Naxalites. This writer profoundly differs with Maoism or Naxalism politically and ideologically but criticizes the killings of hundreds of Naxalites by the Congress government in the 1970s, a number at least 30 times more than the CPI(M) cadres and sympathizers, killed by the same government. This too is equally condemnable because such brutalities are a mockery of our democracy.