From Zohran Mamdani, Nehru and the forgotten thread of freedom https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pratap-bhanu-mehta-writes-from-zohran-mamdani-nehru-and-the-forgotten-thread-of-freedom-10350358/ the working class — not the privileged elite — that heralded a genuinely open and cosmopolitan society. In contemporary parlance, one might say that the cosmopolitanism of the city is the cosmopolitanism of labour, not of capital... The ideological thread connecting these figures( Debs/Baldwin & Nehru) belonged to a historical moment we have largely forgotten — when civil liberties, anti-racism, socialism, open societies, and decolonisation were all considered part of a single emancipatory movement. Freedom and justice were indivisible...
Civil liberties, in this view, were a cause of the Left — distinguishing it from communism and far removed from today’s libertarian appropriation. What is so resonant about this connection is the reminder that civil liberties once meant defending even the rights of those accused of conscientious objection and treason. In an age when the definition of treason has expanded to the point that the very idea of a “political prisoner” has lost meaning, this history bears remembering.