‘May You Live in Interesting Times’: The Maoists and

Us
– P K Vijayan –
(Asst. Prof., Dept. of English, Hindu College, DU)

On 20th February, the Hindustan Times, reporting on the

chargesheet produced by the Delhi Police against Kobad Ghandy,
stated that Ghandy was alleged to have been in direct contact
with a professor in Delhi University, who in turn is alleged to be in
control of the CPI (Maoist)’s tactical counter offensive against
Operation Green Hunt. (How exactly an academic situated and
based in Delhi can mastermind tactical counter offensives on the
battleground, boggles the mind: clearly the Indian government
estimates the Maoist’s abilities to border on either the super-
technological or the supernatural.) Referring to the same
chargesheet, on the same date, the Times of India reported the
investigators’ claim that civil rights groups like the PUDR and
PUCL were actively helping the Maoists to spread their base;
while Mail Today stated that there was an active Maoist operation
amongst university students, specifically identifying the
Democratic Students Union (DSU). Elaborating on this same
chargesheet report the next day, the HT adds that a prominent
research scholar and a human rights activist have been
specifically identified by Ghandy as Maoist leaders in the capital,
although they are not named by the newspaper. Interestingly,
each of these details appears only in the particular newspaper
mentioned, and not in any of the other papers: like the blind men
and the elephant, it is as if each has ‘found’ something unique in
the chargesheet, that characterises the contents of that
document. But unlike the blind men in the story who, after all, are
each seeking to describe the same beast, but end up describing
only the part that they sense, these newspapers presumably all
have access to the same ‘beast’ (i.e. the chargesheet) in its
entirety, but have chosen to report only on specific – but different
– aspects of the allegedly extensive Maoist network in Delhi.
What, we may legitimately ask, is going on?
Very simply, if each newspaper reports on any one branch
of this alleged Maoist network, each will have apparently
reported something unique; further, each newspaper’s readership
will have been made aware of one crucial way in which the
Maoist ‘menace’ is apparently already in their neighbourhood,
and spreading like a virus. But the total effect of all the reports is

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the imaging of a hydra, a Ravana, a many-headed monster
conceived in the savage and distant tribal terrains of Jharkhand,
Chhatisgarh and Orissa, and that is now slouching towards the
safe cosmopolitan world of the NCR to be born. What is most
disturbing in this picture – which would be fantastically ridiculous
if it were not so dangerous – is that the heads of this monster
that have been identified in the newspapers are intellectuals, civil
rights bodies and university student organisations: the classic
sites of dissent in any free society. In other words, the targets of
Operation Green Hunt (or OGH) are no longer ‘out there’, but are
now slouching around in the NCR: protest against OGH is
gradually itself being targeted under OGH.
Troublingly, sections of the press appear to be participating
– wittingly or unwittingly – in this urbanisation of OGH. The fact is
that, if each of these papers had presented all that the others
had also reported, the larger picture would have been self-
evident, the elephant would have stood revealed for what it is:
the state preparing to trample on intellectual dissent. One does
not need to be particularly gifted visually or intellectually to see
the connection between intellectuals, university students and
civil rights activists. Every modern state has sought to control
these sections of its society – and usually the press too –
precisely because they have always been sources of political
discomfort. The question before us is, were the reporters of these
newspapers deliberately fed partial information by the police,
individually and separately, to ensure that the fear of the Maoist
virus spreading would be treated as a ‘real’ threat, and not be
perceived for what it patently is: a strategy for clamping down on
any questioning of the government’s armed offensive against
large populations of its own citizenry, in the name of cleansing
the Maoist ‘infestation’? Even if it was so however, it was and is
incumbent on any press worth its name – as another important
site of dissent in any free society – to have sought out the
information in its entirety, before rushing to press. Otherwise, it
will simply be (blindly) repeating the lies, over and over again, till
the lies become the truth. When the press seems to be going
along with the state, or confining itself to being the voice of the
state, it must ring a bell for us – in this case a very loud alarm
bell, that tolls the name of Joseph Goebbels, over and over again.
Perhaps the business interests that control the media
financially (through advertisements and sponsorships) ultimately
decided what would get represented and how; perhaps the press

