‘Time to revise theoretical positions’: D Raja on communists, caste, Buddha | What’s Your Ism

#communistpartyofindia #communism #caste
D Raja, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India, says a communist revolution is not possible in India by only focussing on economic concerns.
In this special two-part episode on What's Your Ism, Sudipto Mondal earlier spoke to the CPIM’s Sitaram Yechury. In this part, Raja reflects on the role of BR Ambedkar and the Buddha in shaping his communist ideology, Modi’s India, and international conflicts.
Although communists have traditionally been at loggerheads with identity movements, Raja says it's time to revise the theoretical positions held by classical Marxists. He also talks about why the CPI and the CPIM continue to be separate political parties despite being ideological twins.
Watch.
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[@armaandhillon3265]

To all my comrades in India, we must not feel discouraged, inspite of the hard times. "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." -Lenin

[@phaniindra6730]

News laundry is on a mission to merge both the communist parties 😂

[@Abhijeet-ls7pk]

Do podcasts with young Leftists like the host of the podcast "India & Global Left." Will give you far convincing and unapologetic defense of Left economic, and geopolitical policies, politics and principles.

[@ABBartan]

Tbh he can access the Gen-Secs of the two CPs so he can also access the top intellectuals of the Left like the Patnaiks or Jayati Ghosh or CP Chandrashekhar or Vijay Prashad. Problem is he doesn't have enough depth to interview them. He's still stuck on UG-level caste/class arguments and Dugin bad type conversations, it will be quite impossible for him to ask questions on structural debt crisis or imperialist superexploitation, or anything basically that is above the average internet debate level.

[@ArvindawaLama-wp8fu]

🙏 dear sir D Raja ji ,I salute to Your thoughts , feelings and Political experience . Hopefully comes together for a better idea all of us to better India

[@RIJU9285]

Great job Sudipto. Strong hire by NL!

[@DhanyaRajendran]

Sudipto is the Executive Editor of TheNewsMinute 😊

[@keshaviyengar191]

Wonderful to see your guidelines for comments! So you have commissars, I presume, who will weed out the deplorable chaps! Saw all your isms, they’re all red. Fantastic! All the best!

[@peacemungtsa]

Thanks

[@abdulkalamsyed8563]

Good episode 💯 India is a union of states, there is dire need

[@ravim4170]

Excellent interview. I think after the guest has spent so much effort sharing all his knowledge, he should be thanked / appreciated a little more at the end. I noticed the same in previous interviews of this series also. I do understand the host’s nerves in handling such a detailed discussion with such knowledgeable/ experienced people and the mental rush to do a good job of it and get it done with, but still…hoping that this little feedback will be used.

[@user-pi4nz4gk8v]

Dude - Cd D. Raja gets so irritated with such gentle to and fro of questioning. I mean come on - you might have the most appropriate understanding of the current issues - it doesn't matter if you cant convey them and make them acceptable to the masses.

[@ABBartan]

He sounds like a grumpy grandfather who goes on with his own stories and doesn't listen to anything else. He is too old, past his prime. Yechury also is too old, even if he doesn't come across as grumpy, but he's also slow and not as sharp as he used to be. This is a systemic problem of the Left parties. In the CPM, each politburo member is 60+, and in the CPI, all but one national executive members are 60+. They need to consciously have people under 60 in their top leadership. Of course some older leaders can be very sharp, but it's an exception. Only if they lower the age composition of the top leadership, can they have sharper and more articulate people at the top.

[@shiadmajeed8524]

Can any of the both Communist party reconstruct party base in Bengal. What happened to the red fort of Bengal, CPI & CPI(M) should understand they failed backward population in Bengal, specially the economical weak minority

[@soumyajeetchakrabarty6872]

❤

[@umakantamajhi5654]

Lal Salam 🚩🚩🚩🚩🏹 JAYA ADIVASI

[@rakeshkumar-yn9tl]

Thank you News laundry

[@ArvindawaLama-wp8fu]

Thanks brother to giving me better and closely understan , sir D Raja ji.

[@SoumitGhosh26January1971]

Excellent interview

[@rakeshkumar-yn9tl]

Red salute news laundry

[@harbanslalbadhan1587]

*Gautam Buddha was the first scientific communist of the world. He was the champion of economic and social equality. He rejected the religious theories of Hindu religion, Vedas, religious books, soul, incarnation, salvation, God, etc. etc. etc. He was the natural child of his parents i.e. mother and father. He was a welfare economic and was also a democrat. Once all the untouchables of India were Buddhists and proud to be Buddhist.*

[@brisingr12]

Buddha certainly didn't have the jeaulosy driven radical revolutionary elements which has made communism one of the most genocidal ideology whenever it has managed to reach power.

