Singur and Nandigram make you wonder - is the
last stop of every revolution advanced capitalism?
There is an atmosphere of growing violence across
the country. How do you read the signs? In what
context should it be read?

You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs.
We have a growing middle class, reared on a diet
of radical consumerism and aggressive greed.
Unlike industrialising Western countries, which
had colonies from which to plunder resources and
generate slave labour to feed this process, we
have to colonise ourselves, our own nether parts.
We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that
is being generated (and marketed as a value
interchangeable with nationalism) can only be
sated by grabbing land, water and resources from
the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most
successful secessionist struggle ever waged in
independent India - the secession of the middle
and upper classes from the rest of the country.
It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one.

They’re fighting for the right to merge with the
world’s elite somewhere up there in the
stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the
resources, the coal, the minerals, the bauxite,
the water and electricity. Now they want the land
to make more cars, more bombs, more mines -
supertoys for the new supercitizens of the new
superpower. So it’s outright war, and people on
both sides are choosing their weapons. The
government and the corporations reach for
structural adjustment, the World Bank, the ADB,
FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy
makers, help from the ’friendly’ corporate media
and a police force that will ram all this down
people’s throats. Those who want to resist this
process have, until now, reached for dharnas,
hunger strikes, satyagraha, the courts and what
they thought was friendly media. But now more and
more are reaching for guns. Will the violence
grow? If the ’growth rate’ and the Sensex are
going to be the only barometers the government
uses to measure progress and the well-being of
people, then of course it will. How do I read the
signs? It isn’t hard to read sky-writing. What it
says up there, in big letters, is this: the shit
has hit the fan, folks.

You once remarked that though you may not resort
to violence yourself, you think it has become
immoral to condemn it, given the circumstances in
the country. Can you elaborate on this view?

I’d be a liability as a guerrilla! I doubt I used
the word ’immoral’ - morality is an elusive
business, as changeable as the weather. What I
feel is this: non-violent movements have knocked
at the door of every democratic institution in
this country for decades, and have been spurned
and humiliated. Look at the Bhopal gas victims,
the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The NBA had a lot
going for it - high-profile leadership, media
coverage, more resources than any other mass
movement. What went wrong? People are bound to
want to rethink strategy. When Sonia Gandhi
begins to promote satyagraha at the World
Economic Forum in Davos, it’s time for us to sit
up and think. For example, is mass civil
disobedience possible within the structure of a
democratic nation state? Is it possible in the
age of disinformation and corporate-controlled
mass media? Are hunger strikes umbilically linked
to celebrity politics? Would anybody care if the
people of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines went on a
hunger strike? Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger
strike for six years. That should be a lesson to
many of us.

I’ve always felt that it’s ironic
that hunger strikes are used as a political
weapon in a land where most people go hungry
anyway. We are in a different time and place now.
Up against a different, more complex adversary.
We’ve entered the era of NGOs - or should I say
the era of paltu shers - in which mass action can
be a treacherous business. We have demonstrations
which are funded, we have sponsored dharnas and
social forums which make militant postures but
never follow up on what they preach. We have all
kinds of ’virtual’ resistance. Meetings against
SEZs sponsored by the biggest promoters of SEZs.
Awards and grants for environmental activism and
community action given by corporations
responsible for devastating whole ecosystems.
Vedanta, a company mining bauxite in the forests
of Orissa, wants to start a university. The Tatas
have two charitable trusts that directly and
indirectly fund activists and mass movements
across the country. Could that be why Singur has
drawn so much less flak than Nandigram? Of course
the Tatas and Birlas funded Gandhi too - maybe he
was our first NGO. But now we have NGOs who make
a lot of noise, write a lot of reports, but whom
the sarkar is more than comfortable with. How do
we make sense of all this? The place is crawling
with professional diffusers of real political
action. ’Virtual’ resistance has become something
of a liability.