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did not choose to investigate the matter further because it was
‘discouraged’ from doing so. But that it did not, for whatever
reason, pursue the matter as it should have, is probably closely
related to another issue, which is the absence in the mainstream
press and media in general, of any real understanding of or
interest in the anxieties and apprehensions that OGH has given
rise to, and of the consequent concern over it. This anxiety and
concern has been emanating from several very diverse quarters,
and essentially pertains to whether it is appropriate for the state
to take arms against its own citizenry. Very few of these voices
may be considered even remotely sympathetic to the Maoist
cause; several of them have explicitly, repeatedly and sometimes
even vehemently spoken against it. Irrespective of their take on
Maosim, however, these voices have focused on the fact that
OGH is an operation that is unconstitutional, violative of
fundamental human rights and pretty evidently underway in
order to further the interests of big corporate investments in the
‘infested’ areas. They have repeatedly sought to point out that
the perceived ‘infestation’ actually constitutes the local tribal
populations living there.
If large sections of the tribal populations in these areas –
threatened with displacement, destitution and/or violent death at
the hands of big-money private armies and/or the state’s own
military and paramilitary apparatus – should choose to resist this
apparently inexorable process of internal colonisation, sometimes
violently, then should we in Delhi be surprised? Delhi’s denizens
are now world-famous for resorting to fists, lathis and the odd
baseball bat on what might be considered the slightest
provocation: it might be a neighbour parking his car in my space,
or another’s washing hanging over my balcony – our sense of our
space as sacred is powerful – all the more so, possibly, because
this is so overwhelmingly a city of migrants. Then, when the tribal
– for whom it is not parking space but her very livelihood, history
and future that are being stolen with her land – decides to
protest, should we not be stirred by sympathy? Should we, who
are so intimate with the condition of being migrant, not feel the
need to vindicate the rights of those millions upon whom the
state is going to violently and inexorably enforce migrancy
through OGH? Millions, the very molecules of whose lives are so
intractably bound to the lands they live in, and that are being
claimed by the state, that for them therefore migration will not

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mean just destitution but will effectively be genocide? And if we
do not feel this need, or are not stirred, we need to wonder why.
One possible reason may well just be plain apathy – which
can only be described as an amputation of the soul, and for which
consequently, there can be no cure. Another possible reason
could be simply a matter of interests: compare the middle class
response to the murder of ‘one of its own’, Arushi Talwar –
candlelight vigils, dharnas, marches, extended and highly state-
critical discussions on TV talk shows – to its almost embarrassed
silence at the slaughter, rape, torture and illegal detentions of
hundreds of tribals, and we would not be faulted for concluding
that empathy is not an exalted, transcendent, universal given of
human nature, but is very much based on class affiliations (and
caste, gender, ethnic and religio-communal affiliations too – but
that is another debate). Evidently, class interests are of profound
significance in deciding the nature and content of the media
(which conversely, also has a major hand in determining what
exactly the interests of this class are).
But this would not in itself be a sufficient explanation,
because there is yet another possible reason for why we are not
moved: from within this very same middle class, there have been
voices of concern as we noted above, which are simply being
dismissed, muzzled or threatened with being labelled anti-
nationalist. Of course, criticising the state for messing up a
murder investigation is hardly as threatening to its discourse of
legitimacy as criticising its use (or abuse) of its authority – so, the
silencing of the latter kind of critical voice is only to be expected.
Indeed, one might even argue that criticizing the state for
bungling a murder investigation is actually an affirmation of the
state’s instruments of authority, because it implies an
expectation that the state ought to act correctly and
authoritatively in dealing with crime and criminals. This
fundamentally statist disposition of the middle classes in India
contributes to the general prejudice, both, against the tribal
movements in the ‘infested’ regions as well as against the
concerned and critical voices raised against the state’s militaristic
approach to these regions, as being insurgent and anti-national.
It is for this reason that, unless these critical voices also make
some sort of mandatory anti-Maoist noises, and thereby establish
their ‘nationalist’/ ‘patriotic’ credentials (or at least, claim a
position of moral superiority that would appeal very much to the
general middle class aspiration to being morally superior), they

