The Inconvenient Truth about Maoists

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Arundhati Roy titled "Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountains". It was a slightly extended, somewhat less loopy version of her essay in the recent Outlook magazine, but both pieces were characterized by a peculiar romanticization of the insurgency in Chhattisgarh, and liberally sprinkled with her usual attention-seeking bon mots - terming Maoists "Gandhians with Guns", for example. I was somewhat perturbed by the assertion that Maoists were morally superior to the state, on grounds that they comprised of tribals who had taken to arms in support of their basic liberties, but couldn't put a finger on exactly why I was so discomfited. The record of the Indian state (to the extent that one can treat it as a monolithic entity) in dealing with its "marginal"/"peripheral" citizens is well-documented, and pathetic. So why was I getting so pissed off? Thankfully, I came across Apoorvanand's fine essay in Seminar today, and think he articulates perfectly the unease I felt at Roy's talk:

"This note attempts to understand the nature of the politics behind the violent actions of the Maoists. There seems to be an agreement among human rights activists that Maoist violence is a ‘forced’ response to the extreme repression of the Indian state. The argument is that since the Indian state has been consistently ignoring or violently repressing various people’s movements, the people are left with no choice but to take recourse to the gun.

There is a fallacy in this argument. We know about people’s movements on issues of land rights or displacement which have not turned into armed insurrections, even though they have suffered major losses and have been treated in a very callous manner by the state. Apart from the Narmada Bachao Andolan there are hundreds of big and small peoples’ resistance movements in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and other states which have not given up on the ‘parliamentary’ path of struggle.

Interestingly, we find that Maoist groups are also active in these areas and they constantly try to infiltrate and take control of such movements. We do not know of any movements organized by the Maoists which were initially ‘peaceful’ but compelled to turn to arms after all attempts at working with the state failed. I would suggest that the theory of ‘peaceful’ movements mutating into ‘violent’ insurrections appears flawed. Also that instead of using ‘Maoist’ as an adjective in a careless manner we should treat them as a political formation organized on the lines articulated in its political programme and constitution which is based on its own Marxian theory of revolution which is impossible without violence."

(I'm not convinced that Zizek is the best theoretical source for articulating a critical response to Roy, but he's not really germane to Apoorvanand's argument)

Roy's essay, not surprisingly, has prompted many critical responses. The best are collected in Outlook.

Soumitra Ghosh: "The Maoist movement is not a typical resistance group. It is driven by an ideology that has its own historicity and its own series of histories. Judging by that, the piece reads like a class-one propaganda, similar to those we used to receive from the occasional visitors to the 'closed' post-revolutionary societies throughout the last century. Many of those made for extremely good reading...and human. When it all came down, we saw the 'human' shrouded a lot of 'inhuman', and the ugly devils of hegemony, domination and power lurked behind the pleasant facade, and not all of that was bourgeois counter-revolutionary propaganda"

Anirban Gupta Nigam: The title - "Moonwalking with the Comrades" - summarizes what follows

But also, elsewhere.

Jairus Banaji's critique in Kafila: "In Arundhati’s vision of politics the only agent of social change is a military force. There are no economic classes, no civil society, no mass organisations or conflicts which are not controlled by a party (or ‘the’ party). There is no history of the left that diverges from the romantic hagiographies of Naxalbari and its legacies, and there is, bizarrely, not even a passing reference to capitalism as the systemic source of the conversion of adivasis into wage-labourers, of the degradation of their forms of life and resources and of the dispossession of entire communities."

Salil Tripathi's take in Mint: "Roy is experiencing the vicarious thrill all reporters yearn for—walking the jungle with rebels. The critical difference between real journalists and Roy is that she accepts what she is told, does not question much and romanticizes the revolutionaries, whereas someone like Alma Guillermoprieto in The New York Review of Books describes what she sees in Latin America, reminding us—and herself—how complex the world is, because there are at least two sides to every story. In Roy’s adventure in the Dandakaranya forest (a name resonating with Ramayana metaphors) there is “good” and “evil”; in the Marquezian landscape of Guillermoprieto, there are no angels, only devils of different hues"

What is additionally peculiar is Roy's emphasis on a "biodiversity of protest" when confronted with questions which fault her for excessive jingoism in support of violence. Roy seems to believe that the Maoists can coexist with Gandhian movements of a more traditional sort, and that the armed insurgency is likely to fall away once it's goals are reached. What Apoorvanand's essay does very successfully is to show this for the canard it is - Maoists are not likely to coexist with anyone who disagrees with their methods. Their aims, and in this they are very much like the LTTE, is to coopt, coerce, and infiltrate their competitors in dissent. Any ecology of dissenters with Maoists in it is thus unlikely to be very bio-diverse; if one has to be faithful to the analogy, they are like weeds who will only rest once they have destroyed all their competitors, sympathetic or otherwise, and taken over the entire eco-system. Whether Roy is blind to this scenario, or deliberately dissembling, is something which I leave to the reader to conjecture. A good place to start with the conjecture, however, would be Ramachandra Guha's old pieces: Arun Shourie of the Left, and Perils of Extremism