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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.

Rogue Ranks

Few things corrode a democracy faster than a police force at war with itself. Maharashtra has now been offered a lurid glimpse of that pathology in the extraordinary feud between two of its most powerful former police chiefs, Rashmi Shukla and Sanjay Pandey, each accusing the other’s camp of bending the law into a political weapon.


Five days before her retirement, Shukla, then Maharashtra’s director-general of police, has lobbed a political grenade into the home department. Acting on a Special Investigation Team’s report, she recommended that an FIR be filed against her predecessor Pandey, along with two other senior officers, for allegedly conspiring during the Uddhav Thackeray–led MVA government to frame Devendra Fadnavis and Eknath Shinde in a revived 2016 extortion case.


Pandey, who headed the force when the MVA coalition ran the state, denies the plot. His allies note that neither Fadnavis nor Shinde was ever arrested or named as an accused. Known for her closeness to the ruling BJP, leaders of the Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT) have dismissed Shukla as a “BJP and RSS worker.” When police chiefs are accused of partisan loyalty as casually as party hacks, the rot is already deep.


Yet the allegations, if even partly true, are grotesque. According to the SIT, businessman Sanjay Punamiya was pressed while in custody to provide statements implicating Fadnavis and Shinde in an urban land-ceiling scam. A re-investigation of a long-closed Thane case was allegedly triggered by a conveniently timed application delivered straight to the then DGP, Pandey.


The BJP, sensing blood, has seized on the affair with relish. Its leaders speak darkly of an ‘invisible hand,’ alluding to Uddhav Thackeray, as directing the police to neutralise rivals.


Shukla’s own timing invites suspicion. Given the looming civic polls, why submit such a momentous recommendation just days before demitting office? Her defenders say she was merely fulfilling her duty on the basis of a report delivered two months earlier. Her critics see a last-minute settling of scores, or worse, an attempt to lock in a narrative before a successor could take a different view.


The deeper scandal is not whether Pandey or Shukla is right. It is that Maharashtra’s police, once among India’s more professional forces, have been reduced to a battlefield for political vendettas. When every change of government is followed by a purge of investigations and counter-investigations, the law ceases to be a shield and becomes a cudgel.


Democracies depend on a simple bargain: politicians make the laws; police enforce them without fear or favour. In Maharashtra that bargain has been shredded. Senior officers appear to have behaved like political fixers, while politicians treat the police as just another wing of their party machinery.


The Shukla–Pandey feud has revealed a force that no longer answers to professional norms but to shifting political winds. Until that changes, Maharashtra’s police will remain not guardians of the law but contestants in an endless, ugly gang war.

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