“Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon”
It was an unforgettable spring evening on May 2, 1954. India’s political map presented a stark contradiction: although the nation had achieved independence from British colonial rule, Goa, Dadra, and Nagar Haveli remained under Portuguese colonial occupation. As the Communists, under CPI leader Godavari Parulekar, mounted an armed liberation struggle to free the motherland, they distanced themselves from the resistance. However, the armed struggle for Goan liberation was carried forward by the Azad Gomantak Dal (under the leadership of Prabhakar Sinari and Vishwanath Lawande) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, led by Raja Wakankar). Yet, this revolutionary uprising urgently required funds and military equipment.
In this critical hour, Sudhir Phadke—a renowned music composer and dedicated RSS swayamsevak—stepped forward to assist the revolutionaries. He went straight to the doorstep of a 24-year-old singer whom the world today venerates as ‘Bharat Ratna’ Lata Mangeshkar. For Lata, this was not a mere professional engagement; it was a sacred spiritual calling rooted in her deep-seated Savarkarite patriotism and reverence for the holy land of Goa and Goddess Mangeshi. From her father, Master Deenanath Mangeshkar, she had learned in early childhood that “Music is a sacred blossom offered at the feet of the Almighty in the service of the nation.” The young vocalist did not hesitate for a moment. Refusing a single penny in remuneration, she took the stage at the historic Hirabaug in Pune on May 2, 1954.
The fiery musical fervor that flowed from Lata’s voice at Hirabaug that evening did not merely spellbind the audience—it ignited an unprecedented nationalist awakening. The substantial funds raised from that charity concert directly reached the hands of the armed freedom fighters. That money was used to purchase essential weaponry, empowering the revolutionaries to shatter colonial chains and liberate Dadra and Naroli in July 1954. History stands witness: a young female playback singer of independent India transformed musical notes into weapons, directly funding an armed revolution against Portuguese colonialism!
However, Lata Mangeshkar’s uncompromising patriotism, her family’s spiritual devotion to Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and her direct contribution to nationalist causes were never tolerated by India’s Communist and Left-wing ecosystem. The Leftist cultural leadership—operating through the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA)—regarded the film and music industries as their exclusive ideological fiefdom. They perceived Lata’s India-centric nationalism as a formidable threat to their cultural monopoly.
This hostility was not the result of ordinary artistic or aesthetic critique; it stemmed from deep-seated ideological malice. To the Communist cultural establishment, Lata Mangeshkar possessed three unforgivable ‘sins’:
Her uncompromising Indian nationhood and adherence to Sanatani heritage;
Her veneration of Savarkar as a family patriarch and guardian (whose patriotic poetry led the Congress-Left-controlled administration to dismiss her younger brother, Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar, from All India Radio); and
Her open historical affinity with the nationalist ideals of the RSS.
Savarkar-RSS Ideological Roots: The Primary Source of Communist Wrath
To comprehend the Left-wing camp’s intense malice toward Lata Mangeshkar, one must first examine her ideological and family background. Her father, Master Deenanath Mangeshkar—a legend of Marathi musical theatre (Sangeet Natak) and an accomplished classical vocalist of the Gwalior and Kirana gharanas—was a staunch cultural nationalist. In 1918, he established the ‘Balwant Sangeet Mandali’, breaking away from conventional theatrical norms to propagate Swadeshi and freedom-seeking ideals through Marathi stage productions. Along this cultural journey, the Mangeshkar family forged a deep spiritual bond with the freedom fighter and chief architect of Hindutva ideology, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
In her landmark book published by Princeton University Press, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, researcher Janhavi Bakhle provides a detailed analysis of Savarkar’s Marathi literature, history, and poetic spirit. Savarkar—whom the Mangeshkar family affectionately addressed as ‘Tatya’—was a frequent guest at Deenanath Mangeshkar’s home. Deenanath’s theatre troupe staged Savarkar’s nationalist plays, notably the 1931 production Sannyasta Khadga, for which Deenanath both composed the music and performed lead roles. In a historic interview broadcast on DD Sahyadri, Lata Mangeshkar and her younger brother, Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar, recalled that Savarkar was an elder patriarch of their household, whose patriotism, poetry, and political discourse were part of their daily home conversations.
