Last month, Jacobin published an article by Shadman Ali Khan called “Indian Communists’ Muslim Dilemma.” This “large crisis,” the author argues, “is a crisis of imagination regarding the kind of social transformation it aims to achieve.” Because the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) must stay “electorally relevant,” it gets “trapped in the conflicts of identity.”

Indian Communists, it’s implied, are trapped by the social contradictions of today’s India, which means that they have absorbed the wretchedness of an anti-Muslim politics. This is a strong claim, but thankfully one that the article cannot sustain.

To take just a single example of the inaccuracies and evasions littered in Ali Khan’s piece, one of the two statements that provides the anchor for the essay is purported to be by Kerala’s chief minister and CPI(M) Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan. Ali Khan says that Vijayan made the point to the Hindu’s Sobhana Nair that gold smuggling in parts of Kerala is used for “anti-national” purposes. At the bottom of the article, the newspaper apologized for the inclusion of material about gold smuggling that had been made “in writing” by the public relations company Kaizzen and not by the chief minister. Two days later, Vijayan reiterated that he had not made or approved those statements. Ali Khan elides all of this and takes for granted that these statements are made by Vijayan. It frames the basis of his entire article.