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By:

Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent...

Red Romance

For long, the Naxalite in news was recognisable by the gun. But the more insidious version of Naxalism has never needed a rifle. It has thrived in varsity classrooms and newspaper and magazine columns, fostered by men and women sympathetic to it. These academics and other members of the so-called intelligentsia have long enjoyed their status as ‘respectable dissenters’ even when their politics offered intellectual alibis for Naxals carrying guns. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent Independence Day warning about “dimaagi Naxals” should therefore not be dismissed as another political label. His larger point was that an insurgency does not survive on ammunition alone. It survives on ideas and people willing to make violence appear morally fashionable. The most revealing feature of India’s Maoist movement was never simply its brutality. It was the strange attraction it exercised over sections of the metropolitan Left elite. The Naxalite with an AK-47 could be transformed into a romantic revolutionary while the policeman he killed became an instrument of an oppressive state. This was not merely naïveté. At its ugliest, it was the intellectual laundering of political violence. The fantasy of the romantic revolutionary has always been seductive. In this narrative, amplified through sympathetic media priding itself on telling ‘truth to power,’ India was not a constitutional democracy struggling with inequality and corruption but an inherently illegitimate state waiting to be overthrown. In the minds of this elite Left, Maoist violence has often been recast as resistance while attacks on infrastructure as blows against capitalism. The armed overthrow of the Indian republic was the liberation they craved for. Some of India’s most celebrated intellectuals have flirted dangerously close to that moral inversion. The issue here is whether intellectual prestige can be used to sanitise an ideology whose practitioners have murdered civilians, policemen and public servants and terrorised some of India’s poorest districts. A university cannot be the place where Maoist romanticism acquires the legitimacy of a fashionable campus cause. Professors who turn armed insurgents into heroic revolutionaries are not merely exercising academic freedom. If they knowingly excuse violence, they are helping to construct the moral vocabulary that makes violence possible. Let’s be clear here. A professor who criticises the Indian state is not a Naxal while a journalist who exposes state excesses is not an enemy of India. But an intellectual who repeatedly excuses, glorifies or rationalises political violence cannot hide behind the word ‘dissent.’ India has paid an enormous price for the Maoist fantasy. Thousands have died. Entire regions were held back by fear while development was obstructed. The people supposedly being liberated were often the first to suffer. The armed Naxal is now being pushed towards extinction. But the Indian republic cannot afford to leave behind the romantic mythology that made the gun respectable. A democracy can tolerate dissent. It should never be expected to tolerate the glorification of those who seek its violent destruction.

From Damascus to Cyrenaica

The fall of the Assad regime has led Russia to pivot from Syria to Libya to secure its Mediterranean influence.

Damascus to Cyrenaica

The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime last month has turned the Syrian capital into a graveyard for Russian ambitions, a stark epitaph for what once seemed like Moscow’s triumphant return to global geopolitics. Damascus, long a prized jewel in Vladimir Putin’s crown of influence, symbolized more than a strategic alliance. It was an ideological defiance, a barricade against Western encroachment and a showcase for Russia’s military prowess.


Now, for Moscow, the shock of Syria’s unravelling has prompted an urgent imperative for reinvention. Like a chess player unfazed by the loss of a queen, Putin’s foreign policy machinery has shifted its gaze westward to Libya. Eastern Libya, with its fractured politics and strategic Mediterranean coastline, has emerged as Russia’s new staging ground. Troops, warplanes and Wagner Group mercenaries, now rebranded with Orwellian flair as the ‘Africa Corps’ are being redeployed to Libyan bases.


This has led Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of the Libyan National Army, to step into the spotlight. Haftar is no stranger to Russian patronage. His transactional relationship with Moscow mirrors Assad’s. In Syria, Russia gained naval access to Tartus and control of Hmeimim airbase in exchange for propping up Assad. In Libya, Haftar’s fiefdom in Cyrenaica offers Russia a gateway to Africa and a lever to disrupt Western designs. Yet, like Assad, Haftar’s reliance on Moscow reveals the vulnerability beneath the veneer of strength. His grip on power depends on the illusion of autonomy, even as Russian mercenaries provide the scaffolding.


Haftar’s dependence deepened after his failed 2019 assault on Tripoli, a miscalculated gambit that left his forces in retreat and his credibility diminished. Enter the Wagner Group, whose drones and military advisors have kept Haftar afloat while tethering him to Moscow’s geopolitical agenda. It is an uneasy partnership. For Russia, Haftar is a tool, not a partner—a proxy to further its ambitions in the Mediterranean, not a leader to champion.


Western policymakers, meanwhile, are caught in their own quagmire. Washington’s repeated attempts to woo figures like Haftar with promises of legitimacy and patronage betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the power dynamics at play. Haftar’s strength is borrowed, a reality that mirrors Assad’s reliance on Moscow’s firepower in Syria. The West’s failure to grasp this has left it flailing in a game where the rules are being rewritten in Moscow.


Yet the story of Libya, like Syria before it, is not just one of external meddling but of internal decay. The National Oil Corporation, Libya’s economic lifeline, has become a pawn in factional disputes. Governance has disintegrated into kleptocracy, creating a vacuum where foreign actors like Russia thrive. Strengthening Libya’s institutions—ensuring accountability, restoring sovereignty, and fostering inclusive political frameworks—is the West’s only viable countermeasure.


That said, Haftar, like Assad, is a precarious foundation for empire-building. The more Moscow invests in him, the more it risks repeating the cycle of dependency and collapse that played out in Damascus.


The fall of Assad and the rise of Haftar as Moscow’s new linchpin should serve as a clarion call for Western policymakers. Reacting to crises as they unfold has only left the region more susceptible to exploitation. If the West hopes to counter Russia’s influence, it will have to address the underlying vulnerabilities that make such interventions possible. Libya, like Syria before it, is not just a battlefield for foreign powers but a mirror reflecting the failures of governance and the perils of neglect.


In the grand chessboard of global politics, the pieces are always in motion. But as Moscow shifts its weight from one unstable alliance to another, it risks discovering the limits of a strategy built on proxies and pragmatism. For the West, the lesson is clear: the game isn’t won by reacting to the moves of others—it’s won by reshaping the board.

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