In post-independence India, when Nehruvian and Marxist historians launched a concerted campaign to demonize Savarkar, Lata Mangeshkar and her family publicly stood by his legacy. In numerous interviews, Lata expressed profound anguish that independent India had denied Veer Savarkar his rightful honor, calling it a grave injustice toward his monumental sacrifices. Because Savarkar was a declared ideological adversary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], the Communist ecosystem naturally branded the iconic singer who revered him as their political enemy.
The direct fallout of this hostility manifested through the abuse of state power in public institutions. During the 1950s, when Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar was employed at All India Radio (AIR) in Mumbai, he composed the music for Savarkar’s famous patriotic poem “Sagara Pran Talamalala” (Ne Majsi Ne Pherat Matribhumila) and broadcast it over AIR. As documented by historian Vikram Sampath in Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, Hridaynath Mangeshkar was summarily dismissed from All India Radio within just eight days under pressure from the Left-leaning Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi cited this historical injustice in Parliament in 2022 to expose the past suppression of free speech by Congress and the Left, Leftist media and Maha Vikas Aghadi leaders attempted to downplay official records. Nevertheless, this bitter experience of the Mangeshkar family remains a damning testament to Left-wing political persecution.
Gramscian Cultural Hegemony and the Monopoly of Leftist Art Establishments
To understand the Communist anti-Lata campaign, one must grasp Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s theory of ‘Cultural Hegemony’. In Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence & Wishart, London), Gramsci posited that capturing political power requires first establishing cultural dominance over civil society, education, literature, and the arts. In 1940s India, under the direct instructions of CPI General Secretary P.C. Joshi, the ‘Progressive Writers’ Association’ (PWA) and the ‘Indian People’s Theatre Association’ (IPTA) were created.
As detailed in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents edited by Marxist historian Sudhi Pradhan (National Book Trust, Kolkata) and Rustom Bharucha’s Rehearsals of Revolution: The Political Theater of Bengal (University of Hawaii Press), the Communist Party sought to convert Indian theatre and the emerging Hindi cinema industry into their propaganda apparatus. A significant section of directors, screenwriters, and lyricists in the Bombay film industry were CPI cardholders.
Within this organized Leftist cultural ecosystem, Lata Mangeshkar stood as a towering and insurmountable exception. She was the undisputed sovereign voice of India; consequently, even the most hardline Marxist music directors found it impossible to boycott her. A prime example was the legendary composer Salil Chowdhury. Chowdhury was a student leader in the CPI and a front-ranking IPTA cultural activist who composed famous mass songs (Ganasangeet) like “Bicharapati” and “Gayer Bodhu” during the 1943 Bengal Famine. Yet, when working on classic cinema like Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin or Madhumati, Salil Chowdhury had to rely entirely on Lata Mangeshkar’s vocals. He famously described her voice as a sublime confluence of Rabindranath Tagore, Amir Khusrau, and Kahlil Gibran.
However, this mandatory reliance enraged the Communist cultural hierarchy. While they sought total domination over the music industry, they could neither bypass Lata’s overwhelming popularity nor force her into their Communist mold. Lata proudly sang devotional Sanatani bhajans, maintained her conviction in Savarkarite nationalism, and refused to become a ‘progressive’ cadre of IPTA. An article by journalist Somen Sengupta in The Telegraph India documents how the CPI operated cultural policing over its own composers in the name of preserving ideological purity. When Salil Chowdhury included references to Lakshmi Puja and the sounding of conch shells (Shankha) in the song “Gayer Bodhu”, dogmatic CPI leaders denounced him as “bourgeois and idolatrous.” It was hardly surprising that a party that persecuted its own composers for traditional folk elements viewed Lata Mangeshkar’s open Hindu nationalist stance through the lens of a deep conspiracy.
