Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 145
is a luxury reserved fo r the industrious and prosperous ? If
so, perhaps it is not surprising that in later years, the notion
oflibertarian thought in India seems to have become
restricted to individualist consumer aspiration and free
market capitalism, posited as the natural and only antithesis
to a crushingly restrictive state apparatus. Lotvala's intellectual
trajectory seems superficial, fickle, and selrserving,
as ifhe seizes on the notion of "tree thought" as an excuse
fo r inconsistency. Ifhe had worked fully through the logic
of libertarian socialism, perhaps he might have seen fit to
scrap both the state and free market in favor of a decentralized
fe deration of small-scale free enterprise and collectives
of producers, consumers, and service providers.
Bhagat Singh
One revolutionary who might have been capable of persuasively
elaborating such a synthesis died too soon to do
so. Bhagat Singh was perhaps the greatest of the anarchistic
thinkers of the independence struggle era. Atheist,
socialist, republican, and militant, he read voraciously
from Kropotkin to Lenin, hung a portrait ofBakunin on
the hall of the Naujavan Bharat Sabha headquarters in
Lahore, and wrote a series of articles on anarchism fo r the
Kirti, a Punjabi monthly founded by returned Ghadar
revolutionaries in the mid- 1920s.
Marxist-Leninists proudly claim that he saw the light
shortly before his execution at the age of twenty-three, giving
a clear indication that had he lived, he would have embraced