There was a time when mass movements looked to
the courts for justice. The courts have rained
down a series of judgements that are so unjust,
so insulting to the poor in the language they
use, they take your breath away. A recent Supreme
Court judgement, allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to
resume construction though it didn’t have the
requisite clearances, said in so many words that
the questions of corporations indulging in
malpractice does not arise! In the ERA of
corporate globalisation, corporate land-grab, in
the ERA of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and
Bechtel, that’s a loaded thing to say. It exposes
the ideological heart of the most powerful
institution in this country. The judiciary, along
with the corporate press, is now seen as the
lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.

In a climate like this, when people feel that
they are being worn down, exhausted by these
interminable ’democratic’ processes, only to be
eventually humiliated, what are they supposed to
do? Of course it isn’t as though the only options
are binary - violence versus non-violence. There
are political parties that believe in armed
struggle but only as one part of their overall
political strategy. Political workers in these
struggles have been dealt with brutally, killed,
beaten, imprisoned under false charges. People
are fully aware that to take to arms is to call
down upon yourself the myriad forms of the
violence of the Indian State. The minute armed
struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world
shrinks and the colours fade to black and white.
But when people decide to take that step because
every other option has ended in despair, should
we condemn them? Does anyone believe that if the
people of Nandigram had held a dharna and sung
songs, the West Bengal government would have
backed down? We are living in times when to be
ineffective is to support the status quo (which
no doubt suits some of us). And being effective
comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to
condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.

You have been travelling a lot on the ground -
can you give us a sense of the trouble spots you
have been to? Can you outline a few of the combat
lines in these places?

Huge question - what can I say? The military
occupation of Kashmir, neo-fascism in Gujarat,
civil war in Chhattisgarh, mncs raping Orissa,
the submergence of hundreds of villages in the
Narmada Valley, people living on the edge of
absolute starvation, the devastation of forest
land, the Bhopal victims living to see the West
Bengal government re-wooing Union Carbide - now
calling itself Dow Chemicals - in Nandigram. I
haven’t been recently to Andhra Pradesh,
Karnataka, Maharashtra, but we know about the
almost hundred thousand farmers who have killed
themselves. We know about the fake encounters and
the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh. Each
of these places has its own particular history,
economy, ecology. None is amenable to easy
analysis. And yet there is connecting tissue,
there are huge international cultural and
economic pressures being brought to bear on them.
How can I not mention the Hindutva project,
spreading its poison sub-cutaneously, waiting to
erupt once again? I’d say the biggest indictment
of all is that we are still a country, a culture,
a society which continues to nurture and practice
the notion of untouchability. While our
economists number-crunch and boast about the
growth rate, a million people - human
scavengers - earn their living carrying several kilos of
other people’s shit on their heads every day. And
if they didn’t carry shit on their heads they
would starve to death. Some f***ing superpower
this.

How does one view the recent State and police violence in Bengal?

No different from police and State violence
anywhere else - including the issue of hypocrisy
and doublespeak so perfected by all political
parties including the mainstream Left. Are
Communist bullets different from capitalist ones?
Odd things are happening. It snowed in Saudi
Arabia. Owls are out in broad daylight. The
Chinese government tabled a bill sanctioning the
right to private property. I don’t know if all of
this has to do with climate change. The Chinese
Communists are turning out to be the biggest
capitalists of the 21^st century. Why should we
expect our own parliamentary Left to be any
different? Nandigram and Singur are clear
signals. It makes you wonder - is the last stop
of every revolution advanced capitalism? Think
about it - the French Revolution, the Russian
Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam
War, the anti-apartheid struggle, the supposedly
Gandhian freedom struggle in IndiaŠ what’s the
last station they all pull in at? Is this the end
of imagination?

These are times when to be ineffective is to
support the status quo. And being effective comes
at a terrible price.

The Maoist attack in Bijapur - the death of 55
policemen. Are the rebels only the flip side of
the State?