Institutional and Academic Character Assassination
The Communist and Leftist offensive against Lata Mangeshkar was not confined to newspaper columns; it was weaponized through international research papers and university-level institutional academia. Shortly after her passing in 2022, Dr. Pramod Ranjan published a controversial paper titled “Social and Political Concerns of Lata Mangeshkar: An Ambedkarite Perspective” in Sage Publications’ international journal Media Watch (Vol. 13, Issue 3) in an explicit attempt to tarnish her legacy.
This paper serves as a glaring document of the Communist-pseudo-Ambedkarite nexus. Under the guise of calling Lata the “uncrowned queen of music” and referencing Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan’s famous compliment (“Kambakht kabhi besuri hi nahi hoti”), the paper systematically maligned her entire political outlook as fiercely reactionary. Ranjan maliciously alleged that Lata was ideologically aligned with the RSS and “prioritized communal politics over secularism.” Explicitly labeling the RSS as followers of “Nazi ideology,” the paper attempted an unprecedented smear—framing the world’s most revered singer as a patron of European fascism and Nazism. The theoretical underpinning for this attack was borrowed from Marzia Casolari’s controversial 2000 paper in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), “Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s”.
Simultaneously, the Leftist ecosystem attempted to manufacture caste-based anti-Ambedkar propaganda against her. An article on the Left-leaning portal Counterview, titled “Lata Mangeshkar, a Dalit from Devdasi family, refused to sing a song about Ambedkar”, alleged that despite her paternal grandmother belonging to Goa’s Devadasi community, Lata actively upheld Brahminical upper-caste hegemony. Quoting Marathi folk artist Sambhaji Bhagat, the article claimed that Lata had refused to sing songs honoring Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. The goal of this smear was to portray Lata as casteist and anti-Dalit to India’s marginalized communities. Historical truth, however, refutes this malice: Lata Mangeshkar consistently paid heartfelt tributes on Ambedkar Jayanti and sang above all social divisions throughout her career.
Another vicious academic assault came from a Marxist-pseudo-feminist coalition. Ashraf Aziz, a researcher affiliated with Harvard University, argued in his book Light of the Universe: Essays on Hindustani Film Music that Lata Mangeshkar’s high-pitched, soft, and sweet voice was part of a capitalist-feudal conspiracy designed to make Indian women “domestic, obedient, and subservient to patriarchy.” Aziz claimed that her feminine voice was promoted over deep, robust voices like Noor Jehan’s to cultivate a submissive, dutiful, and superstitious mindset among Indian women.
This Marxist-feminist critique exhibited blind disregard for Lata’s extraordinary real-life resilience. Following her father’s untimely death in the 1940s, the young Lata assumed full financial responsibility for her family. In the Bombay music industry, she fought single-handedly against male producers and composers to secure royalties, proper screen credits, and fair compensation for playback singers—pioneering a historic revolution for women’s economic independence. Yet, Leftist critics suppressed this history of female empowerment, reducing her voice to a “symbol of patriarchal and Hindutva servitude” simply because she refused to subscribe to Left-wing political agendas.
Vicious Propaganda and Internal Conflicts of the Music Industry
To erode Lata Mangeshkar’s cultural stature, Left-wing music critics circulated a persistent narrative for decades—alleging that she operated as a ruthless, capitalist monopolist in the Bombay music industry who deliberately suppressed emerging female singers. Marxist film critic Raju Bharatan initiated this narrative in his 1995 book Lata Mangeshkar: A Biography (UBS Publishers).
