Discussion with Justin Podur, York University, Canada
Maoists in India: Tribals
under siege
[Soon after this book was published, Prof.
Justin Podur conducted a written discussion on the book as a preparation for his own
succinct review. As winter sets in, killings are on the increase in the Maoist areas. By now it is almost like a natural order, like the seasonal hurricane or the debilitating drought. Killings on both sides will continue for years unless the civil society intervenes.]
Would you say your motivation
to write this book was primarily humanitarian, or political, or would you reject
that distinction?
I won’t reject the distinction
since it is possible to intervene in a situation of conflict with purely
humanitarian aims, such as supply of medicine, potable water, blankets, etc.
without commenting on the forces engaged in the conflict. This is what Amnesty
International and other organizations do. However, in the conflict involving
adivasis under discussion, almost the entire effort is spent on
critiquing/defending the forces without due attention to the adivasis
themselves in terms of what they are going through due to the conflict. I am
appealing for a political understanding of the humanitarian disaster to
highlight why adivasis are the principal victims without being participants in
the conflict. In that sense, the political and the humanitarian converge.
Although
your book isn't heavy on theory, there is an interesting political perspective
about political strategy in an electoral context like India's. It
seems that your strategic disagreement with the CPI (Maoist) stems from these
ideas. Could you summarize your perspective on what kind of left and movement
strategies make sense in this context, and why?
This is related to the point
about humanitarianism raised above. Too often, in fact almost without fail,
insurgent movements are launched only with a political end in view, such as
seizure of state power, without factoring in the immense cost to the
populations. Suffering of populations is considered only as a tactical issue,
not a fundamental political issue. The moral omission is even more glaring in
cases such as Indian republicanism where not only alternative and less
traumatic means are available to address and progressively ameliorate the
misery of the masses, the professed political end itself is questionable. Since
this general point applies to cases much beyond the Maoist insurrection, it is
a theoretical point to that extent, drawing obviously on Gandhi’s thoughts on
ends and means.
Related
to #2, what do you say to those who, looking at the insurgencies in the
northeast and Kashmir, the package of laws that enables the government to
restrict fundamental freedoms, corporate control of the political process, the
economic disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the population, say that
the system is broken, and that trying to work within or use the system is bound
to fail?
The operative clause is whether
any effort, including massive resistance to the oppressive actions you list, is
‘bound to fail’. It is unclear whose prediction is the professed determinism
here that over-rules acts of resistance as yet organised or even imagined.
Insurgencies in Kashmir and the North-East lie
in ruins now after decades of genocidal violence. In fact, some form of
dialogue, some show of determined resistance, is beginning to generate solution
spaces in favour of the population. But, as ever, there is a long way to go. I
return to this.
South Africa and much of Latin America perhaps represent even more notorious
histories of prolonged oppression than Kashmir
and the North-East. Yet the end of apartheid in South Africa, and progressive
electoral outcomes in Latin America, show how militant but peaceful mass
resistance can achieve radical goals for the masses even in those brutal
circumstances. As Chomsky has pointed out, the US was compelled to pull out and
something like an elected government was installed in the ruins of post-Saddam Iraq. These
things happened not due to guerrilla attacks on US forces but by militant
movements often organised by the workers.
To get back to your specific point,
as violent insurgency largely fizzled out, dazzling street movements have
filled the Kashmir valley in the last six
years or so. This has had a wider and more lasting effect in compelling the Indian
state to take urgent measures to address each of the oppressive acts you
mention. It is still a long way to go, but Kashmir
today carries at least some measure of hope that was unthinkable a decade ago.
Not surprisingly, the ‘radicals’ of all hues are not very pleased.
The
debate around the CPI (Maoist) is completely polarized, but in your book you
refuse the dichotomy, taking strong exception to the CPI (Maoist) and to those
who are calling for the state to repress them. Do you think the polarization
will mean that readers will miss the point of your book?
The rejection of the suggested ‘binary’
is a crucial point of the book. A polarized discourse is an inevitable
consequence of insurgency when it is ruthlessly attacked by the state. This is
not by itself a moral or a political problem if the insurgency is vastly
popular and has genuine mass support, as in Vietnam and more recently in Nepal.
Historically it means the emergence of a barricade. It is a huge problem when
the insurgency itself is ‘predatory’ with vast masses of people caught in the
crossfire. I discuss several cases in the book arguing for the required
distinction.