How can the rebels be the flip side of the State?
Would anybody say that those who fought against
apartheid - however brutal their methods - were
the flip side of the State? What about those who
fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought
the Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes?
Or those who are fighting the US occupation of
Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State? This
facile new report-driven ’human rights’
discourse, this meaningless condemnation game
that we are all forced to play, makes politicians
of us all and leaches the real politics out of
everything. However pristine we would like to be,
however hard we polish our halos, the tragedy is
that we have run out of pristine choices. There
is a civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created
by the Chhattisgarh government, which is publicly
pursing the Bush doctrine: if you’re not with us,
you are with the terrorists. The lynchpin of this
war, apart from the formal security forces, is
the Salva Judum - a government-backed militia of
ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to
become spos (special police officers).

The Indian
State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in
Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed,
hundreds of thousands tortured, thousands have
disappeared. Any banana republic would be proud
of this record. Now the government wants to
import these failed strategies into the
heartland. Thousands of adivasis have been
forcibly moved off their mineral-rich lands into
police camps. Hundreds of villages have been
forcibly evacuated. Those lands, rich in
iron-ore, are being eyed by corporations like the
Tatas and Essar. mous have been signed, but no
one knows what they say. Land acquisition has
begun. This kind of thing happened in countries
like Colombia - one of the most devastated
countries in the world. While everybody’s eyes
are fixed on the spiralling violence between
government-backed militias and guerrilla squads,
multinational corporations quietly make off with
the mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of
theatre being scripted for us in Chhattisgarh.

Of course it’s horrible that 55 policemen were
killed. But they’re as much the victims of
government policy as anybody else. For the
government and the corporations they’re just
cannon fodder - there’s plenty more where they
came from. Crocodile tears will be shed, prim TV
anchors will hector us for a while and then more
supplies of fodder will be arranged. For the
Maoist guerrillas, the police and spos they
killed were the armed personnel of the Indian
State, the main, hands-on perpetrators of
repression, torture, custodial killings, false
encounters. They’re not innocent civilians - if
such a thing exists - by any stretch of
imagination.

I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of
terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they
have committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no
doubt they cannot lay claim to undisputed support
from local people - but who can? Still, no
guerrilla army can survive without local support.
That’s a logistical impossibility. And the
support for Maoists is growing, not diminshing.
That says something. People have no choice but to
align themselves on the side of whoever they
think is less worse.

But to equate a resistance movement fighting
against enormous injustice with the government
which enforces that injustice is absurd. The
government has slammed the door in the face of
every attempt at non-violent resistance. When
people take to arms, there is going to be all
kinds of violence - revolutionary, lumpen and
outright criminal. The government is responsible
for the monstrous situations it creates.

’Naxals’, ’Maoists’, ’outsiders’: these are terms
being very loosely used these days.

’Outsiders’ is a generic accusation used in the
early stages of repression by governments who
have begun to believe their own publicity and
can’t imagine that their own people have risen up
against them. That’s the stage the CPM is at now
in Bengal, though some would say repression in
Bengal is not new, it has only moved into higher
gear. In any case, what’s an outsider? Who
decides the borders? Are they village boundaries?
Tehsil? Block? District? State? Is narrow
regional and ethnic politics the new Communist
mantra? About Naxals and Maoists - well... India is
about to become a police state in which everybody
who disagrees with what’s going on risks being
called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to be
Islamic - so that’s not good enough to cover most
of us. They need a bigger catchment area. So
leaving the definition loose, undefined, is
effective strategy, because the time is not far
off when we’ll all be called Maoists or
Naxalites, terrorists or terrorist sympathisers,
and shut down by people who don’t really know or
care who Maoists or Naxalites are. In villages,
of course, that has begun - thousands of people
are being held in jails across the country,
loosely charged with being terrorists trying to
overthrow the state. Who are the real Naxalites
and Maoists? I’m not an authority on the subject,
but here’s a very rudimentary potted history.

