Three Modes of Graduate Student Being

1) Graduate school is a perpetual struggle in a Hobbesian state of nature. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Course readings overwhelm; professors intimidate; funding runs low; research topics run dry; job prospects look bleak. Life is real, life is earnest (except that this is the ivory tower!). Perhaps it's pointless anyway. Sigh! Life, research, struggle, graduate school...

End state: Professor at Alaskan community college with more or less the same complaints.

2) Graduate school is meant for those who got good grades in high school and college because they were teacher's pets. It's a safe job for those of us who never want to leave school and enter the "real world." What's all this intellectual talk about? At seminars and elsewhere, learn to drop names: Foucault, Bourdieu, Agamben, and, er, your advisor. Read the "literature" on whatever your advisor does, and then suck up, copy his methods, and extend his argument by a thousandth of a decimal point. Academic research is incremental. Science proceeds this way. Heck, that's what the journals are about!

End state: Tenured professor at old graduate school with a chair named after advisor.

3) Graduate school is inspiring and rewarding as long as one is willing to work hard. Serious intellectual effort is valuable for its own sake. Advisors are role models, even heroes, but not gods. Publishing journal articles and presenting papers at conferences are fine, but the key is to enjoy debate and discussion, learning and teaching. Academia is itself part of the real world, embodying every form of hierarchy and discrimination outside it. Studying important issues in society and teaching college students are important ways to set things right just a wee bit.

End state: Unemployed writer or activist.

The Pleasures of the Intellect

This post takes its inspiration from Robert Pippin's recent essay in the NY Times. Pippin calls for a renewed focus on the intellectual pleasures of reading, research, and writing beyond the many kinds of THEORY that the knowledge factory churns out regularly. He calls these pleasures "naive," ostensibly because they are innocent of theoretical pretensions. But they are, if you reflect for a moment, rather sophisticated. In a way, everything we learned in kindergarten is still relevant for us today: the joy of learning new things after protracted struggles; discovering new ideas that challenge our inherited conceptions of the world; experiencing the aesthetic pleasures of reading; creating our own forms of intellectual and artistic expression; basking in our realization of the inexorable complexity of our lives and our world, and thus discovering the limits of our mortality. I find little, if anything, that is naive here.

My teaching experience this semester reminds me unambiguously of the joys of intellectual cultivation, even in an age of social networking sites, PlayStation, and IPhones. It helps that I teach political philosophy to thirty-five bright kids at a leading US university. We read a pretty standard canonical selection of political philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Some might find it odd and complain that I have succumbed to academic conservatism. Indeed, from a certain position in the "cultural wars" of the past, this is correct. But I think we are smarter now. The canonical writers, we appreciate, speak to us in different voices rather than offer us a coherent sermon, and it is for us to pose challenging questions to them and find our own answers. This is anything but easy. Political philosophers are distant historically and culturally, and difficult to read and comprehend. Only in our minds, however, can the texts and their authors come alive and speak to our deepest concerns and anxieties. This, however, involves the time-honored virtues of close reading, critical thinking, analytical writing, and intelligent discourse/debate.

The idea is not to simply accept what an author or professor says, but to question, to think, and grapple with the texts as much as our own inchoate notions about politics and society. Consider Plato. Everyone sympathizes with Socrates on their first reading of the Apology. That's what Plato intended. And he was a bloody good writer! But there is something more to it. Socrates wishes to lead only the examined life or perish. Yet his pursuit of the examined life is seen by many of his fellow Athenians as impious and corrupting. The innocent reader is led to believe Socrates' defense in the trial. The Delphic Oracle told him to question others and think for himself, so he can't be impious, he says. How could one man, he asks further, corrupt his fellow citizens in a democracy? The innocent are persuaded again by Socrates' personification of the Laws of Athens in the Crito. Surely, one might conclude, Socrates regards himself to be a good citizen, albeit one who stood for free speech and other civil liberties before his time. "He'd be fine today" is the verdict of many first-time readers. But if this is so, there's no point reading Plato except as a historical curiosity from an illiberal era. Let's read instead, some might say, the classics of postmodern thought in our day and satisfy ourselves with the extreme skepticism, uncertainty, and despondence that characterizes so-called late modernity.

