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Maoism in India really the only response to poverty and lack of
development? Is an armed rebellion the only way to change the way the
Indian state operates? Will such a movement lead to a better future for
underprivileged people in this country? Are other forms of mass democratic
struggles an alternative option at all?
These are the questions that haunted me as I sat through a
public hearing on drought at Daltonganj in Jharkhand’s Palamu district in
late October 2009. Questions that are not new and have been debated
repeatedly within the various strands of the Indian Left movement for
several decades now with no clear answers as yet.
While I mused, there was this young woman standing on the
stage, slowly edging towards the mike, patiently waiting for her turn to
speak. She need not have said anything at all. Her emaciated, frail frame,
the harassed look on her face and the tears silently welling up in her
sunken eyes had already conveyed to us that this was another tale of
unmitigated tragedy.
Barely in her early twenties, she had been diagnosed with
tuberculosis a few months ago. Her husband was already on his deathbed due
to the same affliction, as there was no public health centre near her
village. Treatment in town was obviously unaffordable. The drought raging
in the district, reported to be the worst in over half a century, would
end up wiping out her entire family, she explained in a quiet,
matter-of-fact tone.
As we sat there, the small ‘jury’ of three or four of us
who had come from Delhi and Ranchi to listen to the woes of Palamu’s
villagers felt much, much smaller. For her horror story was only one out
of some 3,000 similar ones of neglect, deprivation and outright
desperation that tensely waited to be recalled that early winter
afternoon.
The old man who never got his old-age pension, the
abandoned widow on the verge of starvation, the landless worker who
slogged for wages that never arrived, the child born with a deformed hip a
decade ago and still hobbling his way through childhood. This contrasted
with the fact that thousands of crores of rupees had been allocated for
employment guarantee schemes, subsidised rations, public health and
infrastructure schemes – all siphoned off somewhere between the Indian
capital, New Delhi, and the state capital, Ranchi. Stolen by a kleptocracy
that dares to call itself the ‘elected’ representatives of the Indian
people.
And yet poverty and lack of development are not the only
reasons why the Naxals or Maoists, the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), or
whatever you want to call them, thrive in Palamu. It is also the lack of
respect and dignity that the Dalits and Adivasis of these parts have
suffered for centuries, their abject humiliation by the ‘upper castes’
continuing without redress in independent India.
Many, many moons ago when the first movements for justice
started in this district, they were led by the Communist Party of India,
the socialists, the Gandhians. Struggles against feudal practices like the
‘right to the first night’, which forced the brides of Dalit men to spend
the first fortnight after marriage as concubines of upper-caste landlords,
a ‘custom’ enforced at gunpoint. Or against the practice of bonded labour
whereby generations of families slaved for their ‘creditors’, the interest
on their loans accumulating faster than the rivers of sweat they were able
to shed.
In the 1970s, when these popular struggles died down due
to changing priorities or exhaustion or corruption or whatever of these
organisations the Naxals had moved into this vacuum – with their guns. So
somehow it is not just the failure of the Indian state to deliver the
basic needs of the people we are talking about here but the inability of
our mass, democratic movements to maintain a consistent long-term presence
too.
Do the Maoists have popular support? Among the landless,
the poor, the ‘lower castes’, the Adivasis, the answer would obviously be
yes, as in the initial years their interventions did help wipe out the
worst of feudal excesses. Most of their cadres come from these oppressed
sections of society though the occasional ‘upper-caste’ youth too have
joined.
Have their actions led to an overall improvement in the
lives of the people? Well, yes and no. Yes, because, as mentioned, their
activities have boosted the morale of the poor and the oppressed. No,
because a high morale is all very well but a highly nutritious meal or a
functioning high school would be still better and these are still elusive.
The Maoists with simple Newtonian logic had achieved the
first step of doing away with the fear of feudal oppression. Greater the
inertia of an object, greater the force required to move it. Shoot a few
really bad, ‘upper-caste’ warlords in the area and this has the force
multiplier effect of, at least for a short while, moving mountains of
unaccounted power.
