Arundhati Roy, the Maoists, and the India Shining Public

As the dust settles after Arundhati Roy's recent dispatch from Dandakaranya, I want to ask what we have learned from this episode by contextualizing the social drama enacted last week. I do not want to simply determine who gained and who lost in this latest round of political contestation over this imaginary entity named Maoism. There is the larger question of why the various actors in this dramatic contest acted the way they did.

Let's start with Ms. Roy herself who is at the center of the storm, much to her delight, I should add. Her political engagements until now have been more like flings than relationships. Her initial foray into the messy world of everyday politics took place nearly a decade ago even as the ill-fated Narmada Bachao Andolan petered off to its inevitable demise. Her primary contribution to the NBA-led movement happened to be a profoundly moving essay on the debilitating social consequences of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on adivasis displaced by it. The essay made little impact in metropolitan India, except to attract the ire of bourgeois intellectuals such as Ramachandra Guha, but it raised awareness in the North Atlantic world on the dark side of India's development surge. As an undergraduate in far-away Iowa in 2002, some years after the essay appeared, I was questioned by more than one concerned professor about the state of affairs in the Narmada valley. They cited Roy's essay and admired her courage to use her celebrity status to canvass for "good causes." What struck me then was the affective or emotive quality of her writing, her ability to represent subaltern voices without being patronizing in the typical colonial-liberal manner. She was someone who had obviously read her Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, but more importantly, Edward Said and James Clifford. The challenge of representing accurately yet evocatively seemed insignificant for someone whose Booker-winning novel portrayed poignantly the social and emotional dimensions of her early years in the paradoxically caste-ridden communist milieu of Kerala. Yet her way with words did not obscure her utter inability to comprehend, like most Westernized Indians, the mechanics of power and contestation in contemporary India. When a reactionary, activist judiciary sentenced her, Medha Patkar and their comrades to a brief jail term, she did not follow Patkar's "Gandhian" advice to serve her time in jail, but decided to raise a thousand rupees in the form of one-rupee contributions from her metropolitan supporters. It did not go down well with her comrades, most of whom saw her as hungry for publicity and superficial in her political activism.

For some years thereafter, Roy kept a low profile, restricting herself to her friends and associates in New Delhi. She clearly realized she had burnt her fingers in her first foray into the cauldron of Indian politics. During this time, however, she wrote essays on the state of India and the world, condemning multinational corporations for their ecological impact, the anti-people policies of neoliberal India, Narendra Modi's pogroms in Gujarat, and the new imperialist wars of George W. Bush. A seething rage expressed itself eloquently in these pages even though it seemed little more than an impotent rage against the state of the world at large. An essay in The Guardian on the AFSPA in Kashmir and its impact on subjugated populations in that region of South Asia caused a slight stir among her readership in London and New York though, predictably, it found few takers among the India Shining Public that had been evolving over the past decade or so. Buoyed by her marginal success, she consciously assumed a more public role by taking up, in particular, the proposed acquisition of adivasi lands in the Niyamgiri Hills of southeastern Orissa. Her conspicuous silence on parallel proceedings in neighboring West Bengal ought not to go unnoticed. It seemed messier than Orissa, where MNCs and adivasis could be cast clearly as villains and heroes. And as she visited these areas, she found nodes of subaltern agency that she could have barely imagined. Adivasis were organizing effectively to respond to the twin threats of MNC land-grabs and upper-caste Hindutvaization. Violent and non-violent tactics formed elements in a comprehensive strategy of resistance from below. The uniqueness of the new wave of adivasi resistance lay in its deep understanding of the weak spots of its opponents, the state, the MNCs, and right-wing Hindu groups led by the Bajrang Dal. They employed limited forms of violence to intimidate these opponents and stake claims to particular territories as theirs. Appeals to state-produced memories of adivasi wildness, primitiveness, and autochthony checkmated the state at its own game; a few kidnappings and extortion threats took care of the MNCs; and, a few strategically-targeted assassinations of Hindutva leaders took care of the their followers.

