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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.

Sharad Pawar puts up a fierce fight

In a departure from his usual ways, Sharad Pawar came down heavily on those who betrayed him and split the NCP that he had founded, taking the fight into the BJP’s home.


Sharad Pawar

Mumbai: As electioneering enters the final phase, Sharad Pawar’s public rebuke of those who betrayed him and split his party, comes as a surprise to many. In the past year and a half, the patriarch of the NCP (SP) has not publicly condemned his former colleagues too often. Neither is he known to use intemperate language against his opponents, particularly the BJP. Even when BJP leaders called him a ‘bhatakti atma’ just before the Lok Sabha polls, Pawar only had a humourous retort. But this time, the angry statesmen has taken the fight to the people, almost as if urging the people to choose the right from the wrong.


In Yeola, Pawar came down heavily on Chhagan Bhujbal, remaking that he had “crossed all limits” and had betrayed not just him but also Bal Thackeray earlier and exhorted the voters to shun such as person. Dilip Walse Patil, a former close colleague who shared warm relations with the Pawar family, wasn’t spared either. Pawar ruefully remarked that he, too, had betrayed him. The hurt was evident. But the burning desire to upstage these leaders at the ballot box was there for all to see.


A party leader explains that Pawar’s decision was to consolidate his gains in a few constituencies where the NCP (SP) enjoys a good base. And this is in the rural belt of Maharashtra. The seats secured by the NCP (SP) are crucial for the party which sees the sugar and milk belt of western Maharashtra as its bastion from the early days of Pawar’s political career. He’s balanced the caste equations well; bringing in candidates with high “winnability” and also rewarding those who are loyal, while keeping an eye on the caste combination. Sandeep Kshirsagar is a stellar example—the young OBC leader has been fielded from Beed which is seeing widespread Maratha agitation. He’s been a loyal to the party and is being groomed as the NCP (SP)’s OBC face with Bhujbal’s departure. “It makes it all the more important for Pawar to criticise and expose Bhujbal. It makes way for people to recognise others,” says the party worker.


Rural Maharashtra is where the party has set its sights. Even as the MVA formed the government in 2019, the undivided NCP bagged the maximum number and the most influential portfolios in the cabinet. The NCP had taken 12 cabinet positions with portfolios linked to rural politics such as water resources, cooperation and rural development, apart from the key home and finance departments.


There are two days of active campaigning left and Pawar has zipped across the state, combing through every other constituency of rural Maharashtra especially Marathwada and Western Maharashtra. At 84, he declared that he will grow old only once the government changes. The state has barely seen a fighter as fierce as him.

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