Sickle and Hammer, Hammer and Tongs

The first ever election that I witnessed was as a five-year-old, in 1980, in the communist town of Tiruppur in Southern India. Although the big fight in that election was between parties led by the men in shades - MGR and Karunanidhi - we, in our small town had many more drawings/posters of Che Guevara, Lenin and Karl Marx (I can even remember a few pictures of a stern-looking Stalin) on our walls. Almost every wall had Suththial Aruval (Sickle and Hammer) drawn alongside. We, kids and grown-ups alike, did not know who all these foreign-looking men with beards and mustaches were but knew that they were definitely bigger personalities than the bald scriptwriter (who was crying on stage for forgiveness for his misrule during his previous tenure as CM and for another opportunity to sit on the chair) and the actor with an indistinct speech (thanks to a bullet embedded in his throat from a punch-up with a fellow actor - the details of the fight are still unknown).

Tiruppur, being a hosiery-manufacturing town, had a very strong communist leaning and as long as I lived there it was always the left parties – the CPI or the CPI-M – that won all the local elections. An uncle of one of my friends was an artist as well as a staunch communist, and I still remember the concentration on his buck-toothed visage as he painted the cut-outs of these leaders. The likes of him never cared for the Congress Party’s continued whinging about the fact that the Communists had, after all, supported China when India was at war with its number one enemy. But, unlike the Congress Party, which was the only strong national party at that time after the fall of the Janata Party's ragtag coalition, the Communists had regular meetings in the street corners. They weren’t elitist – at least not in my town.

Every third person you saw on the street was related to the second and all three of them voted for one of the two prominent communist parties (there were others like CPI-ML). Also, child labour was quite rampant in those days (I think even now it is) and I guess many of the kids who were working in these hosiery manufacturing units felt the need to have a voice of their own. Bruce Lee, of course, was our hero and ‘The Big Boss’ and ‘Enter The Dragon’ were perpetually featured in one cinema or the other at any given point in time. So, it was only natural that many of us were pulled towards ‘communism’ quite early in our lives, although we never fully understood the philosophy itself. The idea of everyone being treated as equals and everyone having everything was enough for us. It was as appealing to our young minds as religion is the opium of the masses. This was enough reason to support one of the two prominent communist parties. How wrong were we to mix up an ideology with a political party!

[To be continued…]