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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.

Licence to Pollute?

Delhi’s bungled fuel ban reveals the chaos of half-baked green governance.

Delhi
Delhi

When the Delhi government abruptly banned the supply of fuel to older vehicles at the beginning of the month, it was hoping to send a firm message that it meant business in its war against air pollution. Instead, it sparked outrage across the National Capital Region (NCR), prompting an embarrassing retreat just days later. Faced with legal challenges, technological shortfalls and political heat, Delhi’s Environment Minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa assured citizens that their vehicles would not be impounded and that a “new system” was being planned.


It was a remarkable climbdown less than a week after the government’s own campaign had begun. At the heart of the controversy is India’s perennial struggle to reconcile its environmental ambitions with the reality of inadequate infrastructure, limited state capacity, and deeply embedded social norms. The ban, which sought to enforce longstanding Supreme Court and National Green Tribunal (NGT) rulings restricting diesel vehicles older than 10 years and petrol vehicles older than 15, was directed by the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM), a central authority overseeing air quality in Delhi-NCR. But in its haste, the implementation exposed how even well-intentioned policy can falter when saddled with bureaucratic overreach and technological optimism.


The idea was that petrol pumps would be prohibited from supplying fuel to “End-of-Life Vehicles” (ELVs). Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems were installed to verify vehicle age, and violators were to be issued fines or have their vehicles seized. But in practice, the scheme was half-baked. The ANPR cameras were glitchy, poorly placed and functioned inconsistently. More problematically, the system had not been rolled out uniformly across NCR. Border towns such as Noida, Faridabad and Gurugram were either unequipped or non-compliant. That created the perfect conditions for fuel smuggling and cross-border evasion.


Even ministers within the Delhi government were uneasy. India’s vehicular pollution problem is complex, tied not just to the age of the vehicle but to how it is maintained, what fuel it runs on and where it operates. Many older vehicles on Indian roads are still mechanically sound, and banning them en masse runs counter to a longstanding culture of repair, not replacement.


The backlash soon turned legal with the Delhi Petrol Dealers Association challenging the mandate in court by arguing that fuel station operators, who are private entities, were being arbitrarily tasked with enforcing the ban without legal authority. The petition warned of confusion, unfair penalisation, and an undue burden on petrol pumps, which see thousands of vehicles daily and cannot be expected to monitor compliance with perfection.


Even Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena intervened, urging Chief Minister Rekha Gupta to halt the ban. Saxena’s letter struck a populist chord, noting that many middle-class families had sunk their life savings into buying vehicles that were now being summarily outlawed.


The CAQM, sensing the backlash, eventually agreed to delay the ban’s implementation until November 1 and to roll it out simultaneously across all six NCR cities - Delhi, Gurugram, Faridabad, Noida, Ghaziabad, and Sonipat. It was a tacit admission that the original strategy had been neither fair nor enforceable.


Delhi’s air pollution is no trivial matter. According to the WHO, the capital ranks among the world’s most polluted cities. But piecemeal bans, rolled out without coordination or preparation are unlikely to make a dent. A systemic solution must involve cleaner fuels, better public transport, real-time emissions monitoring and behavioural change - none of which can be outsourced to a glitchy camera or a harried petrol pump attendant.


India’s green transition is often framed in terms of grand targets: net-zero by 2070, EV adoption, solar gigawatts. But the battle will be won or lost in moments like these. If Delhi’s policymakers are serious about fixing the capital’s toxic air, they would do better to begin with enforceable, equitable regulation and not blunt instruments masquerading as climate action. Until then, the only thing Delhi seems to be running on is confusion.

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