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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.

Kohima, WWII’s Overlooked Turning Point

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

The year 1944 marked a pivotal chapter in the Second World War. June 6 saw the Normandy landings, the audacious Allied invasion of mainland Europe. A day earlier, Rome had fallen to the Allies, becoming the first European capital to be liberated. By September, the Allies launched ‘Operation Market Garden’ - an ambitious and risky attempt to outflank German defenses by seizing key bridges in the Netherlands which ultimately became a heroic failure.

Today, as these events are commemorated on their 80th anniversaries, another titanic clash of the war, largely forgotten by history, took place in a remote corner of colonial India. The Battle of Kohima, fought between March and July 1944 between British Commonwealth forces and the Imperial Japanese Army, was just as brutal and consequential, yet it remains overshadowed by the European theatre.

Stalingrad may capture the popular imagination, but Kohima, fought on the Indo-Burma border, was no less significant. By halting the Japanese advance, it changed the trajectory of the war in Southeast Asia and set the stage for the British and Commonwealth forces to retake Burma. The Japanese dream of an imperial empire collapsed along the ‘Road of Bones.’ Until recently, the Battle of Kohima remained on the fringes of history, mostly preserved in the memoirs of servicemen like Arthur Swinson's ‘Kohima’ and John Henslow's ‘A Sapper in the Forgotten Army’. However, Field Marshal William Slim's ‘Defeat into Victory’ emerged as the definitive account. Recent works, notably Fergal Keane's ‘Road of Bones’, have helped bring this overlooked theatre into the spotlight.

But why does Kohima matter? In early 1944, Japan was on the back foot. In the Pacific, the Americans’ island-hopping campaign was drawing ever closer to Japan’s home islands, threatening strategic bombing raids on its cities. The Japanese high command, desperate to relieve this pressure, gambled on an offensive into India. A successful push into the Assam plains, they believed, might trigger the collapse of British colonial rule and open the door to a negotiated settlement with the Allies. Thus, the Japanese launched Operation U-Go, aiming to seize Imphal, Kohima, and Dimapur, critical logistical hubs on the route to Assam and Bengal.

Facing them was Slim, commander of the British 14th Army, who had been quietly rebuilding a demoralised force battered by defeat in Malaya and the humiliating fall of Singapore in 1942. The British and Indian armies had endured the longest retreat in Commonwealth history, following the Japanese invasion of Burma.

Kohima came under siege on April 4, 1944. For over two weeks, 15,000 crack Japanese troops surrounded the garrison, which was outnumbered and short on supplies. But Slim’s men, bolstered by one battalion of the 161 Indian Brigade and the 1st Assam Regiment, held firm. Vital supplies were airdropped, and the garrison endured, testing and proving the theory that troops could stand and fight while being resupplied from the air.

The battle’s significance cannot be overstated. The Japanese offensive was decisively crushed, securing Imphal, safeguarding Dimapur, and delivering a fatal blow to Japan’s war effort in Southeast Asia. For the Indian Army, Kohima was transformative. The battles at Kohima and Imphal helped forge a modern, mechanised force capable of waging an all-arms war. Many of the formations that fought there would later serve in post-independence India, notably the 161 Indian Brigade, which was rushed to defend Srinagar during the 1947-48 Kashmir conflict. Kohima deserves far greater recognition.

(The writer is a advocate at the Punjab and Haryana HC and a military history enthusiast)

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