HVK Archives: Recalling Naxalite terror
Recalling Naxalite terror - Indian Express
Swapan Dasgupta
()
29 June 1996
Title : Face of liberal conformism
Recalling Naxalite terror
Author : Swapan Dasgupta
Publication : Indian Express
Date : June 29, 1996
IN the second volume of her autobiography - The Road To
Power - published last year, Margaret Thatcher
underlined the formidable difficulties she had to
encounter in the process of restoring to the
Conservative Party its true soul. "By 1964," she wrote,
"British society had entered a sick phase of liberal
conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only
progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an
increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media
class."
In a sense, Thatcher could just as well have been talking
of India. The "sick phase of liberal conformism" which
contributed to Britain's steep decline as an
international power in the 1960s and 1970s has infected
this country to such a remarkable extent that
intellectual debates are marked by an exaggerated degree
of self-censorship. Whether in the lofty but inconclusive
debate on secularism or the more abstruse discussions on
development and poverty, participants are unwilling to
cross the arbitrary lakshman rekha drawn by the guardians
of "progressive" thought.
True, there have been sporadic outbursts against the
insidious regime of political correctness, but since the
levers of intellectual power - both in academia and media
- are tightly controlled by those who presume to have a
monopoly over enlightenment, dissenting voices are
relegated to the margins. By an adroit blend of
patronage and moral intimidation, liberal conformism has
successfully created a wide dissonance between acceptable
discourse and lived experience. No wonder intellectual
concerns in India often seem contrived and lacking in
relevance.
The disturbing extent to which fashionable partisanship
successfully masquerades as conventional wisdom was
brought into focus this month through a relatively
unpublicised (at least, outside eastern India) court case
in West Bengal. On June 5, a magistrate in Calcutta's
Bank shall court sentenced a retired police officer, Runu
Guha Niyogi, to a year's imprisonment (pending the
outcome of an appeal) on charges of torturing Archana
Guha - a former schoolteacher who was suspected of
harboring naxalites in 1974. Niyogi was a well-known
police officer who headed the Anti-Naxalite Cell during
the turbulent Seventies. It took nearly 19 years and
protracted legal wrangling for the court to arrive at its
verdict.
The judgment was immediately welcomed by the various
human rights bodies as a case of belated justice.
According to one report, the spokesman for the
Association for the Protection of Democratic Rights
(APDR) gleefully declared that Niyogi "should have been
put away for at least seven years". The local press too
was similarly sympathetic towards Guha who was partially
paralysed after her three-year incarceration, and whose
case had been championed by Amnesty International. Of
course, there were a few police officers who came to
Niyogi's defence, but these voices were drowned in the
sanctimonious indignation of those who resurrected
memories of the "reign of terror" unleashed by the State
Government in the 1970s to crush the extremist movement.
The jubilation over the discomfiture of a police
officer, who showed his mettle by effecting the arrest of
Charu Mazumdarin 1972, fits neatly into the mould of
liberal conformism. History having been successfully
rewritten, it has now become fashionable to romanticise
the naxalite movement. Despite the conventional
abhorrence for political violence, naxalism is seen less
as a nihilist perversion, than as a justified out pouring
of rage against "socioeconomic" imbalances in society. As
the People's War Group in Andhra Pradesh and the Maoist
Coordination Centre in Bihar undertake an orgy of arson
and murder, the liberal intelligentsia shy away from
outright condemnation. Violence is distasteful, but the
naxalites are somehow "different".
It was this brazen display of squeamishness and
"progressive" double standards that facilitated the
"spring thunder over India". The naxalite movement was
not born merely out of China's misplaced adventurism
during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It
acquired the political and intellectual space the India
of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies thanks to an
international community of radicals intent on proving
that the Chinese approach was morally superior to the
democratic method. Just as an entire generation in the
West was besotted by Stalinism in the 1930s, a creamy
layer of the Bengali middle classes succumbed to Chairman
Mao's perverted impetuosity thanks to the intellectual
dishonesty of the Joan Robinsons and Han Suiyns.
The naxalite movement was not merely a grim tragedy for
Bengal - along with the constitutionalist Communist
movement, it heralded the state's national
insignificance - it was a celebration of the macabre.
Twenty-six years after the CPI(M-L) launched its
"liberation struggle" in the streets of Calcutta by
attacking seven cinema halls screening Dev Anand's Prem
Pujari and beheading statues of, Mahatma Gandhi and other
"semi-feudal" heroes, it is easy to forget that this was
no simple infantile disorder. Naxalism in India was
crafted on plain and simple murder.
The cheroot-smoking Charu Mazumdar was quite clear and
categorical about what the movement was all about.
Speaking at the CPI(M-L) congress in 1970, the proclaimed
"revolutionary authority" said: "Only by waging class
struggle - the battle of annihilation - the new man will
be created; the Newman who will defy death and will be
free from all thought of self-interest. And with this
death-defying spirit he will go close to the enemy,
snatch his rifle, avenge the martyrs and the people's
army will emerge. To go close to the enemy it is
necessary to conquer all thought of self. And this can he
achieved only by the blood of martyrs."
The naxalites gave no quarter. The ageing vice chancellor
of Jadavpur University was murdered in cold blood as he
went for his evening walk on the campus; Forward Bloc
leader Hemanta Bose was stabbed to death as he stepped
outside his house on the eve Of the 1971 election; and
countless traffic constables in Calcutta were killed for
the crime of being in unifornt. This was the reality of
naxalism. As a repentant revolutionary was later to
write: "Fired by a rhetoric and at myth from which they
were distanced, almost to the point of unintelligibility,
students and young people fleshed out the reality of
Revolution as terror."
Coping with this bout of ruthless insanity called for
skill, imagination and audacity. It was a thankless job,
but the Calcutta police lived up to the challenge, as did
the political class under Indira Gandhi. Of course there
were horrible excesses and unnecessary brutality, but
nihilism could not have been stamped out by a one-sided
commitment to the Queens bury Rules. Fighting terror
necessitated creating a deterrence of counter-terror -
hence Niyogi's terrifying reputation. In any case,even
counter-terror was wonderfully selective. While naxalites
from well-connected families were generously treated, and
even given safe passage out of the country despite
evidence of involvemerit in murders, their lower middle
class counterparts were not so fortunate.
The Niyogi case is a landmark event. But the issue is
only peripherally one involving torture and the violation
of an individual's human rights. The larger questions are
raised by the naxalite movement itself. Does the state
abdicate its responsibilities when confronted with a
challenge to its very nationhood? Can society afford to
forget the fact that in the dark days of the 1970s West
Bengal was polarised into two camps? One side was
patriotic and the other side was progressive, treacherous
and criminal. Naxalism lost and India prevailed. Those
who fashioned the outcome should not be forgotten.
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