Images have been circulating on social media of a book titled ‘Maharishi Karl Marx’ authored by one Shriram Sharma Acharya. The book has invited much ridicule and mockery from people who found the title book highly amusing.
The first picture which depicts the cover of the book, the logo of JNU is seen in the top right corner of the page. In the second picture which shows the inside of the book, words on the bottom left corner state that the book was published by the propaganda department of JNU. Those bits were probably photoshopped on the cover page for humour and mockery.
After a little bit of digging on the internet, we discovered that contrary to the image being circulated, the book was published by an organization called All World Gayatri Pariwar (AWGP) and is available for purchase on their website. The Wikipedia page of the author reveals that he was a distinguished social reformer, philosopher, a visionary and the founder of the AWGP and is popularly known as Pandit Shriram Sharma Acharya by the members of the organization he founded. He has several authored several other books on spirituality apart from the one on Karl Marx.
The title of the book reveals the obsession of Indians to adapt the current rage in the world to the Indian context. Although it unclear when the book was first published, it is evident that at the time the book was authored, communism was a dominant force in world politics as the Shriram Acharya passed away in 1990. And since 2000, when liberalism is the most dominant force in world politics, we witness various spiritual leaders emphasize the inherent ‘liberal’ nature of Hinduism regardless of the merits of the case.
There seems to be a dormant need for the Indian population to force it every western ideology in the Indian context and perhaps communism is just one of them, albeit, the most violent one.