Why targetting the Naxal is the basic dharma of the Indian Republic
In the light of the house arrest of supposed ‘urban Naxals’, activists today are urging us to defend democracy in India. These arrests are supposedly part of the ‘destruction of the democratic idea of India’, which promises a progressive Constitution and the right to dissent.
But I ask — why should I defend this idea of India and this democracy?
Do we not know that this ‘democratic’ idea of India — which the BJP is supposedly destroying — has been deeply stained by the cold-blooded (‘unconstitutional’, ‘extra-judicial’) murder of Naxals, across the decades? Naxals or Maoists have been killed by Indira Gandhi (remember Operation Steeplechase) as well as by Left governments and regional parties.
Nehru can be safely assumed to have started it all.
In killing the armed peasants of Telangana in 1950-51, he was killing the precursors of the Naxal movement.
Operation Steeplechase, carried out by the Indian Army, was apparently like a right-wing vigilante operation, without any paper trail and no records, as revealed by the man in charge, Lieutenant General JFR Jacob. Jacob, in turn, was reporting, again without papers, to the republic's famous military man, Sam Manekshaw.
The Naxal is treated by all political forces — from the left to the right — as the absolute enemy, an infinite menace to the Indian republic.
The Naxal is not an opposition, not dissent. It is a deadly abyss, a precipice, hence rightly called the ‘underground’. This contrasts with other struggles of the marginalised and the oppressed that operate overground. It is not decked up in the beautiful buzzwords of ‘upward mobility’, ‘rights’ or ‘empowerment’.
The road to heaven or the revolutionary utopia cannot but pass through the dark and dingy abyss, a vertiginous spin away from the mainstream, the so-called ‘democratic process’. The starry sky is properly visible only from pitch darkness.
It is from the underground and its imaginary that you can see and feel the radical possibilities that everyday reality, the normal and the ‘overground’, always keep concealed. It is such a feeling, very palpable and real, which Gautam Navlakha must have experienced during his Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion. This is what is captured in the poetry of Varavara Rao, Cherabandaraju or, even more so, Saroj Dutta.
Here is realised the impossibility of a luminous abyss. Does this not throw new light into Nietzsche’s dictum that “if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into thee”?
The Indian republic feels very insecure. Given that the luminosity is from an abyss, it feels that it can permanently repress it.
But it cannot. Hence we know that the idea of India has a lie in its very foundation. The much vaunted freedom from colonial rule was itself fake. ‘Yeh azadi jhoothi hai’ is the clarion call here, a call which carries the basic message of Bhagat Singh, who declared that without a social and economic revolution, India’s political independence will be an elaborate con on the people. The brown sahibs will simply replace the white sahibs.
If this is basically what independence and the Indian republic is about, then the Naxals cannot happily participate in elections and do mainstream politics. Charu Majumdar famously declared in 1968, 'Boycott elections', parliamentary democracy seen as a con. In a largely feudal society, where neither the landed classes, nor the princely states were eliminated, democracy and universal adult franchise are considered a kind of a smokescreen. Such a democracy would favour what Suniti Kumar Ghose called 'the Indian big bourgeosie', the capitalist class.
Yet, the Indian republic claimed to be progressive by blowing the ‘communal menace’ beyond proportions.
It is as though the secular elites had a vested interest, a kind of a vicarious investment in the continuation of the vexed Hindu-Muslim issue. The radical visions of Bhagat Singh and sections of the working classes were thereby effectively sidelined.
The idea of a secular and democratic India then is the name for what is essentially a counter-revolutionary — if not a reactionary — consolidation of the power of upper caste and dominant class elites.
We are not dealing with the shortcomings of the republic, some kind of a work-in-progress (this is what the Left parties believe in). We are dealing with a positively constituted counter-revolution — yeh azadi jhoothi hai. There is therefore no rapproachement, no negotiation, possible.
This sets the stage for the Indian state to treat the Naxals or Maoists (or armed communists, more generally) as the absolute, or rather, the perfect enemy of the republic. Hence, the Maoist problem is sometimes a ‘law and order problem’. But at other, less tense times, it is a ‘socio-economic problem’— the struggle between these two positions was clear within the UPA government during 2009-14, when Digvijay Singh publicly attacked Chidambaram’s more hawkish line.
‘Dharma’ means inner nature, intrinsic quality, like an encoded DNA. Targetting the Naxal is such dharma of the Indian republic. Surely the Naxal wears this as a badge of honour.