My heart travels a thousand miles towards my native land.
My dream intertwines with sadness like a skein of a thousand threads.
Innocent, I have now endured a whole year in prison.
Using my tears for ink, I turn my thoughts into verses.
Ho Chi Minh or Vietnam’s “Uncle Ho,” penned these beautiful lines during his life in a Chinese prison. In 1942, at the age of 52, Ho Chi Minh was arrested in South China, accused of being a communist spy. Bound in leg irons, Ho was shifted from jail to jail for months.
Throughout this time he kept a diary with verses written in Chinese. As his verses echo, his heart always remained in the villages of Vietnam, with the people of his native land who struggled and suffered for generations in the hands of different colonial and imperialist powers.
For the people of Vietnam, he was a messiah who marched them to the promised land of freedom and dignity; for his nemeses, he was a mere Soviet agent with a mysterious life who took the oath to disseminate communism throughout the world. He assumed hundreds of names and ultimately became popular as Ho Chi Minh, or the ‘bringer of light’. The one who travelled across the world as a cook’s helper in a French passenger liner, as a Buddhist monk, as a Comintern agent and finally as the President of Vietnam. Ho was indeed a person with an enigmatic life and his death on September 3, 1969 did not end the fascination of the people to debate over his true political and ideological leniency.
On his 130th birthday, the world remembers him as more than anything else but as the leader of the most successful movement for national liberation in the century, a man who is part Lenin part Gandhi part Confucius and all Vietnamese. In 1908 at the age of 17 when Ho was studying at the National Academy in Hue, a group of farmers marched past his Academy against the colonial government’s corruption and excessive taxation.
Ho translated their demands to French language so that the colonial administrators could read them. Knowing this, the authority expelled him from the school and this event turned out to be the first revolutionary act in the life of a man who led his people to fight the impossible. Later in his life, he travelled across the ports in Africa and Asia including the countries like Senegal, India, Algeria, and Morocco, experiencing the colonial oppression in these countries, and these had a deep influence on his views. This journey in pursuit of ideas for liberating his people took him to the United States, France, and with great admiration for Leninism, he finally reached the Soviet Union where he learned the craft to turn the communist ideas and rhetoric into revolutionary act.
It took almost thirty years for him to return to Vietnam, armed with the revolutionary ideas and a mind full of determination, and ultimately to lead his people to liberation. After years of armed conflicts and the guerilla war against the French, in 1954 when Việt Minh (national independence coalition formed by Ho Chi Minh) defeated the French troops, it was for the first time in history a European country was defeated by its colony since the American Revolution.
Later in 1975 when the U.S. was forced to withdraw its troops from Vietnam after the defeat from the communist forces, for them it was no longer the fight against communism but humiliation, a war which they terribly lost against a small country guided by the wit and wisdom of a Man.
As a communist leader, Ho Chi Minh had his own distinctiveness that cannot be matched with any other communist leader, whether it is Mao Tse Tung or Joseph Stalin. The Marxist ideology of Ho was more of an amalgamation of Leninist principles with Confucian ethics and the French revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In fact, when he read out the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam in 1945, he even quoted from the American Declaration of Independence – “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” His life was a journey in search of ideas that would equip him in his fight for the liberation of his people against some of the world’s mightiest nations, and he was open to all the ideas that would help him in this quest for freedom.
Ho was a scholar who wrote in different languages from English, French, Russian, Chinese to the native Vietnamese. He wrote many works such as, “The Way to Liberation,” in which he explained his ideas on the theory of the revolution of liberation and “Guerilla Warfare”, which described the principles of fighting methods of armed forces in times of rebellions, the structure and characteristics of armed forces, etc. But during the war of liberation, Ho spent most of his time interacting with the peasants, living like one among them rather than spending a lot of time in theorising and correcting the ideology. He was more of a pragmatic person than a theoretician in contrast to many other prominent revolutionary figures of his time. This made many scholars and even his contemporaries to consider him as a mere practitioner rather than a revolutionary theoretician. But Ho was never bothered in this distinction, in fact, to an interviewer who once asked him why he had never written an ideological treatise, he simply replied that ideology was something he would leave to Mao Tse Tung.
Even though Gandhi never had any direct influence on Ho Chi Minh, he was often compared with Gandhi for his strong emphasis on ethics and simplicity. On one occasion, he even said, “I and others may be revolutionaries, but we are disciples of Mahatma Gandhi, directly or indirectly, nothing more nothing less.” In Moscow, during the time he worked for the Comintern there he met and interacted with the Indian communist revolutionary M.N. Roy.
He always maintained a very amicable and warm relation with India. In 1954, after the victory of the Vietnamese forces over the French, Nehru was one of the first foreign dignitaries to visit Vietnam. Later in 1958 Ho visited India in an 11-day State Visit and this opened a new chapter in India-Vietnam relations.
In his last testament, Ho Chi Minh wrote, “In our patriotic struggle against American aggression, we may indeed have to endure greater difficulties and consent to new sacrifices, but we are bound to win total victory. This is a certainty. I intend, when that day comes, to tour both the North and the South, to congratulate our heroic compatriots, cadres and combatants, and to visit our beloved old people, youth and children. Then, on behalf of our people, I will go to the fraternal countries of the socialist camp and the friendly countries of the whole world and thank them for their wholehearted aid and support for our people’s patriotic struggle against U.S. aggression.”
It took almost six more years for Vietnam to win its war against the U.S. after the death of their great leader, but in the last testament to his people, he was certain about that victory.
In the time of Colonialism, Imperialism, and Capitalism, it is this determination that inspired the people who struggled and suffered under the mighty nations to rise against inequality and injustice.
