Sumit Sarkar's father was a Communist at a time when the power of the Communist party was rising in West Bengal. The Centre, too, was moving Leftward & had allied with the Soviet Union.
Sumit, however, lived to see the BJP come to power both in Delhi and Kolkata. Communism was dead. 'Subalterns' had taken power. Consider Alluri Sitarama Raju, the Hindu Sanyassi who led the Rampa revolt in 1922. There was a time when Sumit could say the fellow was unknown outside his district. But the film RRR came out in 2022. It won the Oscar for best song. There is an airport and a district named after the hero. No one can pretend he was actually a voiceless tribal or incipient Maoist. The man was a Hindu revolutionary of precisely the type that created and continue to inspire the current ruling party both at the Centre and in West Bengal.
In 'Open Magazine', Shaan Kashyap writes-
Sumit Sarkar (1939-2026) and the Deepening of Indian Democracy
Sumit had nothing to do with the deepening of anything whatsoever. Dynasticism declined and the Hindu majority asserted itself.
Sumit Sarkar’s life as a historian and public intellectual was defined by
writing worthless shite. The stupid cunt was part of the 'subaltern' group. They didn't seem to be aware that the subaltern was taking power all over the country. It was tribals and Dalits and OBCs who were becoming Chief Ministers. New States were being carved out for them. Stupid Marxists either emigratedo or were ignored.
a persistent scrutiny of power
He couldn't scrutinise shit. Historians had no power. They weren't an elite. They were deluded shitheads.
—whether exercised by the Right, the Left, the state or institutions of knowledge
Neither the Right nor the Left would give him the time of day. He was irrelevant. I suppose, there was a time when one could say 'he represents West Bengal's determination to keep the BJP out of power' but there was no such determination. Sarkar's virtue signalling was worthless.
Sumit Sarkar (1939-2026), who passed away on August 13, 2026, was not only one of the tallest historians of modern India
He was rubbish. History is written by those who make it, not by those who live in cloud cuckoo land.
but also a public intellectual of rare courage, clarity and intellectual integrity.
He may have been a public toilet. What is certain is he was overflowing with shit.
His writings as a public intellectual can be read as a sustained interrogation of a deceptively simple question: what makes democracy possible, and what makes it vulnerable?
Nonsense! Everybody knows what makes democracy possible- viz. periodic elections which lead to one party or bunch of politicians displacing another. This requires a good enough Election Commission and an Army which doesn't conduct coups.
What makes democracy vulnerable is a large Muslim population. The peaceful religion doesn't seem congenial to democracy. Look at Pakistan and Bangladesh. Im the Dim is in jail. Sheikh Hasina is in exile. Now look at India. The Bench may send a politician to jail but, chances are, he will be out on bail soon enough. Nobody has to go into exile. The Army has zero political role.
His answer was
meaningless gibberish
never confined to elections or constitutional institutions. It concerned the distribution of power—in universities, communities, political parties, historical memory and the nation itself.
All of which are wholly irrelevant. The distribution of power wasn't so different between India & Pakistan. India has been democratic. Pakistan hasn't.
The fact is, when a Dictator usurps power, it can't be because power has been redistributed though, subsequently, some such thing may occur. Thus, when Portugal, Spain, Greece and, later on, Warsaw pact countries, switched to Democracy, there simply hadn't been enough time for a big change in power distribution. Thus Sumit was completely wrong. This was because his entire brain was constituted by a thick lump of shit.
The argument was already visible in his 1989 essay, ‘Autonomy for Whom?’, written against Rajiv Gandhi’s education reforms and the UGC’s proposals for autonomous departments and colleges.
Neither of which mattered in the slightest. The only comment that can be made about that period is that 'Autocracy is tempered by Assassination'. Universities don't matter- more particularly if they tuned to shit long ago.
The language of the reforms was democratic:
No. Nobody was saying that College Principals or Vice Chancellors should be elected.
autonomy, decentralisation and freedom from bureaucratic control.
have nothing to do with Democracy. The fact is Democracy has been associated with increased centralization and bureaucratic control not just in Europe and America but also India.
Sarkar questioned the assumption that decentralisation was automatically democratic.
If some Indian shithead was making that assumption, then it was because the fellow had shit for brains. It was fucking obvious that Democracy in India had increased centralization and reduced 'subsidiarity'.
Feudal Europe had been decentralised;
No. It was synoecist. The Pope in Rome had the power to loose and bind. It is a different matter that centralization of various types was 'contested'. But, the fact is, where there are Emperors (e.g. the Holy Roman one) there is greater centralization than when there are Nation States.
so, had the slaveholding American South.
Which was democratic.
