I have just returned from a meeting addressed by P.C. Joshi,
this being the first occasion of my seeing and hearing him. As a public speaker
he suffers from many handicaps. He has not the right platform voice as Dange
has. Nor has he, like Dange, poise and equilibrium, or that command over hands
and features inseparable from consummateness in public speech. His delivery is a
succession of paroxysms. The recoil of each seems to throw him back a few
paces, giving to staticity the impress of a difficulty achieved balancing feat.
In the violence of his gestures while speaking, he resembles ex-Minister Giri.
But while Giri moves up and down, the knees bending and straightening to
provide emphasis to his perorations, Joshi’s movement is lateral. It is devoid
of footwork.
*
* *
As he speaks the sentences tumble into each other. The
succeeding ones are too impatient to bide their time. They rush forward, very
frequently injuring or even mutilating out of existence the tails of the ones
going before. Such terrific consumption of motor energy is visible in the
physical offshoots of Joshi’s speech that he is rather a painful figure to
contemplate. When C.R. or Srinivasa Sastri speaks, you are thrown into a thrill
which is enjoyed by both mind and ear; they get hungry for more and at the end
wish the speech had gone on a little longer. Similar tribute of being felt as
much too short is not wrung by Joshi from his hearers. Their feeling is one of
relief that an exercise full of strain to the performer has at last come to an
end.
*
* *
Joshi opened this evening’s speech with a grand eulogy of the
rally that Madras was supposed to have
made to the freedom movement, alongside of Bombay and other places, in one
common mass rising of the anti-imperialist forces of all India. He called for
revenge on behalf of the martyred victims of the day. Having been privileged to
see on the spot something of the rising thus praised, I must say that I saw
more of rowdyism than any spirit of freedom in it. Harmless passers-by were
subjected by the demonstrators to arbitrary indignities. Joshi who later in his
speech very rightly condemned rowdyism, and announced with quite proper spirit,--to
the accompaniment of loud shouts of “Down with rowdyism” from many
throats,--that his party would never be coerced by it, should not have failed
as he did to recognize the very large share that rowdyism played in the
demonstrations of last week. Rowdyism is not an evil to be deplored only when the
Communists happen to be its victims. I value civil liberty, and I feel that
everyone that was manhandled roughly without any provocation during the
demonstrations in Madras was as much entitled as the Communist Party itself
undoubtedly is.
* * *
These imperfections apart, Joshi made a great speech. His
comment on Congress leadership was devastating when he adverted to the harbourage
afforded by it to well-known anti-social elements like black-marketeers and
profiteers. Nothing that he said was so vociferously cheered. The crowd that
gathered to listen to Joshi must have been at least 12,000 in number. It was a huge
concourse so far as Madras audiences go. That so many should clap hands in
approbation while top-rank Congress leaders are attacked for their tender
patronage of the war-made rich is a fact not to be got rid of by being loftily
ignored, and the assailed leaders would do well to study it and profit by it,
instead of burying their heads, ostrich-wise, in the sands of complacence over
anticipated election success and the loyalty of the people to the Congress. Not
long ago, when I carried a protest over the selection of a reputed
black-marketeer as Congress candidate, to one of the great leaders of the
provincial Congress organization, he calmly said, “Who is not a black-marketeer
these days?”
* * *
Joshi’s very limitations as a speaker stamp with extra
distinction his value as a political propagandist. The Communist Party does not
lack able speakers. For example, young Ramakrishnan who translated Joshi into
Tamil is gifted with a torrential eloquence of which any veteran in political
and debating experience can be proud. He transformed the secondhand task of
translation into an art of delightful improvisation and high mettle without any
disturbance in sense, and as his tempo rose, he reminded me of Sir S. Radhakrishnan,--the
same fluency,, the same distinctness of utterance, the same regimental band
effect. But Communist propaganda seems to depend far more on convictions and
ideas than on expertness of talk and the graces of oratory.
* * *
Mass predisposition in favour of revered leaders has its
dangers. The crowds that greet Gandhi and Nehru are taken off their feet by
their own idolizing fervor to such an extent that they are left defenceless;
they tend to accept ideas and suggestions put forward before them without
proper independent scrutiny. Lower down, the Gandhian glamour is marketed to
their own advantage by many minor priests of no particular worth in the
Congress temple. Manufacture of mob enslavement on a vast scale, with every
sign of dissent stigmatized severely as disloyalty, is the result. Against this
tendency, the Communists have been waging a hard struggle. Communist faith is
built round ideas and not personalities. Nowadays Communist leaders like Joshi
and Sundarayya of quite average ability as speakers, are able to command huge
audiences running into thousands of whom many come from long distances to
listen to them. A new public is being born with its mind turned towards ideas,
a public capable of criticism and discrimination, of judging for itself what
will advance its interests best, of sensing intelligently humbug camouflaged as
public spirit.
* * *
This public is one of under-dogs. It is ill-represented on
the electorate. Communists have given to it hope, a faith to live by, and the
energy, grit, organizational skill, propagandist zeal, capacity for hard work,
indifference to money and careers, and above all readiness and resourcefulness
in taking up local grievances and fighting oppression and exploitation of various
kinds, evinced by them, have been endearing them to an ever-increasing circle
of grateful beneficiaries. The technique of mass contact originated by Gandhi
with personal benevolence as impetus is by the Communist Party being perfected
on scientific lines with social revolution and liquidation of oppression as its
driving force. It is a party of zealots susceptible to all the intolerances,
dogmatism and fallacies of fanaticism, but its ruthlessness is redeemed by a
certain broad humanitarian outlook, radicalism and freedom from superstition
that invest it with a powerful appeal to the most progressive spirits of the
age. If there are prigs in the Communist Party there are also saints disguised
as realists.
* * *
The inconsequence of rhetoric for the purposes of the
Communist Party is illustrated in the position occupied by Joshi. He stands
exposed to concentrated attack by all the propertied interests in the country
now wooing the Congress for an alliance against social and economic revolution.
Joshi’s political and historical importance springs from this fact. (March 3, 1946)—S A K A.
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