ONE-WORD Diary

“ConReds”. “Sharia Bolsheviks”. “Lol Salaam”. “Commie Pigs”.

- Apeksha Priyadarshini

Who is a Comrade?

These are just some of the colourful pejoratives that inundate social media platforms everyday on the accounts of anyone who has the audacity to publicly associate themselves with Left politics. Funnily enough, a visual archetype—which Bollywood has long patronised—has also emerged caricaturing the ‘Comrade’, to add to the existing meme repository of ridicule. The figure is usually dishevelled-looking (perhaps unbathed), dressed in a worn-out kurta, with a jhola (bag) adorning one shoulder, while one hand rests on the waist—unless of course, it is holding a dafli (tambourine). Occasionally, the eyes are red and droopy; but the mouth is always open, yelling what it ought to hold inside.

It is amazing and amusing at once how an ideology, with such little standing in the vast terrain of the country's parliamentary politics, is made out to be a larger-than-life threat that can seemingly destabilise national harmony—the embodiment of which is the Comrade.

But then, if not this, the question persists—who is a Comrade? A friend? A brother-in-arms? A mentor or a guide?

The Markers