[@jackedjoker1511]

Lol

[@ajayprasad3136]

Bro not incarnation and moksha . those r fundamental to budhism

[@nv9991]

You missed a few important facts. Sidharth Buddha was the first elected prime minister of India. He also gave press conferences every week. You have achieved the ultimate Buddhist purpose, Moksha/Nirvana? That is why you are a proud Buddhist? For Siddhart Gutam anything less than Nirvana is not worth being proud of.

[@harbanslalbadhan1587]

@@ajayprasad3136 Sir, Incarnation and Moksha were also rejected by Buddha. Buddha was an Atheist.

[@stanleyibkiss-vo2cl]

The part was 19:00 to 38:00 was a little anxiety inducing.the interviewer was looking for a specific answer. Mr. Raja was slowly getting irritated and it was like a volcano about to erupt.

[@vishwaskrishna]

Difficult for the interviewer when the guest is speaking on and on and has little patience when the host is bringing him back on track. As someone above has pointed out, why don’t they have younger leaders? D Raja may be knowledgeable but the language he is speaking doesn’t really inspire youngsters to join CPI. No wonder, they are politically irrelevant in most of India.

[@shiadmajeed8524]

Communist parties should have addressed the dalit community and marginalised Minority. Instead they ignored these two communities.

[@brisingr12]

they also ignored development and certainly were weak on crime aprat from many other issues

[@shushunk00]

Its debatable whether caste is superstructure or base

[@brisingr12]

give it a few more decades and we'll figure it out

[@sabihatanveer8494]

It's lost momentum 💪⚒

[@mohakroy821]

He should merge his party into cpm Cpi is almost a dead party

[@frommars-sl8iv]

CPI is the real Communist Party. Our Communists gave the idea of Socialism. We have enough cadres to fight against hindutva agenda. Cpm should come back to us .

[@brisingr12]

​@@frommars-sl8iv it doesn't matter either way. 0 + 0 ▪︎ 0

[@stanleyibkiss-vo2cl]

😂 he may be Putin's advisor he is not mine. Interviewer was getting on Mr.Raja's nerves. To experienced older people like Mr. Raja , we should let them speak and not rely on pointed questions or scenario based questions

[@samruddhasalvi1555]

It gets a feeling of corrupt free party.. but then their ideology is outdated.. and office gives an idea of the party's present status.. but no doubt corrupt free , only party which didnt took electoral bonds

[@ABBartan]

Ideology is not outdated. Every country that has ever developed in the world has done so by curbing the free market, and that is particularly true for those countries which developed without having a host of colonies at their disposal. You can read Ha Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder for a better persoective. It isn't their ideology, but their articulation that is outdated. They struggle to impart ideological training to their cadres and they struggle to convince the people of their worldview because their party machinery is rust-infected. People who are in charge are also too old and past their prime.

[@kesanakurtisomanadham3433]

Bahujanism for >90% and the rest manuism .

[@SAFFRONINFERNO]

DANIEL RAJA IS RAUL VINCI'S MENTOR WHILE HIS WIFE ANNIE RAJA IS FIGHTING RAUL VINCI IN WAYANAD MEANWHILE BOTH DANIEL RAJA AND RAUL VINCI LOVE CHINESE MAIBAAP

[@niranjanshankaran3493]

Changing name of doraiswamy to Daniel, rahul in to Christian sounding name does not accomplish anything dude

[@ABBartan]