Roy surveyed from above this new wave of adivasi resistance with amazement and approval. Subaltern rhetoric drew on long histories of primitiveness produced by the state to make particular claims against the violence of corporate land-grabs aided and abetted by the state. Subaltern politics did not refer either to actual positivist-type histories of their region or the memories produced over time within their communities. They knew the state well, and hoped to bamboozle it at its own game. Roy simply followed suit. She projected the Niyamgiri bauxite-mining project as a shameless USD 3 trillion land-grab by the neoliberal state-corporate nexus (three times the current value of the Indian GDP), and characterized the local adivasis in the uplands of eastern Orissa in familiar colonial terms as primitive, peace-loving people who worshipped these hills as deities. In doing so, she pitted the cold economic rationality of the state-corporate nexus against a timeless adivasi consciousness rooted in nature. By subtly adapting her own grievances against neoliberal India in the light of the new subaltern rhetoric, Roy began a new engagement with everyday politics, one she hoped would end differently from her NBA involvement. It worked! Pressure grew in the UK, especially from human rights groups and the Church of England, and eventually, Vedanta was compelled to pack up and leave from Orissa. In her new role as champion of adivasi politics, Roy continued to visit Orissa and neighboring Bastar to make herself known in the region. Her typical trip, lasting no more than a couple of days, involves hectic travel and frenetic discussions with a range of social actors. Information gathering and social networking make it possible to write on these regions without always being there. It is a process familiar to academics and journalists, of course, in a postmodern age of global communication systems. How else, after all, could the South Asian academic perched atop his professorial chair position himself as an expert on matters several oceans away?

Next we come to the Maoists, a construct of the metropolitan mind much like thuggee in another era. The idea, then as now, is to criminalize certain sections of society in order to exclude or marginalize them. There are, of course, good reasons for the state to attempt to exclude and marginalize adivasi populations living in eastern Orissa, the Dandakaranya forests, or the Chotanagpur plateau. State formation depends, in the final analysis, on violent appropriation of common natural resources, or "primitive accumulation" in Marx's words; such resources are highly concentrated in these three regions. For this reason, all three regions share a common history of marginalization over the past century and a half, the continuities from the colonial to the postcolonial era being clearer than elsewhere in modern India. These "tribal" regions have been cast rather conveniently as exceptions to the mainstream of Hindu India, a notion spawned and promoted enthusiastically by colonial anthropology and governmental practice alike. Anti-state rebellions, signifying disorder, define these "tribal places" in the official view from above. In the language of the postcolonial state, they are incorrigibly backward, primitive, and thus resistant to modern industry and commerce, though the historical record tells us of the very modern production of tribal places and their impoverishment, immiserization, and marginalization in the subcontinent. The terms of trade and politics have been systematically stacked against them. It is as if someone is gagged by a bunch of goons, who then joke that the victim cannot speak. Yet even those who are gagged can kick, and that is precisely what we see today as before. The current ruling class has certainly outdone its equally exploitative predecessors: it's found a convenient outlet for its Sinophobia in an age where it has been outdone by China on the macroeconomic indicators it so values. Maoism is the new demon that must be exorcised, being as it is a "greater threat than even Pakistan" in Home Minister Chidambaram's words. The specter of the vanguardist Naxalite movement looms large in the metropolitan Indian imagination, conjuring up images of the enemy within and striking fear of total revolution that the "spring thunder" of '68 promised.

But alas, this phantom exists in the minds of metropolitan Indians who constitute the ruling class. Ask them who is a Maoist and they will talk of disillusioned intellectuals in universities and gun-toting soldiers following their bidding. Nothing could be further from the truth. And that is exactly why Arundhati Roy's Outlook essay has ruffled so many feathers. She is one of "us," they say, someone who won the Booker prize and brought recognition to a country starved of heroes. How could she write such anti-establishment essays, biting the very hand that feeds her? And how could she possibly say that Maoists are ordinary men and women with real dreams and ambitions that are being denied to them by those who sit on the high table of metropolitan India? How could she decry "development," their get-rich-quick ideology, to defend these poor, dirty scoundrels in the jungles? And last but not least, how could she possibly attribute agency to these wretched of the earth when they are meant to be mere victims, upon whose carcasses academics and journalists can build dazzling careers? That the pseudo-intellectual chattering classes are asking these questions in response to Roy's essay is telling. Hardly anyone in this milieu has experience of these areas, yet they feel competent to challenge Roy's descriptions. Hardly anyone even knows the histories of these regions, yet they have the temerity to defend the status quo. That they are complicit in producing these areas as backward and marginal to the postcolonial polity is conveniently ignored by these mall-going, IPL-watching classes.

