Imagine a high brow, a bush shirt and a great air of intellectual arrogance. One of the great problems of the traditional Left was that they presumed they were right and were averse to criticism. That alienated many individuals in academic circles who were not comfortable toeing a Communist party line. The influence of Communists has been particularly strong in the social sciences and history departments in academia. “They were supposed to be a national force looking out for the people’s good,” says columnist Swapan Dasgupta. “But they also turned out to be little tyrants. There’s an old saying that applies to their current state: first I thought it was only the wife. Now it’s the people who don’t understand us!”
As a right-winger, Dasgupta would naturally revel in the Left’s defeat and be a natural “enemy of the people”. But others with no such baggage have been alienated by an attitude of great arrogance and intolerance Left intellectuals assume when they capture certain spaces and academic fora. Says Patna-based economist Saibal Gupta: “Once they get hold of a space, they are not ready to listen to any other point of view. I would say that plurality of knowledge that is a Nehruvian tradition was destroyed by the Left once it got into certain institutions. They’d try and make you persona non grata if you disagreed with them.” One also ran the danger of being labelled a “closet knickerwallah” or “anarchist” if one disagreed with the wise men (and a few women) of the Left.
Possibly because they come from a strong ideological tradition, many Left intellectuals have been seen as intolerant and people who talk only to each other. Says an academic from the CPI(M) ranks: “Yes, I would say in some matters the Communists are intolerant. Perhaps that is why till the night before the election defeat in Bengal, they were under the impression they may scrape through!”
Perhaps that’s why even those who should be lamenting the diminishing of the Left have little sympathy for them. Today, the CPI(M) brigade is no longer in control of too many institutions. But it turns out that arrogance and petty politics are not things only they’re guilty of. Mediocres from the right as well as academics close to the Congress all play their little games. When the high-brow go low, they play dirty.
