Distant thunder of resurgent naxalism

Deep in the hinterland of the subcontinent far beyond the ken of page 3 and glamour obsessed English language media, an insurrectionary movement is gathering momentum and has the potential to destabilise the polity and push Indian society into a sea of chaos. According to an AICC (All India Congress Committee) task force report submitted to Congress party president and chairman of the National Advisory Council Sonia Gandhi on April 2, extreme Left Naxalite revolutionary militia are active in 170 of the 524 districts of the Indian Union. Initiated in 1967 by a breakaway extremist splinter group of the Communist Party of India in Naxalbari, a remote district in West Bengal, the simplistic credo of the Naxalite movement as enunciated by its first leader the late Charu Mazumdar, was essentially Maoist — elimination of class enemies oppressing the rural peasantry, including landlords and officials employed by bourgeois governments. Until the mid 1970s the Naxalite movement centred in West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, enjoyed considerable popular and even intellectual support, across the country. However the agri-science miracle which was the Green Revolution, the excesses of the Naxalite cadres and the rise of the breakaway Communist Party of India Marxist (CPM) which swept to power in West Bengal in 1977 where it has ruled uninterruptedly since, pushed the movement to the periphery of Indian politics. Against this backdrop the resurgence of the Naxalite movement which is posing a serious threat to law and order in several states of the Indian Union including Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka, is a development which should be regarded with gravest concern. But unfortunately state governments lumbered with leaders preoccupied with primitive accumulation, seem to have little time to address the pernicious socio-economic injustices which are fanning the flames of Naxalism across broad swathes of the subcontinent. It’s hardly a coincidence that Naxalism — a quintessentially anarchic ideology — is experiencing a resurgence at a time when the newly liberalised Indian economy is recording unprecedented rates of GDP growth bordering 7 percent per annum — double the so-called Hindu rate of economic growth averaged during the period 1960-90. This is because it is now painfully evident that the benefits of post 1991 economic liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy have been restricted to the organised corporate sector. The self-employed, small scale entrepreneurs and farmers continue to suffer licence-permit-quota raj and the blatant corruption of India’s globally notorious kleptocrat bureaucracy. Indeed it is being widely acknowledged that the gains of liberalisation have been grabbed by the greedy new urban middle class and leaders of Indian industry which is incrementally revealing the raw, ugly, face of Indian capitalism. And with nobody — except Naxals — bothered about open, uninterrupted and continuous socio-economic injustices persisting in the new age of liberalisation, it’s hardly surprising that radical Naxalism is experiencing nationwide resurgence. There’s a distant thunder gathering resonance in the neglected rural hinterland of India. The establishment and the new middle class engaged in conspicuous consumption and primitive accumulation…