The next several steps of organising people, winning all
the basic things they crave for – food, water, health care, escape from
poverty and so on – has proved far more difficult for the Maoists. In
other words, the details of day-to-day life are missing from their
strategy. There is only so much martyrdom and bloodshed any population can
take.
It is also true though that once the gun has been taken up
by the oppressed, the state weighs in heavily on the side of the local
oppressors. The latter themselves escalate the levels of violence and it
becomes impossible to do anything in the open. No more public meetings, no
rallies, no discussions and debates among the people, no mass
organisations. In other words, none of those basic ingredients required to
build a future, participative people’s democracy.
At the same time, the underground – that dark and
dangerous space so tantalising from a safe distance to angst-ridden urban
radicals – is fraught with enough problems of its own. The constant
hiding, the secrecy and suspicion bordering on paranoia, the inability to
communicate with comrades or carry out political education of cadre, the
costly lapses and subsequent losses – all leading to the near negation of
the movement’s original objectives.
Every now and then a creative Maoist cadre somewhere will
try to do something different at the local level like run schools, crack
down on social evils, mobilise people for militant struggles that don’t
involve the use of arms. These struggles, wherever they have occurred,
have always been hugely popular with the people. Those in power, who had
complained about the violence of the Maoists, would now worry about their
non-violent methods and at some point of time step in with their jackboots
to crush the experiment.
Unfortunately, I suspect, the Maoist leadership too sees
these experiments as ideologically soft, reformist, or even worse, as too
‘Gandhian’ and doesn’t really believe in them in any way. It occasionally
allows them to happen with the idea that ‘deviants’ within their fold can
always be brought back to the ‘correct path’ one way or the other. The
lives of the people, after all, can really change for the better only when
the ‘New Democratic Revolution’ happens.
In the world view of the Maoist ideologues, the physics of
the armed struggle will some day square the grand mathematical equation of
social injustice on one side with the predations of capitalism and
imperialism on the other. Their solutions are alarmingly final ones, all
derived from the dead abstractions of physics and mathematics, whether
they correspond with the living biological needs of the faceless ‘people’
and ‘masses’ or not.
Nobody knows what this ‘New Democratic Revolution’ really
means, how many hands and feet it has or whether it prefers sugar and milk
with its coffee or not. Or, for that matter, why the Dalits and Adivasis
of India should fight for this particular model of the future and not
something else. The indigenous people of the Indian subcontinent, for
example, may be better off fighting for complete autonomy from the rest of
India instead of taking on the burden of carrying out the entire ‘Indian
revolution’. And if the Dalits and Adivasis should take up the gun, why
not poor Muslims, many of whose social and economic indicators are even
worse? Also, if this revolution does happen some day, why should it be
confined to the borders of India – why not South Asia as a whole or even
beyond?
Again, nobody even knows when this revolution is supposed
to happen or be finally declared ‘successful’ but it is believed
passionately that nothing but the gun can lead the people of India to this
utopia. As one of the Maoist ideologues caught by the police recently in
Jharkhand reportedly told the media with frightening clarity, “the
bloodshed will stop only when the Revolution is over”. He did not bother
to set a time frame – they could be fighting for the next 200 years for
all we know – all their martyrs looking nice on wall posters in the
meanwhile. Will there be anyone out there left to recognise the ‘victory’
when it finally comes?
I personally do believe in the right of the masses to
wield the gun if need be. When faced with a violent ruling class, it is an
ugly but understandable premise. Mao was right when he said “power flows
from the barrel of a gun”. The problem is about all the things he did not
mention and that do not flow from guns – like water, food, medicines,
peace or ultimately, for that matter, even guarantees of justice and
democracy. Making a fetish of armed struggle to the neglect of every other
way of operating is not serious politics at all and rather indicative of
the nihilist mind-set behind such strategies – ‘Jalaa do, mitaa do, yeh
duniya agar mil bhi jaaye toh kya hai (Burn it, wipe it out, what is
this world to me even if I can have it)’.
