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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.

The FOMO factor

Mumbai: Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the anxiety or apprehension surrounding missing out on things often triggered by various events that other people are having more fun and getting success. Shiv Sena chief and deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde is passing through the same phase.


News is doing the rounds in the political circle about Shinde’s FOMO moment on Tuesday after protest in Mira Road amid the raging language row in the state. Transport minister Pratap Sarnaik, a trusted aide of Shinde, tried to join the protest against the government which he is part of. MNS workers heckled him, called him a traitor, and forced him to leave.

The minister's presence at the protest rally that too organised by the opposition party raises questions. Sources have claimed that it is not possible that Sarnaik reached the protest venue without the knowledge and approval of Shinde. But since the Shiv Sena leadership has not publicly commented on this agitation the minister must have got a go-ahead from the party boss to avoid public backlash.


Shiv Sena’s alliance with the BJP and NCP has now put it on the wrong side as the Marathi vs non-Marathi debate plays out in Maharashtra. Language has historically been an emotive issue in the state, and Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray has been a pioneer  of the Marathi Manoos cause. Shinde may have retained the party's name and symbol, but it is largely out of action as MNS and Shiv Sena (UBT) accuse the BJP-ruled Centre of imposing Hindi and taking the fight to the streets. The Sena chief appears to be restless, fearing that arch-rival Uddhav Thackeray may reap political dividends from this issue. Due to which it is said that Shinde is having a FOMO moment as Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS have taken the language issue to the streets in their own style, sources added further.


Sarnaik told ‘The Perfect Voice’, “Yes, I have decided to join the protest rally and accordingly I went there. But the MNS workers forced me to leave the spot. There is no politics in it. You people can say anything but I went there for the cause and nothing else.”


When asked whether your party chief granted the permission to attend the protest, Sarnaik screamed and said, “Please don’t ask me such questions. My party chief will take a call on this. You people are unnecessarily blowing the issue out of proportion.”


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