The Communist Party of India, the CPI, was formed
in 1925. The CPI (M), or what we now call the
CPM - the Communist Party Marxist - split from the
CPI in 1964 and formed a separate party. Both, of
course, were parliamentary political parties. In
1967, the CPM, along with a splinter group of the
Congress, came to power in West Bengal. At the
time there was massive unrest among the peasantry
starving in the countryside. Local CPM leaders -
Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar - led a peasant
uprising in the district of Naxalbari which is
where the term Naxalites comes from. In 1969, the
government fell and the Congress came back to
power under Siddhartha Shankar Ray. The Naxalite
uprising was mercilessly crushed - Mahasweta Devi
has written powerfully about this time. In 1969,
the CPI (ML) - Marxist Leninist - split from the
CPM. A few years later, around 1971, the CPI (ML)
devolved into several parties: the CPM-ML
(Liberation), largely centred in Bihar; the
CPM-ML (New Democracy), functioning for the most
part out of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar; the CPM-ML
(Class Struggle) mainly in Bengal. These parties
have been generically baptised ’Naxalites’. They
see themselves as Marxist Leninist, not strictly
speaking Maoist. They believe in elections, mass
action and - when absolutely pushed to the wall
or attacked - armed struggle.

The MCC - the
Maoist Communist Centre, at the time mostly
operating in Bihar - was formed in 1968. The PW,
People’s War, operational for the most part in
Andhra Pradesh, was formed in 1980. Recently, in
2004, the MCC and the pw merged to form the CPI
(Maoist) They believe in outright armed struggle
and the overthrowing of the State. They don’t
participate in elections. This is the party that
is fighting the guerrilla war in Bihar, Andhra
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

The Indian State and media largely view the
Maoists as an “internal security” threat. Is this
the way to look at them?

I’m sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed in this way.

The Maoists want to bring down the State. Given
the autocratic ideology they take their
inspiration from, what alternative would they set
up? Wouldn’t their regime be an exploitative,
autocratic, violent one as well? Isn’t their
action already exploitative of ordinary people?
Do they really have the support of ordinary
people?

I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that
both Mao and Stalin are dubious heroes with
murderous pasts. Tens of millions of people were
killed under their regimes. Apart from what
happened in China and the Soviet Union, Pol Pot,
with the support of the Chinese Communist Party
(while the West looked discreetly away), wiped
out two million people in Cambodia and brought
millions of people to the brink of extinction
from disease and starvation. Can we pretend that
China’s cultural revolution didn’t happen? Or
that millions of people in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe were not victims of labour camps,
torture chambers, the network of spies and
informers, the secret police. The history of
these regimes is just as dark as the history of
Western imperialism, except for the fact that
they had a shorter life-span. We cannot condemn
the occupation of Iraq, Palestine and Kashmir
while we remain silent about Tibet and Chechnya.

I would imagine that for the Maoists, the
Naxalites, as well as the mainstream Left, being
honest about the past is important to strengthen
people’s faith in the future. One hopes the past
will not be repeated, but denying that it ever
happened doesn’t help inspire confidenceŠ
Nevertheless, the Maoists in Nepal have waged a
brave and successful struggle against the
monarchy. Right now, in India, the Maoists and
the various Marxist-Leninist groups are leading
the fight against immense injustice here. They
are fighting not just the State, but feudal
landlords and their armed militias. They are the
only people who are making a dent. And I admire
that. It may well be that when they come to
power, they will, as you say, be brutal, unjust
and autocratic, or even worse than the present
government. Maybe, but I’m not prepared to assume
that in advance. If they are, we’ll have to fight
them too. And most likely someone like myself
will be the first person they’ll string up from
the nearest tree - but right now, it is important
to acknowledge that they are bearing the brunt of
being at the forefront of resistance. Many of us
are in a position where we are beginning to align
ourselves on the side of those who we know have
no place for us in their religious or ideological
imagination.

It’s true that everybody changes
radically when they come to power - look at
Mandela’s anc. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the
IMF, driving the poor out of their homes -
honouring Suharto, the killer of hundreds of
thousands of Indonesian Communists, with South
Africa’s highest civilian award. Who would have
thought it could happen? But does this mean South
Africans should have backed away from the
struggle against apartheid? Or that they should
regret it now? Does it mean Algeria should have
remained a French colony, that Kashmiris, Iraqis
and Palestinians should accept military
occupation? That people whose dignity is being
assaulted should give up the fight because they
can’t find saints to lead them into battle?

Is there a communication breakdown in our society?

Yes.