The Indian state too on its part is appropriately barbaric
in everything it does, making each wild accusation and conspiracy theory
of the Maoists seem like a profound, well-studied thesis. Rupees 470 crore
is the sum given by the central government for Jharkhand’s anti-Naxalite
operations – to be spent on more arms for the police and more uniforms for
the unemployed youth who go on to become the Indian police. If that sum
were spent sincerely on the kind of people queueing up to complain at the
Daltonganj public hearing, there may have been no need for either the
Naxal or the noxious cop.
Instead, the state builds schools in the Naxal-dominated
areas and fills them with policemen – there are 3,000 schools right now in
Jharkhand, full of Cobras and Scorpions or similar species lower down the
evolutionary order. It is clueless about who is really a Maoist and who is
not so it ends up blindly lashing out at some innocent folk within the
reach of its very short and clumsy arms.
Again, the state, for all its prattle about ‘rule of law’,
also does nothing to encourage any form of peaceful resistance either.
Mahendra Singh of the CPI(ML) Liberation, the brave and only MLA in the
Jharkhand assembly exposing corruption in high places, was gunned down in
broad daylight in early 2005. An investigation by an official committee
has implicated a senior police officer who continues to rise up the
hierarchy instead of being booked for murder!
Just a year and a half ago Lalit Mehta, a bright young
engineer and certainly no Maoist, was shot dead in Palamu district as he
exposed corruption and organised social audits of the NREGA or employment
guarantee scheme. His killers, local politically connected mafia, have not
yet been apprehended and may never be. All this obviously sends out a
chilling message to anyone who wants to follow Lalit’s path of ‘unarmed’
activism.
The truth is that those who run the Indian state, and
sections of the Indian population who benefit from its policies, really
don’t give a damn for the people the Naxals or other Left forces are
trying to mobilise. The Dalits, Adivasis and the poor in general can all
shrivel up and die for all they care. Whether these folks want it or not,
they will be subjected to a perverse development process that involves
driving nails through their flesh and laying rail-lines across their bones
so that a small minority of Indians can have their ‘infrastructure’ and
feel like a ‘superpower’. If they choose to fight back, they will be
crushed like flies – the endless legions of unemployed Indian youth from
around the country marshalled in uniforms for this genocide.
That is precisely why when the masked Maoist leader
Kishenji openly mocks the Indian state on prime-time television and
invites it to battle, he should be careful, for he may get exactly what he
wishes. The state would like nothing better than a war against its own
citizens, as it becomes another opportunity to make lots of money,
replenish its arsenal, demolish whatever little democratic space is left
in the country and rollback all resistance to its skewed policies for
decades to come. A war, for which the Maoists too, despite all their
bravado, are simply not prepared well enough.
Both the Maoist leadership and the Indian state, it seems,
are keen on playing with each other only one game, called ‘revolution and
counter-revolution’, which ends only when either of the two players ceases
to exist forever.
One thing is very clear though. If a new game is to emerge
forcefully on the Indian stage soon, a far greater number of Indian
citizens needs to get down to the task of solving the problems of poverty,
oppression and injustice than involved currently. The situation today,
more than ever before, calls for the building of many, many more creative
mass movements to establish the rights of the people than are out there
right now.
As the late K. Balagopal pointed out so insightfully in a
piece on violence versus non-violence in the Economic & Political
Weekly a few years ago, neither method has really made much difference
to the course of Indian state policies since independence. In other words,
there is simply not enough happening to bring about change, given the
scale of the country’s various problems.
There is no point though in blaming either the Indian
state or the Maoists, both of whom will continue to do only what they know
best. While Indian democracy is too important to be left to ‘elected’
politicians, Maoist martyrdom by itself will also never be enough to
change the Indian state.
It is for the rest of India to decide whether they are
going to be mere spectators, pliant players or makers of a different
destiny for themselves and their society.