The communist is primarily anti-nationalist, secordly anti-God and tertially anti-Hindu. In socio-political practice, however, he as well as the communist parties sound more anti-Hindu than anything else. The reason could be that to speak against nationalism would give a message of being anti-nationalist and might imply being anti-patriotic. On the other hand, to speak against God would hurt sentiments of most people including the Muslims. His purpose was therefore achieved by speaking up against any socio-political movement which has a Hindu inspiration. In India, nationalism has to be aroused around the Hindu ethos. The devout Muslim is a supranationalist. The Sunni, in particular, gives his supreme , loyalty to the world ummah.

Iran is the only country which could engage the sympathy of the Shias because all other Muslim countries are dominantly Sunni. In any case, Islam has a clear precedence over the nation. For the communist, the workers of the world are the ummah and the nation is looked upon as an instrument in the hands of the rich to exploit the poor. Appropriately, the communist anthem has been a song called Internationale. The result is that the supranationalist and the internationalist are allies after the dictum 'enemy's enemy is a friend'. Both are adversaries of nationalism and, in India, of the Hindu ethos, the mainspring of the nationalist sentiment in the country.

Before going further, it would be desirable to recall the track record of the cormmunists in India during British days when one could afford to speak  and work openly against nationalism. Go back to 9 August 1942 when Mahtama Gandhi called upon the British to quit India. Overstreet and Windmiller, in their book Communism in India, University of Berkeley, 1958, wrote the CPI (CommunistParty of India) criticised the Quit India resolution as misguided and pernicious. Furthermore, Netaji Subhas and his movement were condemned as a fifth column. Indian socialists were described as the advance guard of the Japanese Army.

In those days, 1942 and after, communist praise was showered on the Muslim League. An example of such appreciation in the words of the CPI Central Committee member Sajjad Zaheer was: It is a good and fine thing, a happy augury, for and Muslims and for India as a whole that the Muslim League continues to grow and gather around it millions of our liberty-loving people. In the increasing sthrenght and capacity of the League to move the Muslim masses on the path of preogress and democracy lies the salvation of millions of our Muslim countrymen.... By mid-1942, the Party was expressly committed to the general view that India was a multinational entity, and that the unqualified right of self-determination should be granted to each nationality. A Party statement of July asked: What can be the basis of our national unity?  Recognition of the principles of self-determination including the right of separation,  for all the nationalities that inhabit our great sub-continent.

A resolution of the September plenary meeting of the Central Committee definitively outlined the Party's new orientation. Its critical passage was as follows: Every section of the Indian people which has a contiguous territory as its homeland, common historical tradition, common language, culture, psychological make-up, and common economic life would be recognized as a distinct nationality with the right to exist as an autonomous state within the free Indian Union or fedruiion and will have the right to secede from it if it may so desire ...Thus free India of tomorrow would be a federation or union of autonomous states of the various nationalities such as the Pathans, Western Punjabis (dominantly Muslims), Sighs, Sindhis, Hindustanis, Rajasthanis, Gujeratis, Bengalis, Assamese, Beharies, Oriyas,  Andhras, Tamils, Karnatikis, Maharashtrians, Keralas, etc.

The two scholars continued: the resolution made it abundantly clear that those nationalities which were predominantly Muslim could secede. This would give to the Muslims wherever they are in an overwhelming majority in a contiguous territory which is their homeland, the right to form their autonomous states and even to separate if they so desire. A year later, the Party was openly supporting Pakistan, and Zaheer said that Congressmen generally fail to see the anti-imperialist, liberationist role of the Muslim League, failed to see that the demand for Muslim self-determination or Pakistan is a just, progressive and national demand, and is the positive expression of the very freedom and democracy for which Congressmen have striven and undergone so much suffering all these years.

