For long, I am ardent fan of Arun Shourie. Like you, I am always amazed by the volumes of research that go into making of his books.

I chanced up on your review of Only Fatherland while I was idle-googling in the wake of the Mitrokhin Archives controversy.

I was amused by the way you summarised the book - “a tirade against Indian Communism–the Indian Communists, to be specific.”. I thought that tirades are strings of assertions and abuse devoid of any proof.

What intrigued me abt the book is the context that occasioned this book - I guess, it was in 1983. Arun Shourie was not an obvious Rightist in those days. He was a Civil Rights activist and was one hell of an anti-establishment (read it as “Anti-Congress”) writers. VM Tarkunde asked him to deliver MN Roy Memorial Lecture, that year. Shourie chose to speak on the role that the Communists played in the Indian Independence movement. The lecture might have caused quite an embarrassment to the organizers for Shourie did not spare MN Roy, either!

I would divide the book into three major parts:

1) Communists and Quit India
2) Shourie’s response on the “verbal terrorism” of Communists
3) Concluding chapter(s?) on the Indian Communists’ reaction to the collapse of their Only Fatherland

Originally, Shourie had planned a book titled “Ideology as Blinkers” and was planning to use the material in this book as an example to illustrate his propositions. I wish he had done that rather than doing a hurried job by adding a couple of other articles and concluding it forcibly.

The concluding chapter(s?) on the Collapse of Communism & the reaction it generated in India was a little disappointing for me. The topic was big enough to be discussed over several volumes.

I would have loved to read a lot more on:

1) What failed - the Theory or the Practice? The factors leading to the collapse - are they central to the Theory or are they incidental/accidental, nay, historical?

2) What accounts for the fascination of Indian Intellectuals with Communism? Is it just plain brainwashing? Or is it intellectual lethargy? Is it sustained disinformation? Isn’t the popularity of communism in India - especially that of the Maoist variety - has less to do with the Theory and more to do with the local conditions?

3) How did anti-Communists fare in India? Shourie notes elsewhere that people like Ram Swaroop, Sitaram Goel did lots of pioneering work in this area. I am yet to read any of those works.

Shourie tried to cover some of the ground in his book on “the eminient historians” especially on the first two questions but I wouldn’t mind reading more :-). It’s,of course, unfair to expect Shourie to do all this by himself. But one builds expectations based on past performance.

Regards
Chary

Everytime India is down, the Indian communists are among those trying to get in a kick.

But what I cannot understand is, how anyone can join the damn party and remain a committed believer through all its twists and turns. I guess some kind of filtration takes place. The sanest leave the party. Those who saw that the CPI was just an agent of the USSR left and became Naxalites - I can understand, and, in a way respect that too. The remaining were either there for self-serving reasons or because they were too deluded.

Those are the people who man the CPI and CPM right now, so not surprisingly, they are the nuttiest.