Terms of Trade | What Poland tells us about ideology
History is replete with instances where politicians thought that the only contradictions that matter are what they have solved but are then proven wrong
A weekly column on political economy by a philistine writer must constantly struggle against ending up as mundane, verbose or worse, half-baked. Political economy, after all, moves at a glacial pace and does not necessarily lend itself to a weekly news cycle. So, this week, I decided on wordplay.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Poland this week. The country’s name means little for most Indians except in the state of Kerala where it has gained folklore status because of the 1991 Malayalam movie Sandesam; it is among the best political satires ever made in India. Disclosure: As a Bihari, I only know this because I am married to a Malayali.
The movie is about two politically active brothers in Kerala – one aligned to what looks like the Congress and another to the Left – who are constantly engaged in a self-destructive fight while their parents suffer mentally and materially. In one scene, the Congress-leaning brother is showing accusing his leftie sibling of resorting to international political rhetoric when he is being challenged on local political questions. Those who have known the Left in India would agree that this is a valid criticism of leftists. The leftie sibling ridicules his right-wing challenger by replying that the latter cannot talk international politics because he does not know anything about it.
It is then that the Congress brother challenges him with “Polandilenthu sambhavichu? (What happened in Poland)”.
Sandesam was made in 1991, just two years after Solidarity led a popular uprising and toppled the communist regime in Poland, among the most important satellite states of the Soviet Union. Challenging a dogmatic communist about Poland just after the demise of the socialist block was tantamount to questioning their very raison d'être. And the leftie sibling’s response is exactly that. “Polandine patti nee oraksharam mindaruthu! Enikkathishtamalla. (Don't utter a word about Poland! I don't like it.)”, he said while having a meltdown before the two almost came to blows.
While Sandesam is absolutely right to call out the dogma of the Left in Kerala by using the Poland analogy, dogma per se is not something, which only affects the less educated foot soldiers of political ideologies.
One can make this point by using another story from Poland itself, something this author learnt about while interviewing Amartya Sen about his autobiography Home in the World. At one place in the book, Sen talked about his exchange with Oscar Lange in Cambridge in 1956. Lange, himself a Polish, was among the most famous Marxist economists and considered an authority on socialist planning methods.
Lange discussed with Sen, how the Polish government, with the help of the Soviet Union, had built a massive industrial city Nowa Huta (literally The New Steel Mill) near Karakow to instil progressive ideology among the people. The steel mill – it was called Vladimir Lenin Steelworks and its production was more than what all of Poland needed – did not make economic sense as raw materials had to be shipped from distant places, Lange told Sen.
But the decision to build the factory was taken because, “Krakow has been a very reactionary city, with a long right-wing history –they didn’t even fight the Nazis properly”, Lange told Sen explaining that “the decision was taken that a modern industrial town ‘with a large proletariat’ was just what Krakow needed”. Lange claimed that the idea had been a success and “People in Krakow are already beginning to become less reactionary”. Sen remembers not being convinced by Lange’s reasoning which he thought was “much too neat and formulaic”.
History would prove Sen’s scepticism right and Lange’s economic determinism wrong. Instead of becoming a bastion for communist ideology, Nowa Huta emerged as the epicentre for anti-communist politics and sent a tectonic shock, which was instrumental in bringing down the entire socialist camp. One of the most famous struggles in Nowa Huta was working class ‘believers’ mobilising themselves against the communist regime’s plans to remove the wooden cross they worshipped in lieu of a church in the city. Karol Józef Wojtyła, the catholic priest who started the tradition of a midnight mass in what was supposed to be a city of atheists, would go on to serve as Pope John Paul II from 1978 to 2005.
“Politically, Eastern Europe was the Achilles heel of the Soviet system, and Poland (plus, to a lesser extent, Hungary) its most vulnerable spot,” historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in Age of Extremes. “The country’s (Poland) public opinion was overwhelmingly united not only by a dislike of the regime but by an anti-Russian (and anti-Jewish) and consciously Roman Catholic, Polish nationalism,” Hobsbawm wrote.
The ideological hubris, which led the commissars into believing that just economic factors could triumph over every other contradiction to preserve socialism is not a preserve of just one ideology or another. History is replete with such instances where powerful politicians often think that the only contradictions, which matter are what they seem to have pinpointed and solved and everything else has been rendered irrelevant. Time and again, history has shown us that such deterministic reasoning is wrong.
If one were to add a more contemporary and provocative example, almost a similar set of sentiments can be seen in the narratives around the election results in the Lok Sabha constituency of Faizabad which includes Ayodhya. The BJP believed that it had bulletproof political insurance in not just Faizabad but all of Uttar Pradesh because it had built the Ram temple after a prolonged dispute and the entire state would vote overwhelmingly for Hindutva.
The voters clearly thought otherwise. To be sure, it would be equally wrong to arrive at the opposite conclusion, namely, that the BJP losing in Ayodhya is necessarily a mandate against Hindutva and the BJP.
Both Poland and Ayodhya teach us the same lesson about ideology and its political praxis. They can take a very different course compared to what our dogmas trick us into believing temporarily.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa
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