THE CONFRONTATION BETWEEN THE INDIAN STATE AND THE CPI (MAOIST) IN THE CONTEXT OF INDIAN DEMOCRACY

A PERSPECTIVE/A PERCEPTION

Gautam Sen

The present essay has been written with the object of examining the ongoing war-like situation between the Indian State and the CPI (Maoist) [henceforth referred to as the 'Maoists']. We ought, therefore, to begin our discussion with a description of this war-like situation.

We have seen that in the name of suppressing the Maoists, the Indian home minister has, on behalf of the Indian state, already made preparations for a long war, which has been launched as a semi-military campaign in the Maoist strongholds; a few extra battalions have been kept ready, while the air force is supposed to keep a vigil on the ground operations even as it awaits a formal order to launch an air-borne attack. A satellite reconnaissance mission, to keep a watch on the Maoist guerillas and to indicate their positions, is also in place. There has, however, been no formal declaration of war and hence no deployment of the army as yet, pressure from a section of the ruling class for the same notwithstanding. On the other hand, an armed campaign has simultaneously been launched by the Maoists against the Indian state with a call to overthrow it. It is as part of this campaign that a police officer was taken in as a prisoner of war by the Maoists, who subsequently let him go on the condition that a specific number of Maoists in police custody be released. Thus, a similar declaration of war seems to have been issued from the Maoist side too. Our task, in the midst of such war preparations by both sides and the military challenges they have thrown at each other, must be to attempt an analysis of the entire situation.

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 Saswat Pattanayak

“To be neutral is to collaborate with whatever is going on, and I as a teacher do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world today.” (Howard Zinn)

In the grossly unequal world that we inhabit, it is always tempting to remain apolitical, especially if one is an academician materially benefiting from the status quo system of education. It is only logical to separate classroom instructions from political activisms, since teachers are desired by the system to enhance employability of students within the social framework, not to agitate their conscience to challenge the social order. In a world of established, codified and professional knowledge, it is required on part of historians to promulgate official narrations of national heroes and victorious wars; not overthrow ruling class histories to replace them with versions of the oppressed subjects.

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Three Fragmentary Theses
on the Politico-theoretical Problematic posed by
the Current Phase of the Indian Maoist Movement for Working Class Politics

Pothik Ghosh

I

The question of overcoming the problem of systemic cooption that faces the Maoist insurgency raging in certain tribal and preponderantly agrarian (in the sense of socio-occupational geography) areas of the country is essentially a question of how to beat the legal-illegal dichotomy that is constitutive of capitalism - a system made possible only in and through contradictions - and its horizon of legality. (This threat of cooption confronts the current Maoist movement - as it indeed would and does any movement against the ways and codes of dominant institutions that regulate and reinforce the various sectors of capitalist life - either in the form of the movement being determined and articulated by the dualised logic of capitalist regulation that compels it to envisage itself as responding to a war while fighting it; or in the form of being accommodated by and within the given form/forms of the capitalist state.) This question, of course in being posed but also in being answered, also gives rise to a corollary in that it posits the problematic of how a workers' opposition to a state formed through revolutionary eruption can, because of such opposition and not despite it, retain its working-class orientation. To get back to the Maoist movement, the problem of its subsumption by capitalism - manifest either as its cooption within the given capitalist state-forms or in its determination and articulation by the dualised logic of the capitalist state even as it is apparently still in its movemental moment - can be effectively dealt with and beaten only when the 'illegal' ontology, which is seeking to become yet another law in and through its dualism-articulated struggle against the prevailing law to displace it from its legitimate place to occupy it, is challenged from within its own zone where it has already become, both structurally and functionally, the law. Before we proceed any further we would do well to realise that an ontology of working-class resistance, which is designated as illegal within the dualised horizon of capitalist legality, is an ontology that in its formation is an expression of the tendency to transgress and unravel the horizon of capitalist legality and thus move beyond the legal-illegal duality and contradiction it constitutively engenders. But this ontology gets designated (or symbolised) as 'illegal' because of its struggle against the prevailing law, which maintains and reinforces the capitalist horizon of conflict and contradiction that the struggle of this ontology in its formation seeks to transcend. Simply put, the foundational translegal or law-unraveling manoeuvre of an ontology of resistance comes to be designated as illegal because of the inescapable duality inherent in all struggles, of which its specific struggling orientation too is an intrinsic part. The recognition of the necessity of this duality, to paraphrase Engels, is constitutive of the freedom called dialectic.

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  An Introduction to Alexandra Kollontai on Sexual and Women's Question

Satyabrata 

This is intended to be an introduction to Alexandra Kollontai's works on the sexual and women's question where these two interrelated aspects have, taken together and in their separateness, been analysed from a working-class perspective. Kollontai was a member of the workers' opposition in the erstwhile Soviet Union. Most of her works in this compilation were written at a time when ideological struggles raged like a typhoon within the working-class movement in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Justice can, therefore, be done to them only if they are read in a critical and revolutionary fashion by refounding them in the current context and conjuncture, thereby reclaiming their originary impulse. Marx has spoken, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party as also elsewhere, of a community of women. To that extent, the sexual and women's questions deserve a Marxian spirit of enquiry rather than adventurism.