The Californian authors wondered what could have prompted the CPI to be so openly pro-Muslim, so pro-Pakistani? One explanation they gave was that the policy may have been prompted in part by an intention to encourage not Muslim separatism alone but all regional particularism throughout the subcontinent. The regional linguistic units of India, which no one but the CPI termed as nationalities, had in many cases shown strong particularist impulses on which a political party might easily capitalize. At this point the CPI may have dimly recognized that the time had come, in the political development of India, to associate itself with these impulses, as it had earlier associated itself with the nationalist impulse. Bourgeois nationalism was on the verge of achieving freedom and establishing an independant state; in preparation for its struggle against that state, the CPI could have no better weapon than regional separation, which could weaken or even destroy a bourgeois government in New Delhi. At one stage the Party openly proposed that Bengal be a sovereign country, in addition to India and Pakistan. It also hinted at independent status for the Sikhs. But it was only after the war that this larger import of the Party's policy - its identification with regional particularism - emerged fully.

The CPI's anti-Indianism did not end with supporting the multiple partition of India. In 1944, General Secretary P.C.Joshi wrote articles wherein he advocate not only the creation of Pakistan but also an undivided sovereign Bengal. As the scholars from California have written: In Bengal as a whole the majority of the population was Muslim but only by a slight margin, the eastern and northern districts being pre-dominantly Muslim while the others were predominantly Hindu. Earlier, the Party had proposed thatBengal be partitioned accordingly, but th League demanded that Bengal go to Pakistan. Now Joshi declared that Bengal should be a united sovereign and independent state, which would maintain relations of mutual assistance and friendly economic collaboration with both India an Pakistan. This solution was clearly advantageous to the League since it would again thus gain influence over all of Bengal rather than over the Muslim-majority,  districts only. In fact, the new state would probably make common cause with Pakistan' which was not mentioned by Joshi.

The anti-Hindu real politik of the CPI had no limit. To quote again from the same book: With regard to the other disputed area, the six eastern districts of Punjab(Central Punjab), Joshi proposed a solution which was equally advantageous to the Muslim League. In all the disputed districts the Sighs constituted a large minority, and in all but one the Sikhs and Hindus together formed a majority; in but one were the Muslims in the majority, and that by only a small margin. Yet Joshi declared that the best solution would be to give all six districts to Pakistan, adding the suggestion that there be a "Muslim-Sikh Pact", which would guarantee the rights oJ the Sikhs under a Muslim government. The Sikhs have nothing to fear, he declared.

This polictical behaviour is ironical when one remembers that conceptually the Hindu explanation of life borders on the agnostic whereas Islam asserts that there god andAllah as the one and only god. To assert that there is god is to rely entirely on faith, if not also conjecture. Sticklers might even describe this attitude as irrational. Mind you, the Marxists are equally irrational in their insistence that there is no god and therefore they are atheists. Without having been able to verify, to assert the existence or non-existence of god is equally irrational.

It contrast, the Hindu explanation has no concept of god; only of paramatma or the total of all individual souls. To that extent all the living beings are partners of  the divine.The so called Hindu godheads like Sri Ram, Sri Krishna or Lord Buddha were avatars or men who returned to earth to redeem the quality of human life which had declined at the time. They are called godheads at the level of bhakti or devotion by the average person. In fact, sanatan dharma is agnostic; there is neither an assertion nor a denial of there being god. The Buddhist and Jain explanations confirm this view more categorically. Is that not so much more rational than the insistence that there in no god?

It is therefore not surprising that the Hindu is not averse to recognising the contribution of Marx to human thought. Also the considerable work Lenin did for the poor. More than anyone else, it was he who made the world realise that the poor so have a right, an equal right, in society. It was only after the Russian revolution, Wich he led, that Europe and America became conscious of the welfare of the poor and, as its it happened, overtook communist societies in making the poor less poor, if not also rich.

That however does not justify the hypocrisy of most communists. Say a family naine is Chatterjee which is the modernized version of Chattopadhyaya which in turn is the Bengali version of Chaturvedi. Or he whose family has studied the four vedas. Doesn't that sound very Hindu, if not also Brahmin and sanatan? Say the first name is Sita Ram. That is even more emphatically Hindu. Do not underrate the value of a name. It is a brand equity. It is among the first things a family gives a baby soon after its birth. Without it, thebaby would not have an identity. How can one carry the identity of Sita Ram Chatterjee and at the same time spend his time running down the Hindu ethos as communal, revivalist, obscurantist and what not? What incidentally does he declare on the passport for his religion?