California: Renowned Marxist philosopher and political commentator, Prof. Ajaz Ahmad has passed away at his California residence. He was hospitalised with age-related ailments and had returned home only a few days ago. Aijaz Ahmad was a literary theorist and in 2017 joined UC Invine School of Humanities at California University where he served as a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature.
A profound orator, Aijaz Ahmad expressed concern over the lack of a political centre for surging movements in India to coalesce and feared that fragmented resistance could lead the country to peter out.
At a debate organised by Bengaluru Collective last year, Ahmad had said that democracy has failed as a system of governance, adding that “I feel, to truly have democracy, we need to have socialism”.“There is something deeply incompatible between democracy and capitalism that produces oligarchic power, ” Aijaz Ahmad had said on the occasion.
Born in Uttar Pradesh in 1941, Aijaz moved with his parents to Pakistan following partition. After education, he went on to work with various universities in US and Canada before joining UC Ivine. Aijaz Ahmad was also an editorial consultant with Frontline magazine and served as a news analyst for the online site Newsclick.
In the seminal work In Theory, he had termed the articles of Marx on India, full of blunder.