[Reader-list] The Naxalites overreached

[Pawan Durani]

Source : http://diwan-e-aam.centreright.in/

Naxalism and the Peter-Pan Mentality

There is a compelling scene in Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries when the
young Ernesto visit the old Incan ruins of Machu Pichu and undergoes a
silent, albeit violent, intellectual turmoil, wondering about the
invasion of a beautiful civilization by the polluted urban decay of
Lima. Soon his friend, Alberto, chips in and shares his dream of an
utopian future in which the entire South America has been swept by a
peaceful revolution. But Ernesto is unenthusiastic and casually cuts
the ecstatic Alberto by a terse, powerful reply, “A revolution without
guns? It will never work”.

To a young teenager active on testosterone, this scene would signify
the quintessential Che Guevara: a romantic idealist fighting for the
just causes of the deprived. One can expect the teenager would one day
grow up and realize the large-scale socio-economic and political
turmoil that would be unleashed if such a ‘revolution with guns’
should come to fruition. But alas, one cannot hope to teach sound
rationalism to someone who has altogether refused to grow up. This
Peter-Pan generation would continue to sport the Che-emblazoned
t-shirts and attend candle-lit marches in opposition to the war in
Afghanistan or Iraq, branding them, without any geo-political
knowledge whatsoever, as acts of colonialism and imperialism; or sit
at the dusky coffee houses in Calcutta or Delhi and chant the familiar
rhetoric against the Establishment crackdown on India’s
still-primitive equivalent of the perpetrators of the 26th of July
Movement in Cuba.



It was not surprising, therefore, to hear these intellectuals accuse
the State of brutality, while exonerating the Naxals, particularly in
the aftermath of the recent massacre of 76 CRPF men in the Dantewada
region of Chhattisgarh. What they always fail to realize is that no
left-wing armed uprising was ever concerned about the deprived and the
dislocated, from Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Pol Pot’s dream
of establishing an utopian agrarian society in Cambodia, resulting in
mass murder and bloodbath, or for that matter in Guevara’s Cuba or
Bolivia. As suggested by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that doyen of all
modern Russian writers, communism “can only properly implement its
‘ideals’ only by destroying the core and foundation of a nation’s
life”. Therefore, it would be immature to suggest that Chinese
communism is of a better quality than the Russian breed. Since,
communism at its very heart is a rotten ideology, it just does not
matter which breed is followed as “they were all leavened with blood”
and “consolidated its power by mass killings”. It has always been, to
borrow Charu Majumdar’s elegant phrase, a tool to usurp state power
and establish their hegemony. And no hegemony can be complete if it is
not supported by individuals who think and reason. Hence, the
overriding need to scramble for allies who would, in their naiveté,
buttress this revolution with intellectual fodder, and cloak the
sub-conscious power-lust inherent in a left-wing armed uprising in a
drapery of dialectics.

But can that mean the reverence of those thousands of people, who
gather every year in Santa Clara, Cuba, to observe the death
anniversary of Che, wrong? It most significantly can. Their reverence
is wrong because they are all inadvertent victims of mass
consciousness, which itself is selectively permeable to history;
gleaning everything that is glossy and shutting out all that is ugly
and hideous. It is this selective consciousness of the masses that
has, time and again, relegated the horrors of communism to the dusty
archives of universities, while accepting the flimsy veneer of
romanticism under whose garb the beheadings are perpetuated and
freedom of speech suppressed. As thoughts enlarge, this veneer is
slowly lifted and what one finds is not the promised egalitarian world
but unsurpassable brutality. It was this disenchantment that Andre
Gide was talking about in his remarkable Return from the U.S.S.R. As
someone who flirted with communism in his formative years, Gide could
not reconcile his disillusionment after his return from the Bolshevik
Shangri-La. “Are these really the people who made the revolution”,
Gide wonders, as he is stuck by the bleakness of the model houses, and
the Soviet Union’s delegitimization of personality, all in an attempt
to create equality. But this equality is itself fatally flawed,
translatable only in symbols and seldom materially; wrought about by a
revolution that persuaded people “that they are as well off as they
can be until a better time comes; to persuade them that elsewhere
people are worse off.” This dichotomy, thus created, only helps the
regime to tighten its hands on people’s liberties even further in
order to perpetuate this illusion of haves and haves-not; hence, an
embargo on communication and dissemination of information, which, if
left unchecked, would only bust the dream bubble.

Unlike other ideologies, communism is itself not self-sustaining,
hence, the dream bubble collapses sooner than later. This gives rise
to other counter-revolutionary movements with “that same revolutionary
spirit, that ferment which first broke through the half-rotten dam of
the old Tsarist world.” These counter-revolutionary movements in turn
creates an inherent insecurity inside the regime which seeks to
safeguard its existence by fomenting revolution elsewhere, hence, the
real basis of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution. Only when the
communist governments in other parts of Europe began to fail that the
Soviet Union under Stalin began to follow the policy of Socialism in
One Country, i.e. strengthening the Soviet Union internally, and that
too as a matter of necessity.

As the operation against the Naxals reach a decisive phase, it is
imperative to clear a few cobwebs. The main myth that is in
circulation is that the Naxals derive their moral support from the
tribals and the peasants. The harsh irony is that these homegrown
idle, albeit lethal, dreamers derive their nourishment not from the
deprived but from the educated middle-class intelligentsia, the very
champions of justice and human rights. And interestingly, they fight
against injustice by condemning the protectors and praising the
perpetrators as “Gandhi with guns”.

Indeed, much like that graceful epithet, it seems their very
priorities have tumbled upside down. In the aftermath of the Dantewada
massacre, it would be a fitting memorial to the martyrs if the State
responds with a bigger resolve to quash these self-styled Robin Hoods,
forever.

- Arnav Das Sharma