The Compass Without North
What happens when your enemy disappears but your enmity remains? The Soviet Union's collapse created an identity crisis for communist movements worldwide. It wasn't just that they lost their ideological headquarters—they lost their guiding star, their proof that the revolution could succeed.
For India's communist movement, this created a peculiar situation. The master they had served vanished, but the habits formed during decades of service remained. Like a compass that's lost its magnetic north but still twitches nervously, the movement continued its familiar patterns.
The most persistent of these patterns? A deep-seated hostility toward Hindu society and culture. This had been woven into the Indian communist movement's DNA, a reflexive stance that defined its identity as much as any economic theory.
This hostility wasn't abandoned when the Soviet empire crumbled. It couldn't be, because it had become the movement's anchor. When everything else was in flux, this antagonism provided continuity, a sense that some battles remained worth fighting.
What's revealing isn't the criticism itself—all societies benefit from constructive critique. It's the consistency of the hostility regardless of changing circumstances.What's telling is that this opposition remained the one constant while everything else was negotiable.
When such movements cling to old adversaries after losing their original purpose, it tells us something important: sometimes opposition becomes an end in itself rather than a means to create something better.