In fact, a ‘predatory’ anti-state
force can also precipitate polarisation in the face of massive
counter-insurgency. As many authors including Robert Fisk had pointed out,
there was a perceptible and growing opposition to ‘jehadi’ politics in the
Islamic countries right after 9/11 despite decades of massive attacks by the US in the area.
All that changed dramatically once the US attacked Afghanistan and
recruitment for terrorist networks jumped many fold. The horrible consequences are still playing
out as the drone attacks continued.
At a much lesser scale, this has
happened with the Maoist insurgency. It did not have a popular face until the
Indian state attacked it around 2005 with a series of atrocious actions leading
up to the operation green hunt. Maoists must have been waiting for this for
decades. The inevitable polarisation followed as a consequence.
However, even if there is some
popular support for the Maoists in some sections for reasons explained in the
book, it is really a reflection of a genuine concern about the plight of the
adivasis, not a political support to the party per se. Also, there is a growing
discourse, outside the mainstream and the Internet (both accessed primarily by
the elite sections of the population), in local papers and magazines, political
handouts, forum reports and the like, which rejects both the statist and the Maoist
options as tools of social justice for the poorest of the poor. Importantly,
much of this critique ensues from radical grassroots forums who are parts of
the generic naxalite framework to which Maoists also belong. In that sense,
there is a serious internal criticism. I have taken some pains to unearth this
literature and present it in the book to suggest where radical priorities
currently reside.
The basic concern for the
adivasis thus translates into a vast audience for the book if proper light is
thrown on the predatory character of both the state and the Maoists from within
the radical perspective itself. It is a thin line but worth consolidating in
view of the grim consequences of the polarized discourse.
To put it another way, what
would you say to those who think your book, in this context, helps the state?
What about to those who say you should have gone to the area yourself?
The two questions are separate.
So let me address them in turn.
(1) The polarized discourse does
have the consequence of postulating a thick, monochromatic notion of state such
that all non-Maoists are agents of the state. In this discourse, even naxalite
critics of Maoists, some of whom initiated the original naxalite movement, and
have spent their lives either in prison or in villages with people, are all
agents of counter-insurgency. Several issues arise. I go into them in some
detail in the book.
In contrast to totalitarian
states, republican states with universal franchise are extremely complex
entities either with zones of relative autonomy or, as some authors put it, a
conglomeration of a variety of sub-states. The generic state is often in an
unsteady equilibrium in turmoil both from the above and below. The simultaneous
(and conflicting) existence of repressive and welfare aspects just highlights
part of the complexity. So it is possible to occupy one zone of the state, such
as the autonomy of the legal and electoral systems, to challenge some other
zone, such as the police and the corporate system. Maoists themselves
frequently demand strict adherence to law and human rights as the state deals
with their arrested comrades. This picture is particularly valid for the plural
complexity of the Indian state, ‘unmanageable’ from a classical European
perspective.
No doubt the neo-liberal era,
which unfolded around 1990, has led to a rollback of some of the welfare
aspects of the state and a consolidation of the ruling classes. But the
electoral system continues to place obstacles to further consolidation of
capital and power as the parties are compelled to hand out progressively richer
welfare measures to wider sections of the people to offset possible electoral
reverses. In that sense, the electoral system is increasingly playing the role
of advancing class war. Some telling cases are discussed in the book. It is
possible even to argue that the state is turning out to be a hindrance to the
globalised ruling classes.
From this perspective, Maoists
are most welcome for the regressive aspects of the state. For the Maoists help
create insurrectionary conditions in which people essentially lose their voice
and all people’s forums, except those sanctioned and conducted by the Maoists,
come to a halt. Again, several cases are discussed in detail in the book. There
is then, some truth to the view that the Maoists are a mirror-image of the most
ferocious aspect of the state, giving some indication of the prospects for a
projected Maoist state.
(2) There is a useful distinction between report
and analysis. An analysis of a phenomenon, based on authentic, comprehensive,
and timely reports from the ground, need not itself be based on its own
“field-studies”. Excellent analysis of Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and even Vietnam are
available where the authors based their analysis on diligent perusal of a
variety of reports and historical studies.
In fact, there is no objective,
"neutral" field-study of Maoist territory by any social scientist,
anthropologist etc. simply bacause the Maoists won't let you in unless you
agree to undertake a guided tour and report verbatim what they tell you. The
only rigorous study of Bastar, Sundar (2007) is really more historical and is
based on limited interactions with Adivasis in the non-Maoist areas. Even this
much is no longer possible as Sundar has found out repeatedly. The recent books
Chenoy & Chenoy (2010) and Padel (2010) claim some field-studies, but these
are mostly for other areas and insurgencies.
