Nawab Nehru Pumps Patronage for the IPWA

The success of the 1945 All India Conference of Urdu Progressive Writers in Hyderabad immediately left a trail of bitterness and animosity in the larger umbrella of the so-called Progressive writers for a straightforward reason: it appeared that Urdu writers had suddenly become dominant at the cost of their Hindi counterparts. And so, an All-India Conference of Hindi Progressive Writers was held in Allahabad in September 1947 to assuage these wounded egos.

This was followed by another AIPWA conference on May 27-30, 1949, in Bhiwandi organized by the newly-minted maniac and shameless Soviet slave, B.T. Ranadive who had usurped the leadership of the Communist Party of India. Ranadive fashioned himself as India’s answer to the epic mass-murderer, Mao Zhedong. To fully stamp his nouveau authority, Ranadive had invited a delegation of writers from the Soviet Union. Thankfully, in a rare moment of sanity, Nawab Nehru’s Government had refused visas to these writers.

Which brings us to yet another carefully buried fact of recent history. Beginning roughly around 1942-3, our Communist eminences were widely despised throughout India for their treacherous role in scuttling the freedom struggle and for their brazen, illegitimate, and highly vocal support for creating Pakistan. Historical archives also reveal the fact that Communists were deservedly blamed for the partition of India and the accompanying orgy of bloodbath.

And so, by 1948-9, there was a screaming need for immediate damage control and image makeover. The first step in this self-rehabilitation exercise was to slowly and deliberately speak the fake language of patriotism in their finely-sharpened forked tongue. The other step was to recruit writers and litterateurs who would amplify this fakery. Accordingly, a snake-oil academic named Ram Bilas Sharma, the head of the English Department of Balwant Rajput College, Agra, dipped his tongue in the poisoned Communist chalice and the words that emerged from his mouth were akin to honey. The occasion was aforementioned AIPWA Conference. This is what he said:

The basic task of progressive writers is to defend and enrich our national culture by our literary work. Against what do we defend our national culture? First and foremost, we defend it against the influence of the corrupt and alien culture of the British imperialists… There is no such thing as Communist domination over the PWA. Things are decided here by mutual discussion among writers whether Communist or non-Communist. [Emphasis added]

Needless, this was the same practiced subterfuge that the Communists had refined almost to an art form. Sharma relied on that eternal and infallible weapon that continues to pay such rich dividends to all politicians and third-rated ideological hawkers: short-term memory loss of the public. Just four years ago, the Hindi-Urdu writer Krishan Chandar had candidly revealed the incestuous affiliation that the CPI had with IPWA in the Hyderabad Urdu Writers Conference inaugurated by Sarojini Naidu:

After a lull of about four years, the IPWA met again at a conference in Delhi from March 6-8, 1953. The conference appointed the selfsame Krishan Chandar as general secretary. There was another weighty outcome of the conference: it condoled the death of Stalin and marched to the Soviet Embassy in Delhi and laid wreaths and other honours to the departed Great Leader. This was hugely significant because among other things, it greatly warmed the cockles of Prime Minister Nawab Nehru who had shamelessly mourned the death of this prolific Communist genocidal maniac on the floor of the Parliament and declared a holiday to that day’s proceedings.

In hindsight, it can be argued that this was a brilliant masterstroke on the part of the Communists. Death had cruelly snuffed out Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s life in 1950, and the comrades exactly knew how they could manipulate their prized idiot who had an almost orgiastic weakness for the mere name of Stalin. As a bonus, their great ally, the putrid V.K. Krishna Menon was Nawab Nehru’s closest aide in more ways than one.

The extent of the power the Communists had acquired after 1953 became public when they hosted the Asian Writers’ Conference, held in New Delhi in December 1956. It was presided by Mulk Raj Anand and was massively attended by all hues of Leftist writers from Burma, Ceylon, China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Syria, USSR, and Indochina. The Soviet delegation of writers alone had a whopping thirteen members! Special place was also accorded to the Chinese delegation as well thanks to Nehru’s ongoing twin seductions of Mao and Chou Enlai. On the Indian side, they had recruited the torrid Humayun Kabir, secretary of the ministry of education. The icing on the cake: the President and Vice President of India, and Prime Minister Nawab Nehru himself gave the valedictory speeches.

There was no looking back after this.

It was also the bloody preface to a phenomenon we’re all familiar with: the systematic takeover and monopolization of all cultural and similar public institutions, which together inflicted a crushing cultural genocide in “independent” India, ruthlessly bulldozing everything that came in their way. Its sprawling concrete success was the eventual founding of the JNU. A prime reason that enabled this cultural invasion was the direct access that the Communists had to ministers and top-level bureaucrats. It is indeed a profound miracle how Sanatana civilization even survived this.

A list of various awards doled out by various cultural bodies to various recipients over the last six decades will reveal the truly horrifying extent and the real-life demonstration of what a bunch of determined termites can do to even the strongest and the most enduring tree. As a random sample, we can consider the Sahitya Akademi Awardees for English. Here are some names in chronological order:

1. The missionary pedophile and Ram Guha’s wet dream, Verrier Elwin

2. Bhabhani Bhattacharya, a prominent member of the IPWA

3. Mulk Raj Anand

4. Sarvepalli Gopal, for writing Nehru’s hagiography

5. Anita Desai: her daughter Kiran Desai was one of the eminences who helmed the Jaipur Literature Festival

6. Nissim Ezekiel, another member of the IPWA,

7. Kamala “Suraiyya” Das

8. Nayantara Sahgal, great grandmother of the award-wapsi charade

9. Vikram Seth

10. Shashi Deshpande, daughter of Prof Jahagirdar mentioned in the previous part of this series

11. Mahesh Dattani, close buddy of the late Girish Karnad

12. Arundhati Roy alias Genocide Suzie

13. Ramachandra “perfumed Kavita Krishnan” Guha

The interested reader might wish to read the full list of awardees in all languages here. Before you train your guns on me, there are also genuine exceptions like Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa, DVG, Shivarama Karantha, Devudu, Vishwanatha Satyanarayana and others who won these awards which only shows the unignorable value of their work.

Then there is the other dark side to this Leftist literary usurpation leading to cultural vandalism: the creation of linguistic states after independence.

To be continued