Leftist media outlets routinely claimed that Lata engineered the ruin of singers like Geeta Dutt, Suman Kalyanpur, Vani Jairam, and Mubarak Begum. Rather than viewing her unmatched skill and commercial demand within a free-market framework as professional excellence, Leftist commentators filtered it through Marxist tropes of “capitalist monopolistic hegemony.” The goal was to stain her spiritual musical image and reframe her as a scheming monopolist.
Similarly, Leftist media distorted Lata’s famous 1960s royalty dispute with legendary singer Mohammed Rafi. Lata spearheaded a historic fight for artists’ financial rights, demanding that music companies share 5% of song royalties with singers. Mohammed Rafi maintained that once a singer received their recording fee, their financial claim ended. Due to this principled stance, the two temporarily stopped singing duets. A Communist movement claiming to champion workers’ rights should logically have supported Lata’s crusade for artists’ royalties. Instead, Leftist media inverted the narrative, accusing Lata of being jealous of Rafi’s popularity and provoking a rift to maintain her monopoly. Whatever Lata did, she was targeted by Communist propaganda.
The Naxalite Cultural Wing
An even more violent and extremist strain of Leftism—the Naxalbari movement and Maoist cultural fronts—targeted Lata Mangeshkar’s artistic work as part of their ideological war. The 1967 armed agrarian uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal, sent shockwaves through India’s urban and rural cultural landscape. In his essay “The Cultural Aspect of the Naxalbari Uprising” (Prabhat Khabar Diwali Special, 2009), Pranab Krishna documents how Naxalite ideology declared all mainstream cultural icons to be “bourgeois class enemies.”
Across Maoist-affected regions in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal, organizations like Jana Natya Mandali (led by Gaddar / Gummadi Vittal Rao) and other Naxal cultural groups emerged. Sociologist Bela Bhatia detailed in her 2005 EPW paper, “The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar”, how Naxal cultural cadres used street theatre and songs for indoctrination. According to Naxal ideology, Bombay cinema and Lata Mangeshkar’s songs functioned as “tools of bourgeois and Brahminical cultural imperialism of the Indian state,” lulling the working class into ideological slumber like an opiate.
Editorials by communist poet Saroj Dutta in the Naxal mouthpiece Deshabrata, along with theoretical essays in Revolutionary Democracy, repeatedly vilified Lata’s dominance as an “instrument of state exploitation.” Where everyday Indians found divine solace in her music, Naxalite Communists called for boycotting her songs as “class enemy entertainment.”
Digital Era ‘Cancel Culture’
In the twenty-first century, Leftist hostility toward Lata Mangeshkar expanded beyond print media into digital ‘cancel culture’ and the misuse of state machinery.
A glaring instance occurred during the 2021 farmers’ protests. When foreign pop singer Rihanna and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg posted misleading tweets regarding India’s agricultural laws, India’s sports and cultural icons stepped forward to defend national sovereignty. Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar posted tweets under hashtags #IndiaTogether and #IndiaAgainstPropaganda, calling on citizens to unite against foreign interference in internal affairs.
In response, the then Maharashtra state government—a coalition of Congress, NCP, and Shiv Sena (Maha Vikas Aghadi) influenced by Leftist advisors—executed a retaliatory maneuver. According to reports in Scroll.in and The Hindustan Times, Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh directed state intelligence agencies to investigate whether 91-year-old Bharat Ratna Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar were subjected to central political pressure to post those tweets! Ordering a police intelligence probe against a 91-year-old national icon who spoke in defense of her nation’s dignity exposed unprecedented political vindictiveness. Opposition leader Devendra Fadnavis condemned the move, questioning the moral bankruptcy of a government investigating Lata Mangeshkar.
Similarly, Communists routinely attempted to provoke controversy around her political choices. Nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1999 during the NDA administration, Lata served until 2005, explicitly refusing any parliamentary salary, allowances, or official government bungalow in Delhi. Despite her limited attendance due to failing health, Left-wing MPs singled her out for attack. Most notably, on March 26, 2002, during a historic joint session of Parliament convened to pass the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), Lata Mangeshkar attended despite ill health and voted decisively in favor of national security and anti-terrorism measures. While Left-wing and self-styled secular parties opposed POTA, Lata’s decisive vote for national security permanently cemented her status as a “right-wing adversary” in Communist eyes.
