This refers to the article, “Goodwill can vaporise in the heat of violence” (April 13) by Ashok Malik. It will not do the Trinamool Congress any good to revert to the old ways of the left. Our students, more than anyone else, need to become activists of the nation, of national and international politics, of cultural resurgence.
They should not be relegated to the position of mere party cadres, which is what the left has done to them. All these years, the CPI(M) has betrayed the people by failing to provide results, because its politics and vision for the future have been limited, and its methods wrong.
See, for example, China, where the student-led May Fourth Movement was co-opted by the Chinese Communist Party that then turned student activism into a thing of the past. In India, the Swadeshi movement is the seat and the source of our nationalist movement, and it might be that Kolkata will play a vital role in it again.