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stand little chance of gaining any serious space or attention in
the media, and are silenced by both the state and the media. But
when the ostensibly autonomous media actively participate in
that silencing – or worse, openly ridicule or deride these critical
voices – then we need to wonder whether we can anymore rely
on the media to remain objective. And we are left wondering
whether this ‘autonomous’ media is not actively spreading the
Goebbelsian lies of the state: that these tribal movements are all
controlled and managed by Naxals/Maoists; or that the tribals are
actually being coerced by Maoists; or that there are no tribals,
only Maoists. That these are people fighting for rights sanctioned
to them under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, is a fact that
gets drowned in all the noise.
The Indian state – which is thus explicitly enjoined by the
Constitution (among other documents) to protect the social and
economical interests of tribals in these scheduled areas – is
financially and politically too deeply invested in the project of
clearing these areas and making them accessible to corporate
exploitation, to acknowledge this. It would lose legitimacy and
become a global scandal. Or it would simply reveal what most
states at this historical juncture in the evolution of capitalism are
doing. Hence the extended exercise of labelling all tribals
protesting its actions ‘Maoist’; all intellectual and civil rights
attempts to dissuade it, ‘Maoist sympathisers’; and all dissent in
general is increasingly being viewed as ‘terrorist’. This, as will be
easily recognised, has long been the hallmark of McCarthyism.
And as with that form of political repression, no doubt a chain of
arrests will be initiated based on ostensible ‘confessions’,
beginning with Kobad Ghandy’s, and spreading out in a network
that will be produced as ‘Maoist’, with no way of knowing if it
actually is – but simply criminalising it for being ‘Maoist’. One
major danger, in this sense, with otherwise well-intentioned
critical voices that have also sought to condemn ‘Maoist violence’
– apart from their buying into the proverbial scoundrel’s
discourse of patriotism – is that they reinforce the perception of
critical voices that refuse to subscribe to such a discourse, as
being ‘Maoist sympathisers’, and thereby also reinforce the
inherent McCarthyism of that appellation. An even bigger danger
though, is that, implicit in a position that seeks to condemn
violence all around – or, relatedly, to see all tribal militancy as
driven by Maoist machinations – is a gross failure to understand
the fact that this militancy is in response to the many decades of

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neglect by the state, followed – insult upon injury! – by violent
attempts to clear the area of these tribal and other populations,
to permit large scale land-grab and the unhindered rape of the
resources of the regions, by the big commercial interests on
whose behalf the Indian government is sending in its troops. This
matter will therefore not end with Maoists laying down arms –
even if, arguably, it is their presence that has drawn public
attention to the intentions of the state in the region; no, this
matter can only end with the lands coming under the complete
control of the government and its commercial-industrial
beneficiaries. It is therefore particularly disingenuous to maintain
that this is a battle between the state and ‘Maoist’ forces. And it
is for this reason that any insistence that ‘Maoist violence’ should
be condemned is dangerously naïve: because it is easy to
condemn Maoist violence, but condemning the tribal communities
for taking up arms against powerful forces intent on decimating
them, or at least their fundamental sources of livelihood – that is
a different moral issue altogether. A simple analogy should serve
the point here: if a foreign power was to invade India with the
intent to colonise and exploit its mineral wealth, the Indian
people would not hesitate to see the moral rectitude of taking up
arms against that invader – and would not give a fig for anyone
who chose to condemn them for following a ‘Maoist’, ‘terrorist’ or
‘revolutionary’ path. And no disingenuousness about ‘bringing
development to the region’ – which is Mr. Chidambaram’s tall
claim – would wash, because it would be too reminiscent of the
old ‘white man’s burden’ idea of ‘civilising’ the worlds that were
colonially ransacked and looted.
It is for this reason that it would be ridiculous – if not
profoundly, odiously disrespectful towards the victims of OGH – to
suggest that there is an equivalence between the kinds of
violence and violations being carried out everyday against the
tribal and other populations in the target areas of OGH, and the
clamping down on dissent that has been initiated in the name of
OGH, in urban areas like Kolkata and Delhi. The scale and
intensity of the conflict in the affected areas, as well as the
impact and the nature of the consequences, are of an order that
cannot bear comparison with what is happening in these urban
regions. Claiming a ‘neutral’ ground from where both state and
‘Maoist violence’ can be condemned – as the well-intentioned
individuals noted earlier have done – is in fact possible only
because of this disparity in the scale and intensity of the conflict

