:: OP-ED

A letter of dissent

Shiv Visvanathan

Dear Mr P. Chidambaram,

Oct.12 : I am part of the much maligned group, the human rights activist, that you often challenge. You suggest we protest at the wrong time and at the wrong things. You seem to think we point too many fingers. Actually, we raise some simple issues. As cottage industries of dissent and democracy, we may not be doing it effectively. We are supposed to be "sympathisers" of the Naxal movement. This letter is to clarify some of our arguments as academics, Indians, citizens concerned about the fate of our society.

Let me build a counter model for you. Working in these areas, documenting the drama of development, is a feisty old woman, a famous writer called Mahasweta Devi. She is worth all the policy intellectuals you command and her integrity is something your entire council of ministers cannot match. She understands poverty and does not have to play boy-scout pranks to demonstrate her concern. Mahasweta Devi makes three or four major points we need to recognise.

Firstly, Indian democracy is often cannibalistic. It consumes its own people. There were decades where the Army was being honoured for action against its own people. Outside our Army, we have roughly a million paramilitary troops which maintain law and order. The question one asks is what happens to a society which attacks its own people with such frequency?

One is not supporting the Maoists. One is referring to the armed groups which do not think twice about violence and murder. Along with the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), they have added to the brutalisation of the countryside and its criminalisation.

We are as concerned as you are about violence. Our voices may not carry far but while your emphasis is on the stability and the sovereignty of the state, ours is on the vulnerability and fate of ordinary tribal people. They face a cruel choice: Development destroys them and when they agitate against its inequities, the state destroys them all over again. You are asking the human rights groups to stand up. We have and we are. As a part of some of them, I can say Maoism is wrong, misguided, is murderous and often gets criminalised. Most of these groups do function as extortion agencies. But will you own up to all the women and children, and old people killed in your operations? Will you dismiss it as part of the logic of internal war?

Mr Chidambaram, logic is deceptive, managerial logic is worse. Using the Air Force against the so-called Naxal zone is to Vietnamise it. Very logical, very rational people have pursued this strategy. As David Halberstam, a great journalist and an authority on Vietnam, said, the best and the brightest came from Harvard and Yale.

The future of democracy is not just your responsibility. To condemn intellectuals who question and to label them as "sympathisers" is to inaugurate a tacit McCarthyism — the concern for internal security forces, an unnecessary homogeneity, or the dualism of "you are with me or you are against me".

Democracy is troubled and troublesome, but it is the availability of dissent and diversity that protects both you and me. This panchayat of pluralisms need expansion. Our sense of doubts demands that we rethink "development", "security" as currently defined. Let me add the word "rights". All three need to be questioned, not just academically as formal definitions but as practices. Let us ask, does development allow the rape of tribals through dams and deforestation? Does security give every policeman the right to brutalise a people? Have these words become ironic and counter-productive? To address it to a more general audience, what can the worlds of Nilekani, Pitroda and Prahlad do for these people? Does the state need a hearing aid or does it think that machine-gunned silence means consent?

On our side, yes, we have been silly. Our reports need to be more complete, less rhetorical, and occasionally less paranoid. However, some of our suggestions are practical and let me repeat them. The involvement of the Army will damage the Army. Secondly, the militarisation of the police without institutional reform and human rights sensitivity will brutalise them. As a society, we did it once in Punjab and let us not use the same tactics. Brutalising a generation is not a way to stability.

When Naxalbari happened last time, the response was brutal, but public sympathy was with them. Ever since the CPI(M) cauterised a society, public middle-class sympathy has been with you. Dissent will sound anachronistic, museumised, and even idiotically Gandhian. We must still dissent, both against you and the Maoists. The use of landmines is utterly cowardly and brutal. The Maoists should be told that. The use of sanitisation operations does not legitimise murder and harassment. You should recognise it. Torture is a stigma, the unforgettable mnemonic which both, Maoism and the state will leave for future generations to gasp in horror.

Maoism has been in the making for years, Mr Chidambaram. Once made, it cannot be unmade through violence. The pacification you propose may be seen as the equivalent of ethnic cleansing. This is not an issue for a hysterical media or the parties to legitimise. If democracy is at stake, the issue has to be solved democratically. Terror and murder can only lie defeated by the inventiveness of democracy. Body counts are not equivalent to electoral votes that we tot up for victory. In fact, by treating casualty rates as low-level production statistics, both society and state have waited too long to act.

Our response cannot be thoughtful. Let us begin with two of the government’s own reports: The report on tribals and the report on the informal economy. Both focus on groups refractory but central to development. Let us ask how these two reports be applied creatively to the current problem.

Conflict resolution often becomes a formal settlement between state and adversary as the insurgent party. Let us involve civil society and community in it, maybe even a few imaginative corporations. We need to create a third space of "constructive labour", as Gandhi called it, to challenge Maoism. This also needs the tolerance which does not treat people who empathise with suffering as suspect. It will also allow the state not to be hemmed in by machismo solutions which add little to problem solving.

Thirdly, internal war needs a different kind of Red Cross. Beyond the ambulance and the human rights team, we need constructive teams. Security operations get too fond of technological solutions. The long march, the night vision device, and the remote-sensing map are not really the answer to summary executions and kangaroo courts. Here small programmes built around livelihood can offer modest alternatives with long shelf lives of sustainability.

The request, Mr Minister, is simple. Do not undermine democracy in attempting to save it. This is the irony the politics of good intentions faces today.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist