DISCUSSIONS are happening about how so many of the young protesters that rocked the Modi government recently came from families that have been faithfully voting for the right-wing prime minister. A crucial fact that seems to elude the discussants is that liberal or communist or fascist ideologues are not hatched in hatcheries. Unlike Narendra Modi, they are not ‘non-biological’ beings that gatecrash our earthly world.

To begin with, it would be useful to bear in mind that the jailed left-wing student leader Umar Khalid had transcended to secular left politics from circumstances in which his father was a member of a major Muslim revivalist body. Likewise, Neha Bora, president of the pro-communist All-India Students’ Association who fasted for 23 days at the protest, tells you sans demur that she broke away from a family tradition of voting for the Muslim-baiting BJP. The flow can be in the opposite direction too. Howard Fast, as the despairing chief of the US Communist Party, famed for writing the story of Spartacus, the slave rebel of Rome, became a Buddhist seeker after abandoning Marxism.

Numerous such examples abound in the Indian intellectual pantheon of progressivism and regression, which we can discuss. A scene is vivid from my childhood in which the migration to progressive politics would seem facile despite the good intentions. It was a balmy morning in Mustafabad, a village of erstwhile Shia taluqdars in the heart of Uttar Pradesh. Some young men and women in the joint family had recently got the first university degrees. Marxism was in the air in university campuses in the........

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