China’s ruling class — communists who are celebrating 60 years of absolute power with a panache that comes from presiding over an almost superpower — need to be analysed far better by India’s chattering class. As was demonstrated recently, fear-fuelled flag waving is a terrible substitute for cool-headed comprehension. But here’s the good news for comrades across the Line of Actual Control: if you felt some members of India’s bourgeoisie are thinking rather poorly on the China issue, note that all members of India’s communist organisations are thinking very creatively on the same subject. Please consider this a gift from our free society on the occasion of your revolution’s anniversary.

There’s so much confusion in the China-India discourse in both countries that this gift should be properly explained. Let’s start by considering a hypothetical situation. Assume that a former Central public sector unit (PSU), which had been privatised amidst shrill protests by India’s communists, hired an American engineering company for a key project. Assume that an industrial accident happened in that key project when the American engineering company was executing the work order. Assume that a large number of workers died in that accident.

How would India’s communists and its communist trade union leaders have reacted? One, demand the arrest of engineers, managers of the American company working on the project. Two, demand that the CEO of the American company be brought to justice. Three, if one and two are not done then threaten to launch a nationwide agitation against India’s capitulation to ruthless American capitalism. Four, issue strong press statements in Delhi that argue the tragedy is symptomatic of the price India is paying for its blind acceptance of neo-liberal economic policy and its US-centric foreign policy. Five, produce long think pieces, published in People’s Democracy and in the bourgeois press, about how the tragedy ties in with characteristics of America’s global political and economic designs, of which the India-US nuclear deal, opposed by India’s communists, was such an eye-opening example.

... contd.