Leftist media and social networks also targeted her during the 2016 Tanmay Bhat controversy. Tanmay Bhat, head of the Left-leaning comedy group ‘All India Bakchod’ (AIB), released a Snapchat video titled “Sachin vs Lata Civil War”, subjecting the 86-year-old icon to vulgar and derogatory insults. The video mocked her face as looking like “a corpse soaked in water for eight days” and crudely suggested she should die.
When national outrage erupted, prominent Left-leaning journalists like Barkha Dutt defended Tanmay Bhat under the banner of “freedom of speech” and “humor.” Self-proclaimed feminists who were vocal on daily issues rallied behind Bhat while turning a blind eye to the vulgar, ageist, and gendered abuse hurled at an 86-year-old national icon. Furthermore, international Left-leaning newspaper The New York Times, reporting on the controversy, referred to Lata Mangeshkar as a “so-called playback singer,” drawing widespread outrage from Indians globally until the publication issued a clarification.
Leftist Propaganda Continued Even on the Day of Her Passing
The most appalling manifestation of Communist malice occurred on February 6, 2022—the day 92-year-old Lata Mangeshkar passed away due to post-COVID complications. While the nation mourned, national flags flew at half-mast, and she was accorded a full state funeral, Leftist digital networks engaged in vile online celebrating and hate-speech.
Media intelligence analyses published by OpIndia, TFI Post, and Satya Agraha documented digital trends between February 6–8. Shivangi, a reporter for Left-wing news portals Newsclick and Firstpost, posted on social media within hours of her death, claiming Lata was a “hardline Sanghi” all her life. Demeaning her immortal voice, Shivangi wrote that Lata’s voice sounded “like a pressure cooker whistle” and exhorted people to “stop RIP stuff.” Another Leftist commentator, Manveer Singh, asserted that because Lata supported a “fascist party like the Nazi-inspired RSS,” no sorrow should be expressed over her demise.
This orchestrated online assault aimed to import Western ‘cancel culture’ into India, calling for her eight-decade artistic legacy to be boycotted due to her nationalist convictions. When a proposal arose to construct a memorial for Lata at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, Left-Congress media networks ignited such political acrimony that her younger brother, Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar, was forced to issue a heartbreaking video appeal. As reported by Mumbai Live, Hridaynath pleaded: “We, the Mangeshkar family, do not want any memorial at Shivaji Park. Please stop playing politics over Lata Didi’s name.”
Why This Leftist Attack?
Why did Communist hostility against Lata Mangeshkar reach such venomous levels during the 2016 Tanmay Bhat controversy, the 2021 farmers’ protest, and her passing in 2022?
The answer lies in the electoral collapse of Left-wing politics in mainstream India. Following the 2011 collapse of the 34-year Left Front regime in West Bengal, along with existential crises in Tripura and Kerala, Communist parties faced parliamentary irrelevance. Losing democratic mandates, they redirected their energy toward ‘compensatory cultural aggression’.
When political parties are rejected at the ballot box, they assault cultural icons, academia, and civil society symbols to assert relevance. The Communist ecosystem calculated that by labeling India’s most revered cultural icon as “fascist, Sanghi, and feudal,” they could weaken the foundations of Indian cultural nationalism.
However, this political conspiracy failed completely. As acknowledged by journalist Wesley Rahn in Deutsche Welle, attempts to apply cancel culture against Lata Mangeshkar failed to resonate with mainstream Indians. Lata Mangeshkar’s voice is inextricably woven into the spiritual, diverse, and national consciousness of India—an immortal legacy that no Communist propaganda or academic smear campaign can ever erase. This failed offensive served only to record the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Indian Communism in the pages of history.