Bhai this interviewer is an irritating character. His research is very weak, and his questions are undercooked, not very relevant, and also repetitive. Often he comes across as an average liberal who has learned politics off of the internet. I'll explain. Firstly, he's asking the exact same questions to both Yechury and Raja. It is not a very intelligent way to conduct interviews. First of all, as audiences we feel an extreme repetition. But even in terms of exploring questions to gain greater clarity, he should have picked something up from this interview and developed a different line of questioning to Yechury (as I think the Yechury interview happened later). For example, Raja's answer on attempts for merger is more detailed on the attempts made. The interviewer could have picked this up, researched this further, and asked more incisive questions to Yechury on the subject. But what we get is a bland repetition. Now secondly, let me take the example of the Russia-Ukraine. In most senses, this question is not exactly very relevant. Ukraine is fast turning into a wasteland which will be brought to accept debilitating conditions by the western countries. It's a lost war for them basically. The world is far more interested in the developing situation in the middle east, which I think requires greater clarity in terms of the role of Iran and other resistance forces. Even a discussion on the emerging situation in Africa vis-a-vis French neo-colonialism would be interesting. Picking Raja's and Yechury's brains on the subject would have been interesting. But okay, I can understand that he's trying to understand the differences between the parties' international positions by bringing this up (although questions on China's political economy would frankly be far more interesting and revealing). But let us take this. Even there, his questions are undercooked and outrightly incorrect at times. Dugin is Putin's advisor? This is flat out incorrect. Dugin has no position in the Russian government and although an influential academic himself, I have never heard Putin cite him or support his narrative. Putin's basic argument for the Ukraine war falls into a brand of irrendetism true, but it is for Ukraine specifically and not the other parts of the former Russian empire. Putin's argument is that Ukraine has a weak national identity and thus gets its national vigour from attaching itself to nazi ideology. I think he is wrong, but his argument is a far cry from Dugin's nazi-adjacent theories. Secondly, that notwithstanding, the reasons for the Russian intervention are multifold, and can easily be attributed to multiple provocations by the West (the expansion of NATO, the 2014 US -backed coup in Ukraine, the deliberate failure of the Minsk accords, the ethnic persecution and killings of Russian-speakers in the Donbass, and ultimately the total disinterest of the west in having security talks with Russia). Frankly, to make this discussion about Dugin suggests he's getting his questions off internet discourse. And moreover, Dugin is a fascist, true. But he's a geopolitician. Has the interviewer bothered to read the history of geopolitics? The term literally became infamous after WW2 because of its usage by Nazis like Haushofer and imperialists like Mackinder. Even in the post-war era, it was rebranded by American imperialists like Kennan, Kissinger, and Brzenzinski to restore its respectability. Has he read any of these people? They're all fascists obsessed with imperialist control. To centre this around someone irrelevant like Dugin really exposes just how terrible this line of questioning is. I can talk about his other questions. One of his main research sources is the 1948 document of democratic revolution of the CPI, which he keeps quoting. Interesting. Did he not bother to read that the CPI repealed the document by 1951? Today, only the maoists take inspiration from that document. The CPI and CPI(M) consider it a gross mistake. So much for his intense research. And as for his questions on caste and Ambedkar, frankly they have the stench of the intellectual level of an average undergraduate student. To Yechury, he outrightly asked, how long did it take you guys to accept Ambedkar was right and you weren't? This debate is outrightly foolish. Ambedkar was not a communist. Far from it actually. It is one thing to explore his views on Ambedkar. It is quite another to come with the assumption that a communist leader has given up on his party's historic positions and simply accepted Ambedkar was right (of course based on his intense research of one document which was also repealed in 3 years).

[@cinefile0075]

D Raja is old and angry guy that I took it from just watching 15 minutes of the interview. He doesn't even let the interviewer complete the questions. This attitude is actually the reason behind their failure. Congress High command is the same.

[@ABBartan]

@@cinefile0075 that has got nothing to do with what I said. You could have written it as a separate comment.

[@cinefile0075]

@@ABBartan you are saying interviewer is irritating I am saying Raja has a short tempered and isn't ready to listen to other guy

[@ABBartan]

@@cinefile0075 Both can be true. I didn't utter a sentence in defense of Raja.

[@mridul6591]

I would have supported communists if the CPI and CPIM would stick to its ideological principles of treating religion as a opium of the masses.They do treat religion as opium of the masses but that's reserved for only one religion in India and that is hindu religion.Somehow this opium theory is not applicable for other religions like Christianity and Islam which proves the hipocritical nature of the communists.When they talk about nuclear dearmanent,it's clear where their loyalty lies and it clearly doesn't lie with India and they are the mouthpiece of China and Pakistan.When they promise they will bring 370 back even though when it's clear that after scrapping 370 Kashmir has become peaceful and militancy is at lowest levels even then they promise to bring back 370 is proof of their treachery.

[@kesanakurtisomanadham3433]

Ou. Ism must be bahujanism not manuism

[@rhyton66]

This guy is ridiculous. 😂😂😂😂

[@pseudosoda9608]

Ayega tu Modi hi 😅