Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam

by Vivek Agnihotri

There is a thirty-three page essay by Arundhati Roy on the issue yet it doesn't smell of the jungles. It smells of her. It stinks of her agenda. Why, I wonder? Why is it that most of the op-eds and essays from the so-called intelligentsia comprising editors, professors, historians, political analysts, social workers, NGO entrepreneurs, humanitarians, and civil society leaders favour the false Naxal narrative? I

In no other country do people invest in land and gold as we do.

Every young boy and girl detested the Zamindar for exploiting his father, uncles, and brothers. For molesting or raping his sister, mother or neighbour’s daughter. This young boy grew up with angst. And it was this angst that became the fodder for the Naxal movement.

Some people in Central Bihar still believe that Naxalite is made of two words ‘naksha’, which means map, and the English ‘lite’ – light, and therefore, put together, it means making a new map of India with our lights.

Delhi is emerging as the centre of Urban Naxalism.

This is new Naxalism. Not the one Charu Majumdar had founded.

In 1972, five years after the Naxalbari incident, a comrade was interrogated by the police and when subjected to third degree treatment, he vomited out Majumdar’s whereabouts. He was arrested and died within a fortnight in police custody. With him ended a short story of an oppressed man's war against the oppressors, called Naxalism.

When above ground tactics fail, they create terror. They kill. They kill those who don’t subscribe to their ideology. They kill to create a power and governance vacuum and soon they fill up this space. They attack schools because education promotes awareness and empowers youth with skills for a livelihood other than farming and forest-related jobs. This is how they keep the population in their area of influence out of the mainstream milieu. They form ‘Bal Dastas’, enrolling children in their fold with the purpose of brainwashing and conditioning these young and innocent minds with violent Maoist ideology. Exactly like the Taliban or the ISIS.

One thing that keeps them motivated is the power to kill innocent people with a promise to change their hell into heaven.

In 1978, the Radical Youth League was formed in association with Jana Natya Mandali and Radical Students Union, with 'Go to the village' campaign. Through these shows, youngsters would make villagers aware of their political situation, like how oppressed they were and the importance of an armed revolution for their empowerment and justice. They were the first political force that invaded the minds of villagers. This was the first political narrative introduced and with that one more decision taken, that no alternate narrative was to be introduced.

‘Trying to understand the Naxal movement is like peeling an onion. In the end, you will have only tears in your eyes and many disconnected and scattered layers of the onion.’

It’s difficult for a militarily trained cadre to easily connect and communicate with a student on a campus. It’s impossible to mobilize students if one is not working with them day and night. It requires easy access.

‘How are they connected?’ I ask. ‘There must be some underground channels. This connection can’t be ad hoc. It has to be a regular connection, disguised amongst the “real regular” connections.’

The outfit is also a member of the Coordination Committee of the Maoist Parties and Organizations in South Asia (CCOMPOSA), which includes ten Maoist groups from Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, with the aim to create a ‘new South Asia’.

These front organizations are the offshoots of the parent Maoist party, which maintains a separate existence to escape legal liabilities. These Front Organizations (FOs) carry out a two-pronged communication attack—propaganda and disinformation. They raise funds for the insurgency and assist cadres in legal matters. These FOs are also used to provide safe houses to underground cadres and shelter to fugitives. They bring intellectuals into their fold who provide an intellectual veneer to the illegal, unconstitutional, and inhuman violence in the Naxal movement. In effect, these intellectuals present this beastly and gruesome reality in a sanitized, romantic, and palatable packaging for which the media and its urban audiences have a weakness. Such FOs exist in twenty out of the twenty-nine states of India. They are seeping into the strategically sensitive north-eastern states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz couplet plays: Chand roz aur, meri jaan! Faqat chand hi roz A few more days, my love! Merely a handful of days more.

I don't know why people tap their cigarette before lighting

the collective consciousness of this country is sleeping,’

Gandhi was influenced by the Gita but inspired by Gokhale and Tolstoy. He didn’t copy them in his works but he copied Gita all the time.’

‘But what’s the difference? In the end, he interpreted all three doctrines in his own distinctive style. I am just inspired by Joshi’s style of satire.’ ‘You are influenced. And an influenced mind is not a free mind. It’s an intellectual slave.

The temptation to steal is the most common human trait, only next to lying.

Innocence and intensity are a lethal combination.

‘It’s utopia. A society can never be fully just and fair, sir.’

