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JOSEPH Stalin’s spirit has been showing up at diverse places in recent days, amused, perplexed and despondent. One could see him chortling at the toast King Charles raised to the Anglo-Saxon brotherhood at the White House. He looked saddened to see one of his more erudite followers and among the gentlest of ‘Stalinists’ you would meet saying adieu to admirers in Delhi.
Stalin’s spirit has looked despondent and shocked at his followers in Iran, the Mujahideen-i-Khalq, who are siding with Israel as Western stooges against the country’s battle with imperialism. And he didn’t look too pleased with the election verdict in crucial Indian states whose results were still coming in on Monday and where comrades sworn to Stalinism as their creed just helped Hindu fascism consolidate its hold over India.
Mamata Banerjee lost West Bengal to Narendra Modi on Monday. He was enabled in the task by the secular left led by the CPI-M. Mamata Banerjee offered the doughtiest challenge to Hindu fascism among all the opposition parties. Rahul Gandhi is also a leading challenger to Modi, but far too many of his Congress colleagues look poised to desert him at the first temptation from the ruling classes — Judas pretending to be Nehruvian activists. A woman candidate for the communist party, which together with the BJP sought Mamata’s arrest for any number of frustrated charges, was canvassing with a singular message in her Bengal constituency. The CPI-M’s view of Mamata was so shocking that I recorded the message on the phone to be sure I had heard it right. The woman was lying to her voters: “We believe that if Trinamool is defeated, the BJP is defeated automatically.” At the last count as I write, the BJP was leading in 192 out of the state’s 294 seats with Mamata’s Trinamool Congress trailing at 95. Mamata has questioned the count, but it would be a stretch to see the leads reversing.
A solitary CPI-M candidate was likely to get one seat, if at all, and the Congress, likewise, one. Rahul Gandhi also uncharacteristically laid into Mamata during the campaigning, describing her rule as terrorism. The comment may have put paid to the future of the perennially fractured INDIA bloc opposition. Everyone who has ruled West Bengal needed an iron hand, given the state’s history of militant agitations.
Stalin had little clue that Indian comrades would one day shore up Hindu nationalism, hitching their anti-Congressism with Hindutva forces.
The late Mubashir Hasan, who helped found Pakistan Peoples Party as a left-of- centre hub, visited West Bengal during CPI-M’s rule. As a perceptive former administrator in various Bhutto ministries, Hasan put his finger on the button. He told me he saw little that was Marxist about the communist party’s rule in Kolkata. “All you need is a strong cadre and the police with you, as is the case here. And you are invincible as long as you don’t make an error of judgement.” The CPI-M ruled Kolkata with an iron hand for a record 34 years until it hit an ideological sandbar and wooed corporates against the people’s will to rural regions of Singur and Nandigram. Left rule ended in 2011.
India’s communist party was born in 1925. In 1946, the party turned to armed struggle and waged guerrilla warfare against feudal satraps in the Nizam’s territory of Telangana abutting Hyderabad. Its best songs and poetry and creative juices flowed in this period. The idea was to launch a rural-based movement à la China. But in 1951, Stalin summoned its leaders and said their conditions were different from Mao’s. There was no USSR in the neighbourhood to provide a lifeline or sanctuary to guerrillas. Besides, the network of railways and a battle-hardened army would enable the colonial state to crush the movement with ease. Stalin advised his Indian comrades to suspend the Telangana movement and join the national democratic mainstream.
The party obeyed and won enough seats (16) in the first elections to become the main parliamentary opposition to Nehru in 1952. It went on to establish the world’s first elected communist government in Kerala in 1957. So far, so good. Stalin would be happy with this less-discussed preference for bourgeois democracy if the time so dictated. He had little clue, though, that Indian comrades would one day shore up Hindu nationalism, hitching their anti-Congressism with Hindutva forces. The slide started with coalition state governments in 1967. The left enabled the RSS to join the federal government in 1977 and immediately felt the pain when Romila Thapar’s and Bipan Chandra’s history textbooks were banned. The left again shored up V.P. Singh jointly with the BJP in 1989. And now a self-inflicted disaster in West Bengal.
Stalin’s spirit was smiling sardonically when King Charles and Donald Trump were engaged in one-upmanship of faux historiography last week. Trump claimed that without US troops, Europeans would be speaking Deutsch. Charles returned the compliment in a toast to the Anglo-Saxon brotherhood. Had Britain not defeated Napoleon, Trump’s ilk would be speaking French. The exchange by habit was noteworthy for willfully airbrushing a chunk of vital history.
An age-old custom has plied with a Western bias to belittle the critical role of Joseph Stalin in Hitler’s defeat and demise. But for the 27 million Soviet citizens who laid down their lives in fighting Nazism, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt would have perhaps not met Stalin at Yalta but would have been summoned instead by the Fuhrer to sign a surrender in Berlin.
Stalin’s spirit was saddened when Prof Vijay Singh passed away in Delhi last month. Stalin had a life-sized presence in Vijay’s revolutionary and intellectual life, a soft-spoken and widely respected authority on Soviet and Russian history. Stalin inspired Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Ho’s Vietnam, Lumumba’s Congo. That was Vijay’s view, and there’s something about the argument that his demise was mourned across the world’s history faculties. He was remembered in Lahore by his comrades in the Pakistani Inqilabi Party and Pakistan Mazdoor Mahaaz.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2026
