Twenty years ago, the dictatorship that rules China crushed a peaceful gathering of students and young people in Tiananmen Square, leading to large numbers of deaths. That day, I think I came of age, politically. It taught me, that the realities I held in the highest esteem could suddenly, over night reveal themselves to be monsters. There was no quicker way to grow up, suddenly.

I was an undergraduate student in Delhi University at that time, and a member (not overly active) of the Students Federation of India, a front organization of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). I had been following, with close interest, the events unfolding in Beijing, where what seemed to be an entire generation of students and young people had been assembling, peacefully, for more than two months, in support of political reform, openness and democracy. For me, as for many others who identified with the left in India, and elsewhere, the students movement was of enormous significance, as it pointed towards the possibility of a dynamic socialist democracy. We were buoyed by the cheerfulness of our Chinese student comrades, followed every communique, every slogan with care and affection, and said to ourselves, “see, they sing the Internationale”.

The ‘official party line’ in the CPI(M), as it filtered down to our ‘student cell’ while not enthusiastic, was tolerant, in a patronizing sort of way, of our ‘youthful’ enthusiasm for the Chinese students. All this changed after the 4th of June. Those at the ‘party centre’ who had expressed their soft spoken approval of the calls for democracy in China, as an example of the resilience and flexibility of actually existing Socialism, were suddenly forthright in their condemnation of the students, and in their justification of the Chinese regime’s massacre of their (and our) hopes.

I recall my somewhat agitated conversation with a ‘student leader’ of the SFI.

“But Comrade, they (the students) were singing the Internationale (the Communist Anthem) and the party ordered tanks on them.”

“Their is a difference between subjective conditions and objective conditions.”

” But till yesterday they were our heroes, and you did not disapprove, and now you are calling them Imperialist agents. ”

“You don’t understand dialectics. ”

This was a form of dialectics that I have since then, chosen not to understand.

I recall not being able to sleep, reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of Marx, and writings on the Paris Commune. I recall an ashen silence at home.

I think it was the next day that we all saw the photograph of the lone man in front of the tanks. It stayed for many years, cut out of the newspaper, stuck to a wall in my room.

The next day, a rag tag group of people, perhaps fifty odd in number, gathered in Delhi and decided to march to the Chinese embassy. I remember listening to Dilip Simeon, sometime naxalite, then Trotskyist, and widely respected history teacher in Delhi university speaking to us at this gathering. We carried a simple large black banner which said – “Condemn Murder of Socialism in China” in large white letters.

There was a small cordon of policemen near Teen Murti Bhavan, we were not allowed to get into Chanakyapuri (the Diplomatic Enclave), let alone near the Chinese Embassy.

Afterwards, we sat, bewildered, sad, on a traffic island. Not much was said. A hastily written press statement was drafted, and laboriously copied by hand by those who had neat handwriting, I was deputed to go and drop this statement at various newspaper offices, which I did. I do not think anyone in the newspapers in Delhi took it seriously. I do not remember it being published, anywhere. I decided that I would relinquish my membership of the SFI, and abandon all hopes of a life with the CPI (M). That evening, I persuaded my father, that he, a lifelong sympathizer, should stop paying the party tithe. He agreed. A man in our neighbourhood, who would come around every week with the latest edition of Peoples Democracy, came, and we spent a few minutes in tense silence. He knew that I had been in the demonstration that tried to go to the Chinese Embassy. I think we both thought of each other as betrayers. He never came to collect the tithe, or to give the party paper again.

In the last twenty years, the memory of Tiananmen Square has always remained with me, and haunted me, and I still cannot forget that ‘they were singing the Internationale’. The students, and those who killed them, would have all sang the Internationale.

Whenever i have met Chinese people of my generation since then, after a while, I invariably ask them, where were you on the 4th of June on 1989. And then the conversation takes a certain turn. Sometimes, there are silences that speak much more eloquently than words can.

As for me, I have never stopped calling myself a communist. I think that to do so, would be to perversely betray the young people of my generation in China, many of whom believed that Communism could also mean freedom, not only the absence of liberty.

Since then, I have grown to understand the peculiar perversity of the state that Mao Zedong and his successors presided over, but I have never let that sway me that my way of remembering Tiananmen will be to continue to whistle the Internationale when the chips are down. The chips were down, often.

Where we are born, where we live and grow up, where we come of age – all these are accidents in the end. I could just as easily have been twenty one years old in Beijing on the 4th of June in 1989. And if I had been twenty one years old in Beijing on the 4th of June in 1989, I know where I would have been, singing the Internationale. I have always had an abhorrence of martyrdom, and out of the love an affection I have for those who were cut down that day, I hope I would have survived.

Someday, I hope that those who survived Tiananmen that day will be able to settle accounts, peacefully, but unforgivingly, with those who ordered the massacre, and with their successors, who still hold power in China today.

And I know that I will never forget Tiananmen. Someday, I hope I stand on its paved stones, and someday I hope I can whistle the Internationale there, not in time with the brass band of the Chinese Communist Party, but in time with the whistling echoes of the ghosts of my Chinese generation.