Many writers in media have brought to our attention the suffering of ordinary people, living in forests and in rural areas rich in mineral resources, who have been unwittingly stranded in the firefight between well-armed Maoist insurgents and security forces of the state determined to crush a brazen challenge to its authority.
In light of the launch of “operation green hunt” (Mr. P. Chidambaram, one of the most competent home ministers of India in recent times, has said that the name was invented by the news media) many scholars and security experts have made compelling arguments against an all out war on the Maoist. It is almost like the government of India is waging a war against its own people.
The most important lesson of contemporary history of insurgency in India, in the northeast and Kashmir, is that a heavy handed military response quickly transforms into a low-intensity conflict that drains the coffers, bleeds the security forces and inflicts collateral damage that pushes more people into the ranks of the insurgents, further escalating the sentiments of alienation.
Thus a military conflict may go on for years and in all probability will end up destroying the life-world and cultural space of forest dwellers and people living in rural central India without bringing about any qualitative improvement in their livelihoods or alleviating widespread socio-economic deprivation.
However, there have been many columns of space devoted to expression of moral indignation felt by many in India and humanists sympathizers across the world. But I think there is a problem with either engaging in moralistic political critique of “Operation Green Hunt” or ideological anti-capitalist critique of the Maoists and sometimes drawing on disingenuous historical parallels. The problem is that any intellectual critique based merely on “empirical facts” such as number of innocents killed and displacement statistics ignores that the facticity of the arguments. Facts are facts and they can be used either way.
The supporters of this war against the Maoist also have “empirical facts” such as number of innocents and government officials killed by the insurgents, and terrorist violence such as blowing up of schools and railway tracks. All kinds of moralistic politics often pick favorite among victims on the either side of a conflict and make death, a matter of statistics. In light of the unacceptable collateral costs, whether the Maoists rebellion will be militarily crushed or not, we can leave that to the security experts, who might have already war-gamed their strategies and tactics and seem to be optimistic from the news reports.
Nevertheless, what should be of more concern for social scientists is the conspicuous absence of a compelling critique of the neo-liberal political-economy, adopted whole heartedly by the Government of India, which is so much tilted in the favor of urban and metropolitan India and against the rights of the stakeholders in rural India. What is required is a compelling critique of the neo-liberal political economic order that has not worked for the majority of people living on the margins of the nation-state and is missing in the current debate.
The disempowerment and depravation brought about by neo-liberal economic policies in the hinterland of India is perhaps the most important factor that has pushed adivasis, who perhaps do not even know who Chairman Mao or Karl Marx is, but have joined the ranks of Naxalites because they see hope in the struggle of the Naxalites; especially when a dysfunctional democracy has failed them and has thrown up political leaders such as Madhu Koda.
Even the Government of India aggress that “adivasi” communities living in the Northeast states, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Telangana, in northeastern Maharashtra, and other parts of India have not benefited from six decades of misconstrued and poorly implemented programs of the developmental state. In most cases, first the state and now global corporations have encroached upon their traditional living space and are exploiting rich mineral and forest resources without in any way improving their living condition.
The feeling of deprivation among “adivasi” communities has been very successfully exploited by the Maoists who have pushed them callously into this cycle of senseless cycle of violence. I am not even sure that middle class ideologues of Communist Party of India-Maoists, who are alleged to be running the Maoist insurgency, still hold on to the dream of total revolution. They are smart enough to realize that it goes against the logic of history. I think that for tribal communities Mao is just an empty signifier of their differential concerns and brutal predicament.
It needs to be acknowledged that a lively criticism of government policies that favor the rich thrives among some leftist intellectuals, but unfortunately often the categories are borrowed from a struggle in the past- class war against the injustices and tyranny of industrial capitalism. Categories drawn from the nostalgia of revolutionary communism and the New Left of the 1960s ignores the gains of liberal democracy, overlooks the genocide committed by authoritarian communism, and has failed to keep up with the evolution of nationalistic capitalism into global capitalism of neo-liberal economy.
Any critique of political economy grounded in categories of old left even though appears to call for change, but it ensures that no change happens. For example at the recently held 11th International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties in New Delhi the criticism of the recent crisis in global finance failed to show a way forward and was stuck in the past. The polemics of the debate by members of the two major communist parties of India conflated issues of underdevelopment and displacement of rural and tribal communities induced by mega projects with rhetoric of old revolutionary communism. As a consequence projecting a incoherent response to the violent insurgency led by Communist Party of India (Maoist) against a democratically elected government and constitutional order.
The challenge progressives face is the need to come up with new critique of political economy of global network capitalism that is only working for the new middle class, the new cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, and has pushed millions living on the margins of the nation-state to destitution and despair. But any new critique of the political economy has to first acknowledge that the path of economic liberalization chosen by the government of India, since 1991, has alleviated poverty among millions who were equipped with right kind of social and cultural capital to get on the bandwagon of global network capitalism and reap the benefits. Otherwise, a criticism that ignores the rise of India in global economy will be hypocritical and a dishonest attempt on part of intellectuals living in comfort of their homes in urban India who themselves enjoy the benefits of breaking the Hindu Rate of Growth barrier since the 1990s.
Economic growth in the last two decades has brought in rich dividends for the Indian industry and the people, mostly living in urban India. Household incomes have increased for both lower and middle class. Some of the major beneficiaries of the economic growth are government servants including teachers and university professors, and public and private sector employees. The shopping malls are filled with consumer goods that have made life easier and comfortable for many. Even a lowest of government employee can afford to buy TV, Refrigerator, a two-wheeler, and has even been promised a people’s car.
But the fact that millions have not only been left out of this economic progress, but in many cases have also been made worse off than they were before the bulldozer of the developmental state reached their villages. This calls for a compelling argument from a new left that radically re-conceptualizes social and economic relations in the context of global capitalism. A critical political economy for the 21st Century will have to take into consideration fallouts of global capitalism such as ecological crisis, lack of distributive socio-economic justice, and not the least, further weakening of social forces of self-organization that enables grassroots democracy.
The core issues raised by the ongoing people’s movement in parts of central India, which has unfortunately been hijacked by Maoist insurgents, are closely tied to problems created by unfettered global network capitalism. Global capitalism has undermined grassroots democracy and self-organization at community level. The privileging of individual want over community’s need has eroded morality of basic distributive socio-economic justice that enables the poor live with dignity. Global corporations single-minded focus on profits alone has destroyed large tracts of forests, and has polluted water and air to dangerous levels, which if not checked will lead to an irreversible ecological disaster.
But all is not lost, as there is common ground among the people who have benefitted from global capitalism and the unprivileged living on the margins who have paid and are paying a heavy price for the economic growth. Ecological sustainability is valued as much by urban dwellers as by forest dwellers, hence a ecological critique of global capitalism can be a foundation on which future social and economic relations can be worked out.
The hope comes from the fact that when land resources of rural communities world over are coming under pressure from advancing global corporations, the Nobel Prize in Economics, which has been infamously inflicted by neo-liberal bias, this year was awarded to the work of Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, who showed that management of commons by self-organized communities has not only demonstrated efficiencies achieved by “free markets,” but has also proven to be ecologically sustainable.
