Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s speech in Lok Sabha, just a day before the RSS-BJP juggernaut had set the date for the official deletion and eradication of the ultra-left idea of Naxalism from India, was a lesson in history, ideology, hegemony and the epitome of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) epistemological deconstruction of the overall umbrella of Marxism.
This deconstruction of Marxism and the upending of its foundations—the economy as the ‘Base’ and Culture etc as the ‘Superstructure’—has been the ideological bedrock of the rightwing led by the RSS and the BJP.
In explaining the journey of Naxalism to its end, Shah has achieved and realized the grand ideological precept of the RSS. The best and most encaptivating parts of the Home Minister’s speech were those which dealt and grappled with ideas and ideological questions and assertions. He turned topsy-turvy the basic tenets of Marxism that fired the idea of Naxalism—he upturned Naxalism at the very basic and fundamental level of causation.
Naxalism was born not out of deprivation, but underdevelopment and fringing of societies across several states in India happened because of Naxalism.
“Naxalism did not spread because of poverty; rather, poverty spread because of Naxalism. Communist Party was not formed to oppose injustice, but to oppose our parliamentary system,” Shah said.
Shah referred to the notorious Red Corridor—it infected 12 states, including Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Bengal, Kerala, parts of Karnataka, and 3 districts of Uttar Pradesh.
“In these areas, 12 crore people lived in poverty for years and 20,000 youths lost their lives; who is responsible for this? Shah asserted that the root cause of Naxalism was not the demand for development, but an ideology—Left-wing ideology.
Doubling down on history, Shah pointed a sharp critique at the Congress.
Who mainstreamed Naxalis and recast it as a developmental debate, as a debate of rights and not a matter of law and order, as a sign of rightful struggle and not an ideological undermining of the India Constitution, its culture, law and identity?
For long, academics, who are not Left-oriented, have been pointing out that it was Indira Gandhi who had pawned off Congress’ intellectual activity to the leftists in return for their support.
Shah just laid it bare open—and at this point I must say, the simplicity of his language, the articulation of ideas and the forceful delivery was impressive. Shah said the Congress’ handshake with the Left and socialists came up as a quid pro quo wherein she firmly established her power over the Congress old guard and the left was allowed to take over the rest of the apparatus, wherein it could lord over education and create knowledge about and of India so as to create and perpetuate its hold over the Indian mind and psyche.
It all happened in 1969. And, Shah said as much. While it can serve as a lesson to Rahul Gandhi too, Shah was talking on a very different plane. He was delving into how political histories are shaped by narrow political interests and the vastly destructive outcomes.
In 1969, Indira Gandhi was a in dire political straits, under pressure from the old guard. She wanted to stamp her dictatorial authority on the Congress party structures. The old guard would not let her. Come Presidential Elections and Indira Gandhi supported independent candidate VV Giri and not the party’s official choice Neelam Sanjiva Reddy to endear herself to the communists and socialists. She wanted to break the ‘Syndicate’—the collective old guard within Congress. Giri won. And the communist-Congress friendship too shape.
Well on this point, Indira was not far removed from her father Jawaharlal Nehru. Even Nehru ensured that Purushotam Das Tandon resigned in 1951 after being elected Congress president in 1950 because Nehru wanted the party to be his creature. Indira only borrowed a leaf from her father’s playbook.
In expounding the rise of the Naxal problem as seated and located within the internal power play of the Congress party, Shah undercut all the latter’s exhortations of ‘what do we have to do with this!’.
Shah, in the same breath, did not spare the Congress-hired communist and leftist intellectuals who have called the shots so far and shaped India’s academic pursuit of creating knowledge for posterity. “In the massacres carried out by Naxalites, their supporters are equally complicit as those who commit the violence. NAC, formed during the rule of the main opposition party, was filled with Naxal supporters,” Shah reminded the House and his audience outside the Lok Sabha.
He said not a single intellectual writes for the farmers who become disabled, for the more than 5,000 jawans of the security forces who have been martyred, for their widows, or for their orphaned children. He tore through the selective humanity and selective rights regime of the communists “They have no humanity for the citizens who are being killed by their weapons. We cannot accept this dual character of humanity. These people are not humanitarians; they are supporters of the Naxalites. These people want to spread their ideology by putting weapons in the hands of the poor, but their days are also over now.”