Back in the summer of 1969 this writer, bound for Iran on way to an ‘overland’ journey to the UK, spent a memorable 10 or 12 days in the company of fellow passengers on board—not a passenger ship, but a cargo ship.
That was the easier way to travel out of the country unless one could manage to get a magical document in those days from the Reserve Bank of India called the ‘P form’, necessary for flying out or booking on a regular passenger liner.
The ship had sailed from Bombay (as the city was spelt when it had not lost its numero uno cosmopolitan tag) on a humid day in May. Its destination was Basra. Passengers bound for Iran had to wait till the ship had touched the Iraqi port. The unfriendly state of Iran-Iraq relations did not allow ships to anchor at an Iraqi port if it had first stopped at an Iranian port.
One of the passengers (all supposedly booked to travel in the hold of the ship) was a self-acclaimed Naxalite from, where else, Calcutta (again, the old name). An intelligent, jovial young man he was. In no time he had become a great pal. There appeared to be nothing sinister when he spoke of ‘Chairman Mao’. The bearded ‘revolutionary’ was headed for the Satanic West where the students in France and Germany had already ushered in revolution on the campuses.
There was no need to fear that the young man from Calcutta was going to disown the supreme trinity of Mao, ‘Che’ Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, not to mention India’s own Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and many other illustrious stars of political daredevilry? The smiling lad from Calcutta was not going to reject Mao’s widely known dictum that power comes out of the barrel of a gun even though he had never held a gun in his life.
There was nothing contradictory here. Most ‘Naxalites’ of the 1960s, at least that this writer met, struck one as being dreamers, passionate about ‘changing the system’ through a ‘revolution’ which was not possible without violence. Those pioneer Naxalites would look rather out of place today; more petty bourgeois than earnest harbingers of a new dawn of equality. For the hooded Naxalites of today who think nothing of bumping off their ‘enemies’ and beheading people seem to have veered more towards the masked bearded men in black robes who have created mayhem in India’s western neighbour—and elsewhere.
It is, of course, a matter of shame that as India ‘shines’, the larger population in the country continues to live miserably. Over 60 years of freedom and democracy have failed to change their fortune. Worse, the politicians who are supposed to address their problems have let them down as they show no qualms in indulging themselves at the expense of the people they represent in elected bodies.
But do the Naxals have the right answers? More important, is their method of violence the right recipe for the situation? The problem that the poor and the deprived face in India can be mitigated only when the entire ‘system’ is cleansed of corruption and immorality. It is an illusion to think that most of the problems in the country will be solved after getting rid of the ‘bourgeois’ class or whatever the name the Naxalites use for them
The rise of ‘coalition’ era politics has seen a plethora of political parties appear on the horizon, many of them speaking on behalf of the people at the bottom of the ladder and their leaders hailed as champions of the downtrodden. But the path these parties adopt is no different from the path of the more reviled older parties—one of corruption, malpractices, immorality and other ills.
Corruption has spread so much in the country that it must have become a part of our DNA. How can one believe that a Naxalite, if installed in a position of ‘legal’ power, will retain his/her honesty and integrity? The Naxalites, as their sympathisers say so loudly, are Indian citizens after all and, therefore, cannot behave very differently from Indians who taste power.
The ‘sympathisers’ of Naxalites have wrongly assumed that they deserve all the plaudits for their ‘liberal’ advocacy of the state’s ‘oppressive’ ways used against the Naxalites because they will herald a new dawn of hope and justice for all. There always comes a point when excessive ridicule of popular notions is wrong politically and morally.
‘Oppression’ by the State in any corner of the country has to be denounced as loudly and forcefully as possible. But there is little justification for a ‘political’ creed, as no doubt the Naxalites see themselves that places too much emphasis on Kangaroo court type justice, using brutal means to eliminate all enemies, real and imaginary.
People in the country, already greatly incensed over acts of terror, have no appetite for a party that beheads ‘enemies’, takes hostages, murders and rapes people on mere suspicion. It will be argued that the police are often guilty of the same crime, except that policemen, no strangers to cruelty, do not resort to beheading people to teach a lesson to others.
In theory at least it is possible that the police can be held accountable for its inhuman acts. There are cases, few they may be, when perpetrators of unjustified crimes in the security forces have been brought to book. In any case, the civil society does not extol their heinous acts. The ‘sympathisers’ of the Naxalites who promptly jump to defend every act of their savagery are in danger of annoying even those sections the Naxalites allegedly claim to represent. The victims of Naxalite violence are not confined to the rich and the privileged; the majority are drawn from the poorer sections. It hardly matters that some of them have been serving the much-hated police force.
The Naxalites can still build a strong following in the country if they abjure their ways of mindless violence and take up the challenge of cleansing the society of its ills, beginning with corruption which deprives a great many poor of deriving ‘benefits’ that they are entitled to.
- Asian Tribune -
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