The most disingenuous critics of Roy are, however, located in academia, especially on the Indian Left. These are men and women who claim no affinity with mass politics: how could they anyway, after transforming from Maruti Marxists to Mercedes Marxists over the past generation? After all, these are Leninists and Stalinists who repose their faith in The Party, elitist, corrupt, violent and oppressive though it may be, and woe betide those subalterns who have dared to lead their own movement against the state. These "adventurers," as the Leninists traditionally label such people, are actually somehow against popular interests, which of course only the Left aristocracy in India is privy to. Arundhati Roy is a soft target; the real issue is the failure of the Indian Left to mature into a party that represents anyone but itself, let alone the popular classes. They sit on academic chairs, debating fashionable texts and feigning radicalism, but make no mistake, this is the most reactionary class in South Asia today. In familiar brahminical positions atop the postcolonial social order, they disdain any attempt to disturb that settled order. They know that a handful of intellectuals in JNU and Jadavpur are not masterminding the movement, as the state-media nexus suggests. The various rebel groups labelled "Maoist" do not draw their leadership from the metropolitan elite in India. The PWG in Telengana-Bastar and the MCC in Bihar-Jharkhand have plied their trade for over three decades against the oppression of the state and its landed upper-caste allies in society. Seemingly countless smaller groups with vaguely leftist aims are better seen as Birsaite than Maoist anyway: their politics seeks not a Maoist-style encircling of the capital city, but adivasi control and ownership of jal, jangal, jameen (water, forests, and land) in a neoliberal era of state-sponsored land-grabs and violent repression. These rebellions against the state, say our leftist academics, are meant to fail so that they can be commemorated by later historians seeking to move up the academic hierarchy, preferably in the North Atlantic world. Disappointingly, however, the new wave of adivasi politics seems to be more than holding its own against the state and its allies. For the intellectual cream of metropolitan India, this is the greatest possible challenge to the phony radicalism that allows it to speak for the subaltern classes.

Against this context, we can easily see why Arundhati Roy's essay has met with the disapproval of the Indian Shining public, especially among pseudo-radical academics. Hers is a shameless attempt to repay the state's propaganda against "Maoists" in its own coin. Moreover, by laying open the emotional and affective registers of anti-state violence in Middle India, Roy has put the gauntlet, as it were, on the table, challenging the Indian state's right to rule in these areas. The creation of non-state spaces in eastern and central India are significant victories for popular sovereignty, fragile achievements though they may be. The state no longer has a monopoly in terms of control and sovereignty in these spaces. It exists and acts increasingly through non-governmental organizations, but its favored mining projects in Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa have all failed to materialize. Civil society and the state are in retreat; political society and those operating at the civil-political society interface are on the ascendancy. A plethora of political possibilities are possible. It is not at all clear what the future holds for these regions. What is clear, however, is that state's final bid for primitive accumulation in Middle India has led to a spectacular defeat at the hands of ordinary men and women who may pose with bows and arrows but in fact wield guns and words that can no longer be ignored.

P.S. Since, as many of you know, I am neither Marxist nor Maoist by way of ideological persuasion, I defend the right to rebel in purely liberal terms. We are not, as Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj, obliged to obey a government that consistently acts against our interests. I should add, with much amusement, that the Hobbesian justification for renegotiating the social contract when faced with a despotic sovereign shares considerable similarities with the radical anti-state positions taken by anarchists since time immemorial.