top of page

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.

Human Capital

Economic surveys are not usually known for fretting about what people eat, how long they scroll or whether their children are glued to glowing screens. They are supposed to concern themselves with sterner fare like GDP growth, fiscal arithmetic, productivity trends and export projections. That is precisely why the Economic Survey 2025–26 deserves attention. In a striking departure, it treats junk food, obesity and excessive screen time not as lifestyle peccadilloes but as matters of macroeconomic consequence.


At his briefing ahead of the budget session, India’s chief economic adviser, V. Anantha Nageswaran startled many by straying from the familiar language of output gaps and capital formation. Instead, he spoke of ultra-processed foods, social media addiction and declining physical activity among adolescents and working-age adults. The surprise lay not in the diagnosis but in their placement within the country’s premier economic document. The blunt message was that a demographic dividend cannot be banked if the workforce is unwell in body and mind.


The survey drew on data from the National Family Health Survey to show the rapid change for the worse in India’s nutritional profile. More than one in five adults is now overweight or obese, with urban India predictably worse off but rural and poorer households catching up fast. Obesity, once caricatured as an ailment of affluence, is spreading across age groups and income classes. The causes are familiar enough: cheap ultra-processed foods, high sugar intake and increasingly sedentary lives. What is new is the survey’s insistence that this is not merely a public-health worry but an economic one.


The survey’s treatment of digital life is similarly blunt. Excessive screen time and social-media use, particularly among adolescents and young adults, are linked to anxiety, depressive symptoms and emotional distress. Behavioural studies cited in the report suggest that constant online comparison, coupled with reduced physical activity, heightens the risk of mental ill-health and even suicidal thoughts. Some Indian states have already begun to toy with restrictions on social-media access for minors.


More striking still are the policy implications the survey dares to sketch. It floats the idea of restricting the marketing of ultra-processed foods during most waking hours, alongside tighter controls on the promotion of infant and toddler milk products. It argues for clearer food labelling to help consumers make informed choices. Such measures tread on sensitive ground, pitting public health against powerful commercial interests and India’s instinctive suspicion of nanny-statism. The survey is careful to note that government action alone will not suffice and that cooperation from the private sector and greater public awareness are essential.


India’s growth ambitions rest heavily on its youthful population. In broadening its lens by linking the mental and physical well-being of the populace, the Economic Survey has made a larger point about development. It acknowledges that human capital is shaped as much by diets, screens and habits as by schooling and skills. That is laudable realism.

Comments

bottom of page