India’s fabled democracy masks a
worrying waywardness. It behaves like a mob at the first signs
of a crisis. This is when it shuts out debate, suspends core
civil liberties by a fiat or by being itself — a bully. And most
brazenly of all, it whips into line a weak-kneed media with
populist slogans of pseudo nationalist expediency.
For days, since the death of 75 paramilitary troopers in a
Maoist ambush in Chattisgarh last week, conniving news channels
have been calling for the arrest of intellectuals led by writer
Arundhati Roy, actress Aparna Sen and journalist Gautam
Navalakha, who brings out the rare worthwhile Indian journal —
The Economic and Political Weekly. They are perceived to be
Maoist sympathisers, which they are not.
The media’s charges are rooted in misplaced missionary zeal
which tends to harm more than it helps the country. For example,
only by a perverse logic can anyone conclude that the author of
the following lines must be a supporter of iconic Maoist leader
Charu Mazumdar: “It’s a great disservice to everything that is
happening here (in the Maoist controlled part of Chattisgarh)
that the only thing that seems to make it to the outside world
is the stiff, unbending rhetoric of the ideologues of a party
that has evolved from a problematic past. When Charu Mazumdar
famously said, ‘China’s Chairman is our Chairman and China’s
Path is Our Path’ he was prepared to extend it to the point
where the Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya Khan
committed genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), because at the
time, China was an ally of Pakistan. There was silence too, over
the Khmer Rouge and its killing fields in Cambodia. There was
silence over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and Russian
Revolutions. Silence over Tibet.
“Within the Naxalite movement too, there have been violent
excesses and it’s impossible to defend much of what they’ve
done. But can anything they have done compare with the sordid
achievements of the Congress and the BJP in Punjab, Kashmir,
Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat… And yet, despite these terrifying
contradictions, Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what
he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter
groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in
India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone we
cannot judge him too harshly.”
Indian anchors, true to their wont, have been quoting the
“visionary” bit about Charu Mazumdar from Ms Roy’s rare
firsthand account from the Maoist patch of the forests. They
have excluded her stern assessment of Naxalites or Maoists in
the dispatch. As a consequence of this new bout of jingoism,
hate mails have surfaced, some of them from state-backed
vigilante groups, asking for the liquidation of writers and
journalists in fake encounters. Why? I suspect this is because
the intellectuals have exposed the complicity of very senior
officials with the mining firms that are eyeing Chhatisgarh and
its neighbourhood for plunder.
I used the phrase pseudo nationalist expediency at the outset
for a purpose. I believe the campaign against the Maoists (whose
brutality is no less repugnant than the state’s methods in
bludgeoning them) is a charade to forcibly dislodge villages of
tribespeople to auction their land to corporate bidders,
domestic and foreign. (The state had earlier bludgeoned the
Gandhian pacifist anti-dam Narmada movement with a similar
motive with the same outcome — people dislodged from their homes
without reprieve) The so-called war in the tribal belt cannot be
understood without reference to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s
statement of June 18, 2009: “If Left extremism continues to
flourish in parts which have natural resources, the climate for
foreign investment will be affected”.
In Maoist discourse this statement is understood in the
following way: “The Prime Minister’s anxiety is not that the
nation will suffer because of extremism in resource rich areas
but rather that foreign investment will be adversely affected.”
India’s neo-jingoists are not an overnight phenomenon. They
belong to a politico-economic worldview.
Let me recall a few occasions when the media went berserk and
joined the state in suspending debate. The most glaring example
of this mob mentality came during the Kargil war. The government
had lost its majority by a single vote in the Lok Sabha and
Prime Minister Vajpayee was leading a lame-duck administration
when the war began. The question to ask was why his government
failed to see the encroachments in Kargil that had probably
started when he was being wined and dined in Lahore in February
1999. Though the Lok Sabha had been dissolved and elections were
nigh, the Rajya Sabha was still there, which is how it was
conceived by the founders of India’s constitution, to discuss
the grave issue in parliament. It was never allowed to meet.
Instead, the media, mainly the 24-hour channels, got their
chance to whip up the foulest emotions about a neighbouring
country without a thought for the vast majority of Pakistanis
who were themselves fighting the military that had invaded
Kargil. There was a time during the China war in 1962, when
Jawaharlal Nehru wrote one line above the masthead of the
National Herald and it evoked a nationwide surge to join the
battle. “The nation is in peril; defend it with all your might.”
That’s what Nehru wrote. Was there a man or a woman who did not
offer their blood, money, jewellery to the government treasury
for that one call, and so selflessly?
Kargil fuelled the Gujarat massacre. And the same journalists,
who were busy identifying the entire neighbourhood as villains
in Kargil, were suddenly shedding tears for Indian Muslims who
came to be branded by a rightwing state government as Pakistanis
and “Mian Musharraf”. Gujarat was yet another example of
state-backed vigilantes running amok. The outrageous behaviour
of the electronic media when Mumbai was attacked in November
2008 by terrorists who belonged to Pakistan is too recent a
nightmare to merit full recall. But that was another moment when
the urban middle class TV watchers were demanding the suspension
of parliament, and for power to be handed over to corporate
houses.
The mob mentality of the Indian state has its roots in a
calibrated worldview. It should not be confused with a lack of
policy. It was expressed in stark terms by Arun Shourie in the
Indian Express, of which he was editor before he became a BJP
politician and later minister of disinvestment, yes. In his
thesis expounded strangely enough on 12 December 2001,
presciently a day before the parliament was attacked, he called
for the state to seek two eyes for an eye and an entire jaw for
a tooth to fight terrorism, leftist and the Muslim variety.
Interestingly, the Express layout carried the picture of Osama
on one side and Che Guevara of all the people on the other side
of the narrative.
Let me end here with Shourie’s appeal in December 2001 which he
repeated in the Rajya Sabha after the Mumbai attack. He squarely
seeks a strategy to deal with the liberal polity of India in his
wider war against terrorism.
“The liberal apologists are much more destructive: they are more
numerous; as they are ‘people like us’, their formulations and
rationalisations are more readily believed…Shun political
correctness. Few things have prevented the West from waking up
in time to the dangers that Islamic terrorism today constitutes
for it as notions of what is politically correct. These notions
have stifled scholarship, they have stifled discourse. They have
led the West to shut its eyes to the ideology by which the
terrorists were being fired up. The verbal terrorism by which
notions of what is correct and what is not the dominant
intellectual group in India — the leftists — has enforced the
norms has disabled the ruling groups, and, through them, the
country, to the point of paralysis. Standing up to that verbal
terrorism, liberating discourse from those notions is the first
requisite of fighting the war against terrorism in India.”
Shourie’s party is in the opposition today but it is an ardent
admirer of Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s call for a military
solution to the Maoist revolt. Both the parties — the Congress
and the BJP — are crucial for India’s corporate barons to
succeed, whatever the price. The state is more calculating than
a mob.
