In its sixth decade now, the Maoist movement is the most widespread insurgency in independent India. It follows an ultra-Left ideology, which argues that an armed revolution is inevitable because electoral democracy has failed to deliver. Over the years, the movement has attracted a range of people from students of top universities to peasants and Adivasis.
Maoists and Government Welfare: Excluding Legitimacy or Legitimising Exclusion?
Routledge India
Pages: 158
Price: Rs.995
The young scholar Suparna Banerjee in her book Maoists and Government Welfare: Excluding Legitimacy or Legitimising Exclusion? examines the reasons that lead people to lose faith in democracy.
The insurgency has seen a spread across several States of the country. At one point, Naxals had a presence in as much as 25 per cent of India’s geography. Banerjee travelled to several parts of the insurgency zone to gather her samples. The book is an academic work that seeks to justify and validate both the author’s field observations and the complex reality of the insurgency that is active mostly in forested areas, and she heavily cites theories by Western critics.
Underlying propositions
Banerjee begins with twin propositions. First, the “omnipresence of dominant groups in the decision-making process” has led to the “exclusionary nature of politics”, leaving many people in a disadvantageous position. Second, the inadequacy of the government’s welfare approach has failed to transform the lives of the affected people. She dissects the political discourse that creates the categories of the “other” and “outsider” for the Naxalites, people who “do not fall within the idea of a majority consensus in a highly diverse society like India”.
The Maoists could not have sustained for decades without a dominant structure that is designed to exclude a designated “other”. Banerjee then goes on to trace the roots of Naxalism in the Indian freedom movement and the Indian National Congress leading the independence struggle. She argues that the many ideas the organisation upheld over the decades had little space for “alternative political thoughts”.
To bring this home, she chooses several episodes where Gandhi is directly pitted against leaders such as Bhagat Singh, B.R. Ambedkar, and Subhas Chandra Bose. In all of them, the “socio-political and professional ideology of Gandhi” ends up “formalising political institutions which manifest social hierarchy”. Commenting on the famous 1939 episode when Bose, despite being elected, resigned from the party presidency at its Tripuri session, Banerjee writes that “a democratically elected president had to resign because of the perceived fear of division within the party and the overwhelming burden of a single line of ideological narrative”.
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The point about the politics of the Congress and Gandhi is well-taken, but linking it with a violent movement that saw several offshoots, even some degenerated ones, seems somewhat overstretched.
A fine perspective the book offers is about why Bengal became the birthplace of the Naxal movement and how the bhadralok went on to supply the movement with a battery of dedicated activists, intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers who invested their creative energies to explain and justify Naxalism.
Highlights
- The author examines the reasons that lead people to lose faith in democracy.
- She traces the roots of Naxalism in the Indian freedom movement and the Indian National Congress leading the independence struggle, arguing that the many ideas the organisation upheld over the decades had little space for “alternative political thoughts”.
- She also discusses the conducive conditions that prompted the Adivasis to join the Maoist ranks.
- Some aspects of the insurgency are perhaps more complicated than what the author proposes.
Adivasis and Maoism
Banerjee also discusses the conducive conditions that prompted the Adivasis to join the Maoist ranks. She refutes a prevailing notion that discredits the Adivasi struggle on the grounds that they “don’t understand ideology”. They may not understand dialectical materialism, but they certainly understand exploitation. She asks a piercing question: how many policemen or elsewhere understand or follow the Constitution?
The question of positionality often confronts an urban researcher or journalist who wants to work on an organisation that is engaged in an armed struggle against the state. While such researchers are not insiders, they cannot be complete outsiders as well because they often represent some part of the state they are writing about. They may have differences with the government, but they do have some stake in the continuance of electoral democracy and in various instruments of the state. Avoiding the prevailing classification of insider-outsider, Banerjee chooses the category of “mid-sider”, as she candidly acknowledges herself to be a part of the “broader categorisation of state”.
However, it also raises questions about some of her propositions. Consider the argument that the state has created a narrative to portray the Maoists as enemies who are using imported ideology. It can be counter-argued that if the movement could not have sustained itself without the state’s apathy, it could not have remained alive without the support of some sections of the state which provide an ideological, philosophical, and moral foundation to the struggle.
Significantly, the above critique becomes applicable because of the author’s own definition of the “state”. Having defined the state in broader terms, the related applicability cannot be ignored.
Similarly, a few other aspects of the insurgency are perhaps more complicated than what the author proposes. Banerjee claims that the Indian state never portrayed the naxalites “as one of our own who have been disillusioned by the system”.
On the contrary, various political parties at different periods have portrayed them as disillusioned youth, only to draw opposition from other parties. Second, the claim ignores the ground-level arrangements political parties have made with the Maoists in various States—the most famous being the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Naxal nexus in certain areas of Bastar. Several BJP leaders in Bastar have been arrested for their alleged links with the Naxals, who in turn have admitted to their electoral transactions with the BJP.
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Another such proposition relates to the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), a boarding school for Adivasi children in Odisha. Banerjee notes that “Adivasi children are made to wear pink and blue uniforms, their hair is cut short and they are not allowed to wear traditional ornaments”. She goes on to list a few such practices adopted by the institution and terms it a case of “cultural and linguistic genocide”.
Genocide is a colossal term. Adivasi children, or for that matter all children, do have a right to maintain their linguistic and cultural uniqueness, but can a school function with such exclusivity? Schools across the country have uniforms of their own. These schools have children from different cultural backgrounds. Can all such schools be held guilty of “cultural genocide”? One acknowledges the need to preserve Adivasi culture, but must the country have separate schools for them? And if the answer is in the affirmative, should we have separate schools for every linguistic and cultural group? It is not to suggest any normative value here, but to underline that the charge of “cultural genocide” requires greater discussion. In the absence of this, one may perhaps want to withhold judgment.
The book marks a significant addition to the body of work available on the topic, but could have done better with greater rigour.
Ashutosh Bhardwaj is an independent writer and journalist. His recent book, The Death Script, traces the Naxal insurgency.
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