Let's start at the beginning though. Assume that poverty and underdevelopment do, in fact, cause agrarian rebellions. It follows then that, in income terms, poorer areas and peoples are more likely to rebel than richer ones. Development data would predict the BIMARU states as the loci of rebellion since 1947. But Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh are not part of the so-called Red Corridor, whereas West Bengal, Chhatisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Orissa are. Now the wily materialist might urge me to look at district-level data to check whether poverty and rebellion are correlated. Again, income falls short as an explanation. The poorest districts are spread far and wide, from Kalahandi in Orissa to Dangs in Gujarat. Most of these districts are not under the Home Ministry's scanner. Of course, we could go even deeper at sub-district or block level or at the village or household levels. Are the poorest blocks, villages, and households the prime movers of anti-state activities? Field research by many, including myself, suggests not. At every level of analysis, therefore, the materialist thesis fails.
Yet materialism is popular among the chatteratti in Delhi and elsewhere. Somehow, in a neoliberal age, everyone seems to have morphed into vulgar Marxists. A number of well-known academics and activists lead the chorus; journalists and their readers follow. Not a single media report has contested a flimsy, even false, argument. Why? I want to suggest a hypothesis here: this is the most convenient apolitical response by so-called civil society in India that effectively denies the link between elite consumption in urban India and the exploitation of resources and peoples located in the Maoist areas. The Delhi chatteratti cannot survive without the ubiquitous adivasi maid from Jharkhand or raise questions regarding the kind of "development" pursued by the modern state in India since 1947. It must come up with an apolitical alternative that protects its narrow interests. Materialism is a convenient myth that puts the blame entirely on the state. Even Chidambaram and his cronies accept it. It's their predecessors who went wrong, they say. Jean Dreze and his accomplices then lend legitimacy to this neoliberal myth, and foolishly sign on to the state's sinister designs to "develop" certain areas. Development here means not freedom from disease, illiteracy, and oppression, as Amatya Sen tells us, but state contracts to multinational corporations to carve out spheres of influence wherever they are resources to be exploited. It's the last great enclosure of the modern age, and there's a fortune to be made for the state and its corporate cronies. Some people, we're told, need to catch up with the times. Or else...
Next, consider the other modern myth, that of the Malevolent Maoist. He is a gun-toting maniac who spews a rotten ideology that preaches revolution and regards 1947 as the start of a second colonial age. They pilfer state development funds and weapons depots, and then lead luxurious lives and rape local women, including those within their cadres. Malevolent Maoists, we are told to believe, spread their tentacles among the poor, who are presumably foolish enough to fall for any trick. They're illiterate, naked, and starving after all. Unlike we who sit in seminar rooms and airconditioned cafes to pronounce judgments on the rest of the planet. We, especially academics and activists, must indulge in state-directed development to redeem these poor, foolish rural folks that are falling prey to the Malevolent Maoist. Although I feel like puking on some of those who tell me such stories, the intellectual in me pushes me towards a calm response. The real problem here is the political impotence of the Indian leftist, whether as academic or as activist. They can no longer pretend to be part of some revolutionary vanguard, representing subaltern struggles in word and action. They are hostage to their professionalism, which necessarily prevents meaningful political engagements with the messy, illiberal world of subaltern politics. History and literature appeals most to our leftist academics: there is simply no need to engage with the present or the real. For our middle-class urban activists, it is usually a simple canned ideology that must be imposed on the hapless sods out there. Doing something is better than nothing, I am often told. But doing something harmful is worse than doing nothing.
And that brings me to how urban academics and activists have been superseded by a class of rural intellectuals who have a deeper understanding of popular grievances and struggles in the Indian countryside and can better represent subaltern claims within a democratic setup. These subaltern leaders speak the languages of their communities as well as the modern state. It is easy to dismiss them as brokers or go-betweens. But they are leaders in their own right. How else can one understand why these so-called Maoist leaders carry out social audits of public works programs such as NREGA or cooperate with honest NGOs? And still, they wield their guns to extract "taxes" from local businesses and to target scoundrels in and outside the state on a case-by-case basis. Violence is selective, a form of subaltern claim-making articulated in ways are justified usually in moral terms. Although active participants in rebel ranks are limited, support for the rebels is widespread. Some people feed and house them; others help organize public meetings to discuss local problems and potential solutions; and yet others build houses for poorer members of a village community or wells and watersheds for the entire village, often with government or NGO assistance. It is hardly surprising that villagers will support young men from their communities who will benefit them materially and politically further their aims.
Is it rebellion at all then? Well, yes, but not a revolutionary one. Scholars and laypersons tend to equate rebellions and revolutions as popular anti-state actions that seek regime change. We do not have a vocabulary or theory to explain rebellions that do not seek to turn the world upside down or overthrow the state. But for better or worse, this is what we must do in the present context. We need to understand how violence, used selectively, can become an effective weapon of the weak under certain conditions to force social change from above. Those conditions refer to a kind of political domination that is not so totalizing that it can be softened up by collective action from below. In other words, these conditions are not found in fascist and other authoritarian regimes. Many electoral democracies, however, do insofar as they are necessarily incomplete democracies and imperfect states. The Zapatista rebellion in Mexico and the '60s race riots spurred on by Black radicals in the US are two obvious examples of violence used effectively as a weapon of the weak to force states to yield to subaltern demands. States and nations, we appreciate, are made from both above and below, and the constant conjunction of domination and resistance is a critical path towards genuine democratization. There is no formula for success, of course, and the path to genuine democracy is crooked.
But it is time to appreciate that non-violence does not always pay. Violence matters under certain conditions where it acquires a moral-cum-strategic relevance. These conditions are not economic, but irreducibly political. They point to essential conflicts of interest such as those between metropolitan Indian elites and rural subalterns. No amount of NREGA social audits and famine inquiry commissions can achieve what the Maoists have since 2004. Jagdalpur and Ranchi now appear clearly in everyone's radar, be it the state or civil society. All sorts of development programs and schemes are being enacted or planned, usually with considerable local input. Livelihoods are becoming more secure and sustainable. Popular mobilization is creating a shared political awareness of the rights of ordinary men and women as citizens of a democratic country, not subjects to be sacrificed at the altar of national development. Women are at the forefront of subaltern struggles to carve out a better future. Ideally, all of this could have occurred in a neat, peaceful way. But ideally, we would all be reasonable people who understood and respected each other. In that case, politics itself would not have existed since everyone would have agreed on everything. Sadly, we live in an imperfect world, so politics is inevitable and violent politics will remain an effective means to secure worthy ends.
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