‘You have seen what happens when you hold a magnifying glass out in the sun and concentrate all the rays on one spot. That spot soon catches fire, doesn't it? Why?’ He continues, imitating the actor in the film, ‘Because the sun's power has not been dispersed but concentrated on that one spot. It is the same with men's minds. You can do miracles if you concentrate your mind on one thing and one thing alone.’ ‘But why are you telling me all this?’ ‘Imagine you are the glass,’ he continues, ‘and all the social issues are those spots which need to burn. Now tell me where is the Sun?’

‘His Sun is his suffering. His Sun is about human suffering. His empathy with human pain. His agony. His suffering. That’s what makes him attack these evils with his writing.

Collective psyche is always dangerous for a society.

My mother thinks I am overworked and offers me an extra glass of milk. My father thinks I am in love. My sister thinks I am smoking weed. My friends think I have become arrogant. Only my drama mentor understands me. ​Present

As I was climbing the stairs, my mother looked at me as if I had lost my virginity.

I found her ‘army-like’ behaviour very cute.

Unfortunately, till date, I don't know what the status of our relationship was. If there was a Facebook then, I would have called it 'in progress'. Most love stories in small towns die while ‘in progress’ and are eventually found at the end of a notebook or a diary as a poem.

I understood the subtle difference between an energetic woman and an angry woman.

It's strange that in India most girls are raped, molested and groped in crowded places. She wasn’t angry because she was groped. She was furious because she couldn’t even react.

At that very moment, I found my Zorba. My Buddha.

Ghasiram bartered his own daughter to Nana Phadnavis, a Brahmin and one of the most prominent ministers in the court of the Peshwa of Pune, to get the post of the police Kotwal.

I am affected by social evils. I want to topple the system. Plus, I have no future plans. The three main requisites for a student to be brainwashed and lured to turn a rebel.

In the garb of a touring cultural group, they would amplify the injustice and glorify revolution.

An education system rooted in the principles of utopian socialism, courtesy Nehru's fascination for the same, and the professors, enamoured of the Nehruvian dream, were feeding the young minds to wage a war against India.

I feel surrounded by the ghosts of all those filmmakers and creative artists who worked out of nothing. No offices, no assistants, no money, no experience and yet they spoke the truth that took our civilization forward. Some were ridiculed. Some were punished. And some were executed.

the truth remains the least priority for the artists of Bollywood.

We have become a driver, surgeon, math teacher or a carpenter who is expected to do the same job each time, with the same skills and same precision. Only technology keeps improving, making it easier for the artists and in return making us dull enough to tell a duller audience that our world is bruised and bleeding. This dullness, this being regular, is the surety of the world. This ordinariness makes the world go around.

Only when the purpose of a creative endeavour is to discover the truth and explore human behavior is the journey of its audience extraordinary. That ‘extraordinary’ is what art is about. I

I start making concept maps, trying to be able to see the entire methodology of Urban Naxalism. And what it leads me to and what it reveals, stuns me. If this is true, I think, then a grave danger is looming over the internal security and the social fabric of this country. Somebody has to warn the masses.

The Naxal movement is engaged in Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW). This war is waged by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, combatants, and civilians.

The modern-day guru of Fourth Generation Warfare, William Lind, has aptly observed, ‘If nation-states are going to survive, people in power must earn and keep the trust of the governed.’

covert politics and not competence or expertise.

This fourth-generation war is complex and long term. It’s decentralized, small in size, and lacks hierarchy. The strategy is to make a direct attack on the enemy's (in this case, the Indian State) culture, including genocidal acts against civilians and wage a highly sophisticated psychological and cultural warfare, especially through media manipulation.

All available pressures are used – political, economic, social, and military. For this purpose, legal professionals are required, media professionals are required, creative people, varied intellectuals and academicians are required, and civil society leaders are required, especially those who are connected with NGOs. It begins with low-intensity conflicts where all the actors attack from different platforms.

‘Urban Perspective’ document

These documents take a long-term approach as they believe direct confrontation for quick results won't help. The document admits that the enemy is very strong in urban areas and, therefore, he should not be engaged with until the conditions are favourable. And to make them favourable, it suggests, exploring and opening of opportunities, organize people through front organizations. Target the 'vulnerable group' of minorities, women, Dalits, labourers, and students through influencers who work undercover for a long time and accumulate strength.

The city becomes the money source, shelter for cadre as transit points, source of weaponry and legal protection, medical aid, media attention, and intelligentsia network.