However commonplace these views might be in certain academic circles, especially in many humanistic disciplines, it is ultimately nihilistic. That's a problem not for some deep philosophical reason but because it denies the intrinsic, non-instrumental value of reading canonical texts and reflecting on them and one's own political dilemmas. It won't lead to a job, more money, a higher IQ, or sometimes even a higher grade. But Plato still has something valuable to teach us. That teaching lies in Socrates' evasive defense at his public trial and his ironic speech as the Laws. What we find here is exactly the opposite of free speech and other contemporary liberal values: a certain kind of evasiveness or deception alongside a defiant defense of self-knowledge as the highest good. Thinking for oneself and questioning what we are told by others, Plato wishes to tell us, are dangerous activities, especially for the young, ambitious people whom Socrates often encountered as his critics as well as disciples. The truth is that Socrates did indeed reject the authority of the gods of Athens and did corrupt the youth with his irreverent philosophy of life. And he was entirely aware of his "guilt." In this sense, Plato offers a fairly radical critique of the inexorable tension between the self-examining individual and society at large. This is, of course, not a critique lost upon college students, who realize that immersing themselves in textual or empirical studies radically alters their worldview and estranges them from their friends and family.

Is this the only possible interpretation of Plato's portrayal of Socrates? Certainly not. But it is nonetheless an interpretation worth considering alongside many others. Indeed, reading texts with multiple interpretations in mind -- yours and your peers' -- is a valuable intellectual goal in itself. This fits well with what some call the "surplus meaning" of texts. Reading collectively with multiple interpretations in mind, we can learn to discriminate between better and worse interpretations, and to confirm that even the best interpretations might not explain everything. Not everyone will agree, but that simply affirms another basic intellectual truth, the difficulty of agreeing on what is good. Conservatives do not appreciate these finer points. For them, it's merely a matter of studying the so-called classics of Western civilization. That's odd not only on account of Gandhi's statement that "Western civilization would be a good idea," but also because supposedly Western canonical philosophers such as Aristotle were lost for over a millennium and only return to European soil with the great Islamic thinkers of the Middle Ages. And what is so "Western" anyway about the polytheistic Greeks and Romans anyway? Whichever way you look at it, if you want to engage seriously with canonical texts, social conservatism is not an option. The texts are inherently radical insofar as they explode our lazy assumptions about ourselves and our world; they excite and shape our intellectual faculties; and, they predispose us towards not just political ideas but political action. If you had any doubt, consider Socrates' martyrdom, Machiavelli's call to liberate Italy from the oppression of secular and ecclesiastical rulers, or Tocqueville's insistence that social equality rather than political liberty makes for a genuinely democratic age.

My purpose here is twofold: firstly, an emphasis on teaching and studying competing theories cannot accomplish what "naive" reading can; secondly, these "naive" pleasures are actually rather sophisticated. When we focus on different theories of textual criticism or social science, we merely reproduce stale structures of thought, and therefore, unleash tedium and thoughtlessness rather than vibrant intellectual energy and passion. If you ever have doubts on this point, compare the graduate students of your university with the undergraduates. You'll know the difference because college kids don't do literature reviews day in and day out. Likewise, if you reflect on what I've said so far, you might find that "naive" intellectual pleasures are what caused at least some of us to take up the life of the mind as a vocation. But you don't have to be an academic to understand my point here. If you're into business or art or soccer, you might actually understand better what I mean. The pleasures of the self-examined life are remarkably democratic: I have learned my most valuable lessons outside classrooms, from the poorest and most marginalized members of my society, who lack the luxuries of time and luck to read closely and write critically as part of their intellectual training. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) their rigorous daily labors and numerous social constraints, they speak "naively" but enthusiastically of new modes of intellectual discovery and political expression in a hostile world. Socrates, who never read closely or wrote critically, would have understood, even if most of our university professors cannot.

Why Poverty and Underdevelopment Cannot Explain Maoism

Every now and then, someone comes up to me and explains why poverty and underdevelopment are the "real" causes of the Maoist rebellions in India today. Usually, I listen patiently, trying hard to contain my annoyance at the crude materialist suggestion, and then pose a simple question to my interlocutor: "Well, what causes poverty and underdevelopment then?" At this point, there is occasionally a reference to development as an onward march to economic and social progress, which implies that some folks are condemned to play catch up in the grand parlor game of modernity. More often, however, there is silence.

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.

The Return of Match-Fixing and Pakistan

Over the past week or so, I've been following, with much dismay, the slings and arrows directed at three young Pakistani cricketers, and by implication, the entire Pakistani cricket team and indeed, the entire Pakistani nation. The past few weeks have featured former cricketers, cricket officials, and fans making insinuations of the worst kind not just at the accused trio but at Pakistan as a whole. Michael Atherton opened proceedings by recommending an end to Pakistan's tour of England, and immediate punishment for the accused cricketers. He then went on to prescribe leniency for the 18-year old rookie paceman Mohammed Aamer on the condition that he was put on a rehab program. In other words, he prejudged, like many around the world, the guilt of the accused. Indian cricketers such as Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar sounded more diplomatic when they said that the guilty should be punished, but they seemed to imply that at least some cricketers were guilty of spot-fixing in the Lord's Test. The ICC President Haroon Lorgat made similar remarks when he banned Salman Butt, Mohammad Aamer, and Mohammed Asif from further cricket until they were proven innocent of the charges against them. Apparently, there was adequate evidence to justify such a ban, despite the repeated official statements to the contrary.