The real question, he insisted, was the distribution of power within an autonomous unit:
The unit isn't autonomous if some within it are allied with powerful forces outside it.
autonomy for whom?
For the unit, you fucking cretin. If it is cohesive and acts independently of other power centers then it is autonomous. If some powerful constitutent within it gets it to do what some alien power center wants, then it isn't autonomous at all.
Thus, if a University is held hostable by the youth wing of the Communist party, the University isn't really autonomous. On the other hand, if it pursues a rational strategy to compete in terms of excellence with other Universities, then it is autonmous.
The proposed reforms made his concern concrete.
Neither he nor those reforms mattered in the slightest.
Departmental councils could exclude half or more of the teachers; students had no meaningful representation; teachers outside the council need not be consulted even on syllabi; and day-to-day administration would effectively rest with the head. The UGC’s autonomous-college scheme similarly removed elected teacher representatives from governing bodies, replacing elections with rotation according to seniority. Sarkar warned that “autonomy” could simply produce dominant cliques around principals and heads.
But Universities couldn't actually get very much worse. Nor could they get better. Both students and staff were utterly shite
The draft Accreditation Council report, Sarkar suggested, claimed to fight the legacies of colonial education, while quietly restoring precisely those features that nationalists had once opposed: less elected teacher representation, greater official control and tighter authority over universities. Lord Curzon, Sarkar observed with characteristic irony, would have been a happy man to find such worthy successors.
Lord Curzon did what was in the interest of Britain. Sarkar objected to the Indian government doing things which were in India's interest. If nationalism involved trying to fuck up the British rulers, surely it also entails fucking up Indian rulers?
A year later, this concern with power moved from institutions to communal politics.
As Hindus, is it not our duty to ensure that Muslims are able to slaughter us with impunity?
In ‘Understanding Communal Violence: Nizamuddin Riots’ (1990), written with Pradip Datta, Biswamoy Pati, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen, Sarkar examined the violence of March 17, 1990, in which two Bangladeshi Muslim refugees
Why would Muslims need to run away from an Islamic Republic? The two men may have been economic migrants. They could not have been refugees.
were killed in police firing and around 50 Muslims were injured. The immediate dispute concerned a boundary wall on land claimed by the Waqf Board and the Delhi Municipal Corporation. The police protected the Hindu crowd constructing it; municipal tankers supplied water for the mortar while refugee settlements burned nearby. An Arya Samaj leader explicitly compared the construction to the Ayodhya shilanyas and called it karseva.
If Muslims in Pakistan are ethnically cleasning Hindus, ought we not to try to help Muslims in India from doing the same thing? Is that not the true meaning of being a worthless Bengali shithead?
Sarkar and his co-authors challenged conventional secular explanations of communal violence, which tended to blame criminals, a communalised police apparatus or distorted class conflict.
What he couldn't challenge was the notion that killing kaffirs is a religious duty.
Such explanations could leave both elites and ordinary people strangely innocent. The investigation instead followed the organisations and networks behind the mobilisation and connected Nizamuddin to the wider Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid campaign.
This is why Hindus voted for those organisations and networks. Shitheads like Sumit helped the BJP by highlighting this.
Communalism, they argued, had to be understood as a social and political process rather than an external aberration.
It is the process whereby one group enslaves or ejects another group from valuable territory.
That method shaped Sarkar’s subsequent writings on Hindutva. In ‘Conversions and Politics of Hindu Right’ (1999), he examined the politics of conversion and the construction of the Christian “Other”.
You are the other who will go to Hell if you don't accept Lord Jesus as your personal God & Saviour.
His argument was not an uncritical defence of Christianity. He acknowledged missionary coercion and the colonial history of conversion. But he also pointed to Christian participation in anti-war, anti-nuclear and socially progressive movements, including cooperation with secular, liberal and Left groups.
i.e. they are useless virtue signallers who will insist that we all let nice Jihadis chop our heads off.
The important distinction was between a religion and the political uses made of stereotypes about it.
What was important for Sumit was that kaffirs offer themselves for slaughter.
The history of shuddhi sharpened the argument.
If you are forcibly converted, nobody should be allowed to reconvert you to your ancestral religion.
Arya Samaj campaigns that might have begun as social reform increasingly became exercises in policing religious boundaries.
There weren't any Arya Samajis in East Bengal. Why did Hindus have to run away from there.
Shuddhi, tabligh and tanzim became mutually reinforcing sources of Hindu-Muslim tension in the 1920s. Savarkar’s 1923 definition of the Hindu through pitribhumi and punyabhumi further connected religious identity with nationalism.
Just like Narendra Modi & Suvendu Adhikari. Sumit wasted his fucking life.
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