When I was young and impressionable and growing up in Delhi in the seventies everyone I knew was a leftist of some kind or other. There were the armchair revolutionaries who lived out their imaginary revolutions in the dusty corridors of Delhi’s universities. There were the ‘intellectuals’ who worked mostly in newspapers and were full of bombast and jargon. And there were the Naxalites, who, to me, were huge romantic figures because they were the only ones who had actually seen action. Some had wandered the countryside looking for landlords to behead, others had been tortured in Calcutta’s jails. I remember hearing these tales of politics and passion on terraces in Nizamuddin and Hauz Khas on endless hot evenings filled with kebabs and cheap rum.

The seventies were when Indian Marxism was at its zenith. Not only did revolution seem a mere breath away, but there was a prime minister who was in total leftist thrall — Indira Gandhi. She nationalised banks because she wanted the proletariat to get loans more easily than evil capitalists. She abolished the princes and took away their privy purses because they represented feudalism and other bad things. The Left was delighted, and even more delighted when she came up with ‘Garibi Hatao’. It was a time of innocence and we did not realise then that poverty could not be removed by slogans and that nationalised banks were going to be just as mean about giving loans to the starving masses as private banks.

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