Thus, the strategy adopted in the
text is to cull whatever one can from four sources: (a) travelogues in
Maoist territory by authors sympathetic to Maoists, (b) talking to and studying
the reports of other naxalites who have some degree of ground-level contacts
with Maoists historically, (c) seemingly reliable journalistic reports by
reputed reporters of reputed newspapers (Aman Sethi of Hindu, Supriya Sharma of
TOI, etc.) who have some real access to both Maoists and the police, (d) the
Maoist documents themselves. A very determined effort was made to stay away
from State-sponsored reports, and reports of parliamentary left, both of which
are likely to be biased. The evidence in (a) to (d) was then cross-checked with
each other to extract some stable facts. I do not know of any literature that
has attempted this rigorously.
Unlike the mainstream
discussions, which use the terms interchangeably, you make a distinction
between Maoists and Naxalites. Why?
As noted, the distinction is
already well-attested in the relevant radical literature. It is just that it is
largely unknown to the general public and even to some of the recent writers on
the topic who are not fully conversant with the history of the naxalite
movement. So the first reason for making the distinction is to supply relevant
information.
A second reason is to expose the
Maoist claim that they are the true inheritors of the original naxalite
movement, a massive peasant uprising in the late 1960s, that still justly
fascinates radical imagination in India. The distinction highlights
the fact that the peasant movement itself need not be equated with the
communist organisation that followed since many democratic and revolutionary
aspects of the original movement were vulgarized by the party which broke into
many factions very soon as the movement fizzled out. Maoists represent perhaps
the most despotic chain of factions that ensued from those divisions. The
distinction thus empowers the analysis to use the views of the other factions
as a critique of Maoists from within the naxalite movement itself, not from a
statist point of view.
A third reason is that the state
and the mainstream media routinely conflate the distinction. This enables the
repressive arms of the state to target the entire spectrum of militant
resistance as naxalite and attack a vast range of democratic movements
accordingly. A clear articulation of the distinction thus opens some space for
resisting these attacks.
One
very interesting aspect of your book is that you use the most sympathetic
accounts of the Maoists to criticize their practice. Specifically, their
economic practice, their developmental practice, and their use of child
soldiers. Can you talk about this analysis and has anyone tried to refute your
analysis based on these sources?
As noted, an important political
task was to criticize the Maoists from a radical point of view, that is,
without falling into statist propaganda. The task of course is best carried out
by examining the claims advanced in the most sympathetic accounts of the Maoist
insurgency in the work of prominent and respectable authors through the
internal details of the accounts themselves. Then the analysis becomes
automatically immune from the charge that it is based on statist material.
Notice that the accounts themselves are based on tall claims by the Maoists
themselves. If their tallest claims reveal a dismal picture of their practice,
it is easy to infer what the real picture is like. You thus get a hold on the
reality without going there.
I am aware that this part of my
analysis, originally published in various versions in ZNet, Outlook and
Economic and Political Weekly, has been widely read and discussed. To an extent,
it contributed to the turn-around in the otherwise polarized discourse. Given
its textual basis, it is hard to refute it, and I know of no sustained attempt
to do so. One argument somewhat apologetically suggested is that, in the
condition of insurgency, it is hard to devote much attention to the welfare of
the people. It is more of an admission than refutation.
To
my mind the most important part of your book is the proposal for a way out of
this war, which you acknowledge is grasping at straws, but which you argue is
the only option left. Can you talk about this proposal and why you think all
other options are no longer viable?
I go into much historical and
ideological detail to argue that the basic problem is that the Maoist
leadership will never give up arms and join democratic struggles, and the
Indian state will use this opportunity to continue with counter-insurgency
operations. In fact, the violence on both sides is likely to increase, and
democratic movements on the ground have no means to thwart the escalation of
arms. The clue to any solution to a ‘war’ between two predatory forces is to
pay attention to the people caught in the crossfire, in this case millions of
hapless adivasis spread over a vast area of dense forests. One general feature
of any sustained insurgency is that they are able to entrench themselves in
some stretch of population to acquire the foot-soldiers.
In the Maoist case, these
soldiers happen to be young adivasis, often minors. A massive democratic effort
to secure their meaningful rehabilitation with full dignity and livelihood could
be the straw you mentioned. To emphasise, the effort has to be democratic, and
not based on surrender to the security forces. The guerrillas will justly never
give up arms en masse to the police given the brutal history of the conflict. A
range of other measures are needed to lend democratic confidence to the
process.
