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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.

Radical Prescription

When Dr. Jay Bhattacharya stepped into the political maelstrom of the COVID-19 pandemic, he wasn’t just another epidemiologist offering cautious public health guidance. He became a lightning rod, an academic insurgent who challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of lockdowns and mass quarantines, earning both ardent followers and vocal detractors. Now, as the newly minted director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under President Donald Trump, Bhattacharya finds himself in yet another storm, this time at the helm of America’s most powerful medical research institution, grappling with funding freezes and a divided scientific community.


Born in Kolkata in 1968, Bhattacharya’s journey to prominence reads like an improbable blend of medical expertise, economic insight and ideological provocation. His family immigrated to the United States when he was young, and by the time he reached Stanford University, he had set himself on an unorthodox path that straddled the realms of medicine and economics. He earned a medical degree and a Ph.D. in economics, an unusual dual credential that shaped his approach to public health as both a physician and a policy thinker.


His rise through Stanford’s ranks was meteoric. A professor of health policy and a senior fellow at multiple Stanford institutions, Bhattacharya built a career studying the economics of healthcare, aging, and the well-being of vulnerable populations. But it was the pandemic that catapulted him into the limelight and into controversy.


In October 2020, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, an incendiary document that advocated against blanket lockdowns, arguing instead for “focused protection” of the elderly and vulnerable while allowing COVID-19 to spread among healthier populations to build natural immunity. At the time, when government after government was implementing harsh restrictions, his stance was nothing short of heretical. The NIH’s then-director, Francis Collins, and White House advisor Anthony Fauci publicly denounced the declaration as “dangerous” and “unethical.”


For Bhattacharya, however, the lockdowns were an even greater moral failing. He believed they disproportionately harmed the working class, deepened inequality, and had devastating consequences for children kept out of school. He framed his arguments not just as a scientific disagreement but as a question of social justice - a rhetorical shift that made him a hero to libertarians and skeptics of government overreach.


His recent nomination as NIH director, confirmed by a narrow 53-47 Senate vote, signals Trump’s broader agenda to shake up the scientific establishment. At his confirmation hearing, Bhattacharya promised to restore “trust in public science institutions” and cultivate “a culture of respect for free speech in science.” His supporters see him as a necessary reformer, someone who will push back against groupthink and politicization within the NIH. His critics fear his iconoclastic tendencies could undermine public health messaging and deepen the distrust sown during the pandemic years.


Yet Bhattacharya, for all his defiance, is no mere political provocateur. His scholarship is vast and deeply respected, with over 135 peer-reviewed articles spanning medicine, law, and public health. His research into physician payment models and healthcare spending has shaped policy discussions for years. But his new role demands more than academic rigor—it requires navigating the complex, often brutal world of Washington politics, where funding battles and ideological clashes define the future of medical research.


Will Bhattacharya’s tenure mark the beginning of a bold new chapter for the NIH, or will his maverick instincts spark further turmoil in an already fractured landscape? As he takes the reins of America’s premier medical research institution, one thing is clear: the debate over public health is far from over, and Jay Bhattacharya remains at its center.

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