The reprehensible acts in Tripura by the Hindutva goons of razing statues of Lenin (1870-1924) who led the October Socialist Revolution in 1917 and was the only head of a state (USSR) who supported the Indian freedom struggle, should not surprise anybody.

We must know why a great liberator and unwavering supporter of India’s independence, Lenin is being targeted by the Hindutva goons. It is being done because Hindutva goons are genetically opposed to democratic-secular values. The pre-Independence Hindu Mahasabha (HMS) leaders brazenly opposed the Indian freedom struggle. They had aligned with the Muslim League (ML) against the Quit India Movement of 1942. When the whole of the Congress leadership was in jail and Indian masses were being massacred for carrying the tricolour, HMS led by Hindutva icon, VD Savarkar ran coalition governments with ML in Bengal, Sind and NWFP. Shamelessly, another Hindutva icon, Syama Prasad Mookerjee was the deputy CM in the Bengal ML ministry.

What many don’t know is that Lenin had written in support of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s struggle. Historian Amaresh Mishra says, Tilak, in his paper Kesari, defended Praful Chaki and Khudiram Bose, two Bengali youths, who had thrown a bomb at the carriage of a British officer in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, and called for immediate Swaraj or self-rule. He was slapped with sedition charges and was exiled to Burma for six years in 1909.

Though Lenin was in exile, he had written “The most liberal and radical personalities of free Britain…become regular Genghis Khans when appointed to govern India and are capable of sanctioning every means of ‘pacifying’, the population in their charge, even to the extent of flogging political protestors! Blasting the “infamous sentence pronounced by the British jackals on the Indian democrat Tilak”, Lenin predicted that with the Indians having got a taste of political mass struggle, the ‘British regime in India is doomed’.”

Large number of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev, Chandershekhar Azad, Ashfaqullah adopted socialism as their creed and died dreaming of independent India on the model of USSR. The slogan, Inquilab Zindabad, coined by Maulana Hasrat Mohani and popularised by Bhagat Singh and his comrades, was inspired by the Soviet revolution.

According to Lenin, “There is no end to the acts of violence and plunder which goes under the name of the British system of government in India…Nowhere in the world – with the exception, of course of Russia – will you find such abject mass poverty, such chronic starvation among the people. The most liberal and radical personalities of free Britain…become regular Genghis Khans when appointed to govern India and are capable of sanctioning every means of ‘pacifying’ the population in their charge, even to the extent of flogging political protestors!”