What is common between the communist icons Mao and Pol Pot and Rahul Gandhi?

All of them were born in wealthy families of ‘aristocratic’ lineage and were fortunate to get themselves educated in some of the most elite schools in their respective countries and abroad.

Added to this now is one more commonality. Similar to how Mao and Pol Pot promised wealth-redistribution in their respective countries of China and Cambodia, Rahul Gandhi too has now promised to carry out the same once Congress is voted to power in India.

At an event held in Hyderabad to release the INC manifesto titled ‘Nyay Patra’ for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, Rahul Gandhi reiterated the party’s resolve to carry out a caste census along with other promises such as abolition of the Agnipath scheme, revisiting centrally conducted entrance examinations, among others.

While Congress leaders have been publicly stating these promises for quite some time now, what has raised many eye-brows is Rahul Gandhi’s new addition to this set of promises- a survey for wealth redistribution in India.

“After conducting a caste survey, we will take up the historic assignment to distribute the wealth of India along with jobs and other schemes targeted towards prioritised sections,” he is reported to have said while addressing the rally.

While the details of this ‘wealth redistribution’ scheme are not available, the phrase has negative connotations considering the consequences it had on the rich and poor alike when China and Cambodia attempted to carry out the same in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.

Redistributing Wealth – Mao and The Pol Pot Way

In east Asian nations of the mid-twentieth Century, which were highly dependent on agriculture, propaganda of the socialist leaders promising extermination of the rich and distribution of their wealth among the ‘proletariat’ quickly became popular.

Particularly in the case of China, which became the first Asian country to have a communist regime at its helm in 1949, policies of its leaders like Mao were initially identical to that of the Communist regime in Soviet Russia.

After gaining control of the country, Chinese Communist Party under Mao followed the Soviet textbook approach towards redistribution of wealth inter alia socialism by embarking on the ‘collectivisation’ program. Under this, private ownership of agricultural land was abolished along with gradual take over of factories and businesses by the state.

Land owners were identified by the party as ‘class enemies’. The task of managing agricultural production was then assigned to newly formed ‘peasant collectives’ who were supposed to dine in common kitchens and pool in resources towards execution of the assigned tasks.

However, what sets Mao apart from his Soviet counterparts is his experiment of forcefully moving a large chunk of China’s urban youth to the rural areas. As a part of the ‘Down to the Country-Side Movement’ which lasted from 1958-1978, the Communist regime under Mao sent nearly 17 million urban youth to the rural areas. The logic behind such a move being that it would reduce the gap between the urban masses with alleged ‘counter-revolutionary tendencies’ and the rural poor.

A Great Human Tragedy

If this wasn’t enough, Mao launched the Great Cultural Revolution in 1966 that saw the flight of the remaining entrepreneurs and intellectuals from China. Along with this, a large number of Chinese citizens belonging to families with entrepreneurial and intellectual traditions were renounced as ‘class traitors’ and hanged to death publicly by the ‘Red Guards’ that largely consisted of rural youth who grew up learning Mao’s Red Book by heart.

Exactly one decade later, Cambodian Communist leader Pol Pot, after taking charge of the south-east Asian country following a bloody civil war, decided to walk the Mao way.

As the chief of the Communist Party of Cambodia or Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot forced nearly 2.5 million residents of the country’s capital Phnom Penh to move to the villages. Nearly 20,000 of them are supposed to have died on the way owing to fatigue and dehydration. This is apart from the nearly 10 lakh individuals who are supposed to have been killed by the Khmer Rouge forces in ‘re-education’ camps.

As far as collectivisation of agriculture and industry is concerned, both China and Cambodia were forced to give up the policy eventually.

At a time when the collectivisation of cultivable land had already led to resentment and neglect of fields by the rural population, China during the Cultural Revolution had forced the urban youth with no knowledge of farming to work in fields while the rural youth who had joined the ‘Red Guard’ in great numbers were brought to the cities to give them a false sense of empowerment.

This eventually led to several episodes of famine causing large number of deaths due to starvation. In the Great Leap Forward Movement alone that saw the introduction of collectivisation, nearly 30 million Chinese citizens are supposed to have died.

Ultimately in 1978, the CCP under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping was forced to discontinue collectivisation in agriculture by replacing it with ‘Household Responsibility System’ that allowed peasant families to choose the kind of crops they wished to cultivate along with other incentives.

Similar reforms were introduced in the industrial domain to encourage privately-owned businesses.

Cambodia too in the gradual course after Pol Pot’s death and restoration of political stability post 2000s embraced capitalism.

Nonetheless, the human cost of such experiments of Mao and Pol Pot, beyond the statistics of deaths, is huge. While the rich and the middle class who had means to escape both countries did so in time, it was the rural masses and the urban poor who paid a heavy price.

For instance, in the heady days of cultural revolution, a young school going kid was forced to renounce his mother as a ‘class traitor’ leaving a deep psychological impact on his mind while noted author Nien Cheng in her book Life and Death in Shanghai narrates how her mother was tortured to death for not giving in to the charges levelled against her.

Similarly in Cambodia, the monstrosity unleashed by the Khmer Rogue ostensibly to bring about ‘equity’ in society continues to affect several survivors from the era.

The Documentation Centre of Cambodia through a survey conducted in 2022 of 31,000 survivors from the Khmer Rogue era has observed high prevalence of hypertension, gastrointestinal disorders, heart disease and mental illness. Nearly, 25 percent of the survivors reported having nightmares despite nearly 40 years having passed after the fall of Khmer Rogue regime.

While the details of this wealth redistribution programme of Rahul Gandhi are awaited, the lessons of history, to anyone who bothers to read it, are plain.