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between the two kinds of regions; how else does one explain the
fact that, on the one hand, Gandhian individuals and
organisations working in the ‘infested’ regions have refused to
outrightly condemn the Maoists, and on the other, these same
organisations and individuals have themselves been targeted by
the state, and been the victims of its violence? But as noted
earlier, this kind of privileged critical position that has emerged in
the cities has only served to feed into a larger discourse on
‘Maoist violence’ and ‘terrorism’ that the state and its
commercial-industrial sponsors are intent on spinning out. It is
necessary, therefore, to draw out the connections that exist and
that are evolving, between these two kinds of regions and the
kinds of repressive measures being deployed in them, in order to
understand the nature and magnitude of the larger agenda at
work here.
It is particularly instructive in this context, that Joseph
McCarthy’s strategy of labelling all dissent ‘communist’ arose at a
time when the capitalist economy of the United States was, post-
Depression, impatiently seeking to lose the shackles of Franklin
Roosevelt’s socially oriented New Deal policies. Thus, any policy
that carried even a whiff of being social-welfarist was
immediately branded communist and dumped, and its
proponents attacked socially, politically and legally. And it was no
coincidence that the majority of those attacked in this fashion
were – apart from the actual communists and trade unionists –
writers, artists, academics, filmmakers, journalists – in short,
anyone who could articulate protest and/or dissent.
The parallels are clear with our own context: we live, as the
old Chinese curse goes, in interesting times – when our own
capitalism is kicking with impatience at obstacles to (irony of
ironies!) ‘economic reforms’; when its increasing population of
dollar billionaires are panting to go forth and multiply their
billions by raping the hinterlands of the country; when the state is
itself eager to role back measures like the PDS and to massively
fudge figures on poverty, even as prices of especially essential
commodities continue to escalate and farmers continue to
commit suicide; when ‘Islamic terror’ – that bogeyman that
allowed the BJP to simultaneously terrorise the Muslim
community as well as steamroll its own version of economic
reforms through – has given way to the ‘red terror’ of ‘Maoism’
(after all, the Congress can’t be seen as anti-Islamic), but to the
exact same end. But the differences between the original

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McCarthyism and our own home-grown version of it are equally
instructive: where Joseph McCarthy’s pro-capitalism was served
by a clear and sweeping anti-communism, Mr. Chidambaram’s
pro-capitalism has to negotiate the presence of a very
entrenched and established mainstream communist party, the
CPM. Following the principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my
friend’, Mr. Chidambaram’s clever invocation of anti-Maoism
quickly provided the CPM with the ideological fig-leaf to cover
over their own increasingly pro-capitalist predilections, and even
more readily present a denunciation: as a leading ideologue of
the party, Mr. Prakash Karat, recently stated, “We do not consider
Maoists as a Left trend or a Left organisation.”1 It is not clear any
longer what Mr. Karat and his ‘comrades’ in the CPM would
consider a Left trend or a Left organisation, apart from their own;
it is not even clear anymore who or what is ‘Left’, if the CPM is:
would they consider for instance, the non-Maoist Naxal groups as
left? – but that is not of immediate relevance. What is both
profoundly ironic and tragic in this is that the only left formation
that is physically battling the encroachments of capitalism into
the heart of the country, is the one that is being vilified and
demonised as a ‘red terror’, not only by the state, but by other
‘Left’ formations: such are the interesting times we live in.
While there may appear to be a kind of poetic irony in our
own Chinese curse seeming to be Maoism, the not so poetic fact
is that it is not the spectre of Maoism that haunts the land today
but the multiple spectres of unbridled corporate capitalism, state
collusion with and participation in this capitalist expansionism,
and the consequent and unprecedented assault on the lives and
livelihoods of millions of tribals in the ‘infected’ areas. And the
ideological cover for all this is our own brand of McCarthyism:
OGH or ‘anti-Maoism’ (which is less of a mouthful than
Chidambaramism, although that would probably be a more
accurate term). (We shall for now not even touch upon the
absurdity, in an ostensible democracy, of banning an ideology, as
has happened with Maoism; who or what, we might well ask,
even if we do not subscribe to this ideology, is being sought to be
protected by this ban?)
The Indian state is, it seems, learning well from Joseph
Goebbels and Joseph McCarthy; perhaps it will very soon look to
Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge too. And it seems, the first to be
purged from the metropolises will be the nuisances identified
1
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/marxists-vs-maoists-karat-battles-red-terror/103922-3.html

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above: inconvenient intellectuals, university students and civil
rights activists who will all be identified as ‘Maoists’ (never mind
that they may actually be socialists, Gandhians,
environmentalists or other such ‘beasts’) and removed from
‘shining India’. And once the intellectuals and activists and
students are disposed of, Mr. P (Joseph?) Chidambaram will no
doubt find an able ally in Mr. Kapil Sibal, to ensure that they do
not surface again – for the latter as we know, is already working
hard to dismantle the higher education system and sack it off to
private and foreign institutional interests – but that is another
tale. Suffice it for now to reiterate that, thanks to Mr.
Chidambaram and his ilk, we do indeed live in interesting times,
and all the interest is accumulating in the pockets of our dollar
billionaires.
It is therefore in the interests of all concerned – especially in
the wake of the offer of ceasefire and the call for mediated talks
from the Maoists – that the offices and officials of the state desist
from criminalising large sections of the intellectual, activist and
journalistic communities by labelling them ‘Maoist’ and/or ‘Maoist
sympathizers’. This will allow for credible voices to emerge and
actively and actually facilitate a meaningful process of dialogue.
There are too many lives at stake for these kinds of semantic
feints and swipes to continue.