Marxists have made the eleventh and last thesis of Marx's 'Theses on Feuerbach' - "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" - famous by transforming it into a shibboleth. The thesis has become, for many working-class activists on the ground, a justificatory dogma to carry on with their business-as-usual activism of 'changing the world' while shunning all serious and necessary endeavour of critical and self-reflexive inquiry. In that context, it would perhaps be pertinent to countenance Marx's second thesis from the same work: "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth [emphasis mine] i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality and non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question."

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 Savyasaachi

In an education system the curriculum and modes of its transaction need to determine the design of the infrastructure - the size and shape of classrooms, the looks of the building, the library, the student-faculty-administration interface, the equipment and so on.

What is the nature of curriculum space and what goes into its making?

We are all familiar with the idea that everything is woven around and into the curriculum - everything here includes not merely all aspects of an institution system but also the larger society; the history, culture, economy, politics and so on. It is one of most contested spaces - what should be included has been debated across the table and has also been a source of conflict and violence between the left, liberal and right persuasions in the fields of politics, economy and culture. Each of these has wanted its agenda to be pushed in.

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Gautam Navlakha

Introduction

Sixty-two years is a long time for learning lessons and to cease being indulgent towards the fallacies and  faults of the Indian state in obfuscating the issue of people’s right to self-determination in Jammu & Kashmir. There is a tendency in India to read wars being carried out inside the country as phenomena that are less than a war. And that is because it takes place within the borders of the 'nation-state', where deployment of 'armed forces of the Union' is somehow considered legitimate even when it is engaged in brutal suppression of the people. The most ardent supporters of non-violence have had no qualms in acquiescing to this venture in the name of the “nation”, “secularism”, fighting “Islamicist” forces, averting another partition.... And it has been accompanied by a reluctance to grasp the real nature of such wars where casualties occur in the form of ‘encounter’ killings, custodial deaths, enforced disappearances, rapes, search-and-cordon operations, arbitrary detentions, torture. The list is really endless. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that in Jammu and Kashmir the staggering scale of these crimes over nearly two decades have failed to arouse popular revulsion. However, when a non-violent mass agitation took place last year, it shook the Indian state and society to its very core because it pulverised every lie that had been fed to us and it became evident that people wanted to opt out of India. Then the elections to the J&K legislative assembly took place, and a largely malleable Indian media jumped to the conclusion that people had rejected ‘azaadi’. But they were once again left wondering when the voter turnout for the 15th Lok Sabha elections plummeted. (If elections are to be regarded as a barometer for deciphering the people’s mood then it is the turnout in parliamentary elections that should be held as the most important marker of shift in that mood.) And then came the widespread protests against the rape and murder of Nelofer and Asiya in Shopian on May 29, 2009. Once again it became evident that whatever lies Indian spinmeisters have tried to weave, anger against the Indian state continues to simmer. Therefore, it will not do to ignore and devalue aspirations of a people. But, the issue of people wanting to opt out of India is not just an emotional issue. Or, a mere matter of human rights violations. It has an objective basis in the political-economic and environmental dimension, which must inform any search for solution. What are its main contours?   

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 Yasser Shams Khan

Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, Aakar Books, Delhi, 2007 (Originally published by Pluto, London, 1999) 

Dave Renton's book on fascism is structured to serve two purposes: firstly to debunk the current intellectual wave of scholars like Griffin and Eatwell, who consider that "fascist studies" should concentrate on the ideological aspect of fascism and not the specific political contexts (as there were only two historical precedents); and secondly to provide an alternate approach from a Marxist perspective. Renton is also against any apolitical reading of fascism. He polemically emphasizes the imperative of historians to politically situate themselves against fascism while trying to understand it so as to prevent it from gaining prominence in the contemporary political circuit. It is within this purview that his book needs to be looked at.

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 Gilbert Sebastian

This condolence note for K. Balagopal, the eminent human rights activist expired at 57 from a cardiac arrest on 8 October 2009, is motivated by the feeling that the political man in Balagopal is often given a short shrift.

As with Marx, Balagopal had also undergone an epistemological break in 1993. So we had two Balagopals: Early Balagopal, the Marxist-Leninist who was an advocate of 'new democratic revolution' and late Balagopal who turned a "liberal humanist". I knew only the late Balagopal since 1994, politically, not personally.

Early Balagopal was influenced by the students involved in radical politics at Kakatiya University, Warangal in 1980s while he was a teacher of Mathematics there. So he used to admit that his students themselves were his teachers. Apparently, he came to be attracted to theoretical Marxism through an uncommon route i.e., through D.D.Kosambi's critique of the Bhagavad Gita.

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A leaflet issued by CORRESPONDENCE & RADICAL NOTES

Admittedly it has been an old problem with most movements, that they have treated the media only as a means to an end, ‘a way of making themselves heard,’ and so long as they got some coverage with the help of conscientious friends within the media, they were satisfied. The larger dynamics of the media, as a certain sort of work, in a certain sort of work place, with human agents who are workers here, has not been addressed. Newspapers and news channels should be and can be the strongest arms of a democratic society; they can make sure that the voice of the people finds representation. Though cliché, one has to point out how the media can raise difficult questions, but the onus is upon journalists as responsible citizens and in their capacity as workers to raise them.

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