Guest Post by Kavita Krishnan
The ‘Operation Black Rain’ film released by the web portal Cobrapost, based on secretly filmed boasts of the Ranveer Sena terrorists with detailed accounts of massacres of Dalit and oppressed caste labourers in the 1990s, has only confirmed public secrets that everyone in Bihar already knew.
Guest pots by BASU ACHARYA
The morning of February 15th this year was exceptionally grim. The sun looked pale, its rays mangled, as if somebody had scratched its face with a scalpel blade of tempered steel. Ramakrishna Naskar lane, an obscure by-lane in Beleghata area of Kolkata, was suddenly bustling with unusual activity. A number of people, quite a few in fact, irrespective of the nature of the red flags they carry, had gathered before a modest dwelling; assembled to bid adieu (with clenched fists and the ‘Internationale’ on their lips) to an old man, an octogenarian, wrapped in a crimson cloth with a crossed hammer and sickle in white. Prof. NB, our very own Nishith-da, Comrade Nishith Bhattacharya was no more. Leaving his mortal remains for the pyre to consume and his comrades to weep over, he had left for the final voyage—journey ‘to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’.
My association with Nishith-da dates back to the early years of the past decade when India, like many other ‘developing countries’ of the world, was passing through the initial days of the second information revolution. I, then an activist of a tiny student-youth organisation, met him on the book-fair ground at Maidan and asked scores of questions about Naxalbari and related topics. Most surprisingly, he, without a slightest mark of impatience on his face, answered each question with brutal accuracy and won my heart. From then onwards I was his admirer, also his disciple, who could even dispose of his own thumb—if asked. There are so many fond memories such as this, and as I scribble this piece, old thoughts crowd my mind and the panorama of our decade-long association appear before my eyes. But honestly speaking, it will be absolutely criminal if we limit a man of Nishith-da’s stature to any personal reminiscence. Rather, it is better to tell the story of his life and time in considerable length and as dispassionately as possible, for history should be impartial nay objective.
Continue reading Remembering Nishith Bhattacharya, unsung revolutionary hero: Basu Acharya
THIS note attempts to understand the nature of the politics behind the violent actions of the Maoists. There seems to be an agreement among human rights activists that Maoist violence is a ‘forced’ response to the extreme repression of the Indian state. The argument is that since the Indian state has been consistently ignoring or violently repressing various people’s movements, the people are left with no choice but to take recourse to the gun.
There is a fallacy in this argument. We know about people’s movements on issues of land rights or displacement which have not turned into armed insurrections, even though they have suffered major losses and have been treated in a very callous manner by the state. Apart from the Narmada Bachao Andolan there are hundreds of big and small peoples’ resistance movements in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and other states which have not given up on the ‘parliamentary’ path of struggle.
Interestingly, we find that Maoist groups are also active in these areas and they constantly try to infiltrate and take control of such movements. We do not know of any movements organized by the Maoists which were initially ‘peaceful’ but compelled to turn to arms after all attempts at working with the state failed. I would suggest that the theory of ‘peaceful’ movements mutating into ‘violent’ insurrections appears flawed. Also that instead of using ‘Maoist’ as an adjective in a careless manner we should treat them as a political formation organized on the lines articulated in its political programme and constitution which is based on its own Marxian theory of revolution which is impossible without violence. Continue reading Violence and revolution
This essay has been published in the current issue of Seminar (No. 607, March 2010).
In his classic Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Ranajit Guha outlines a certain methodological imperative for the historian who wanted to ‘get in touch with the consciousness of [peasant] insurgency’ when access to it is barred by the discourse of counter-insurgency that structures official records. How does one look beyond this discourse of the state that frames the archives in order to gain access to the voice of the rebels? Guha’s solution was relatively simple: Counter-insurgency, he argued, derives directly from insurgency and is so determined by the latter that ‘it can hardly afford a discourse that is not fully and compulsively involved with the rebel and his activities.’1
Unlike British Marxist historian E.J. Hobsbawm who had tried to track the story of ‘social bandits’ through a somewhat problematic reading of folklore,2 Guha warned that ‘folklore relating to peasant militancy can be elitist too’, for many singers and balladeers belonged to upper-caste families who had fallen on hard times and were, therefore, often suspicious of the revolt of the lower castes or tribals. Guha underlined that though the records of the colonial state and its police officials registered the voice of those hostile to the insurgents – including landlords and usurers – they could not avoid being shaped by the will of the insurgents. His conclusion therefore was that the presence of rebel consciousness could be read in the body of evidence produced by the discourse of counter-insurgency itself.
The burden of Guha’s argument was that in order to decode the language of counter-insurgency, it was often enough to simply reverse the values in the terms used by the official discourse: thus ‘badmashes’ simply meant peasant militants and not ‘bad characters’; ‘dacoit village’ would indicate an entire village involved in the resistance and ‘contagion’ would most likely refer to the solidarity generated by the uprising.
Those were happier days from the historian’s point of view. For the peasant and tribal insurgencies that Guha was discussing were organic struggles which drew their leadership from amidst the peasants or tribal communities themselves. Whether it was Sidhu Kanoo, Birsa Munda or Titu Mir – the leadership of the movements and their ‘ideologies’ derived directly from the world of the tribals. The context of colonial India was also, in a significant sense, quite clearly polarized and the possibility of written records being produced from a multiplicity of sources was simply out of the question. It may, therefore, be possible to follow Guha’s suggestion and merely reverse the values in order to get a sense of that other discourse. Continue reading The Rumour of Maoism
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 