What is, after all, the evidence? A sting operation that caught a sports agent caught taking money on camera, and some no-balls balled during a Test match. We, therefore, need to ascertain that (1) the News of the World journalist has not doctored tapes, and (2) there is a watertight argument linking the transaction caught on camera and events on the field. As experts and fans alike will recognize, even if (1) can be somehow proven, (2) is rather difficult to prove with the available evidence. To put it rather bluntly, the evidence is flimsy and the case is weak. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd put my money on the trio playing cricket again pretty soon.

Now back to the allegations. I found them actually more revealing than the video evidence of spot-fixing. When Ian Healy, for instance, talked about the 1994 Rawalpindi Test and how Salim Malik might have been fixing it, he conveniently ignored the fact that his former Aussie teammates Shane Warne, Tim May, and Mark Waugh were co-implicated in that scandal. Moreover, amusingly, it is Healy's missed stumping of Inzamam that attracted the most suspicion on the final day of that Test match. So before one gets sanctimonious about Pakistan's cricketers and its incompetent board, why not take a closer look at the Australian cricket fraternity and its role in protecting Warne, May, and Waugh from scandal? Closer home in India, expectedly, morons are having a field day. Fan comments on cricket websites are a good indicator of the bigotry that blends brilliantly with sanctimonious sentiments. We are told that Indian cricketers are not like that. Yet almost every bookie accused until date has been an Indian; a former captain and many star players ended their careers after Justice Chandrachud found them guilty after extensive investigations; the most expensive tamasha in cricket, the IPL, may well be the most corrupt in the history of the sport. The subcontinent, with its massive market for cricket coverage, is thus, unsurprisingly, the hub of corruption in cricket. In a global age, of course, the corrupt spread their tentacles worldwide, but the creature itself lives and thrives in South Asia. In sum, those pointing a finger of suspicion at Pakistan alone should realize that there are three pointing back towards them.

A final comment must be reserved for the serial Pakistan baiters in public life. Former ICC President Malcolm Speed, whose chief claim to fame is the horribly organized 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean, urged the authorities to oust Pakistan from the cricketing fraternity. Now, Speed has a long history of run-ins with Asian cricketers and officials. But his opinion here resonates nicely with that of many elsewhere. Australian and Indian newspapers are full of similar remarks. The English, though more restrained, are pondering the deeper structural problems in Pakistani society that have caused the current debacle. Some editorial writers have even taken the liberty to connect the latest episode in the match-fixing saga with support for the Taliban, military dictatorship, Punjabi dominance within Pakistan, and Third World poverty in general. Presumably, the argument here is that poor Pakistanis, oppressed by Punjabi elites and military dictators in power, are turning to terrorism and corruption for succor. This is a patently absurd line of reasoning. If true, one would need to explain why the current recession in the North Atlantic world is not causing the poor and unemployed, oppressed by Washington and Wall Street, to turn to terrorism and corruption. But the analogy would be immediately deemed invalid, because Pakistan, in the eyes of the West and its lackeys in India and elsewhere, is in a category of its own. It is a pathology, an anathema to the civilized, and an ode to evil itself. Hence, every accusation and every allegation can be justified without evidence, and individuals are seen invariably as symptoms of a national malaise. Almost everyone and their grandmothers are now self-proclaimed experts on Pakistan, including some ignoramuses in my department. And woe betide the rest of us...

Arundhati Roy, the Maoists, and the India Shining Public

As the dust settles after Arundhati Roy's recent dispatch from Dandakaranya, I want to ask what we have learned from this episode by contextualizing the social drama enacted last week. I do not want to simply determine who gained and who lost in this latest round of political contestation over this imaginary entity named Maoism. There is the larger question of why the various actors in this dramatic contest acted the way they did.

Let's start with Ms. Roy herself who is at the center of the storm, much to her delight, I should add. Her political engagements until now have been more like flings than relationships. Her initial foray into the messy world of everyday politics took place nearly a decade ago even as the ill-fated Narmada Bachao Andolan petered off to its inevitable demise. Her primary contribution to the NBA-led movement happened to be a profoundly moving essay on the debilitating social consequences of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on adivasis displaced by it. The essay made little impact in metropolitan India, except to attract the ire of bourgeois intellectuals such as Ramachandra Guha, but it raised awareness in the North Atlantic world on the dark side of India's development surge. As an undergraduate in far-away Iowa in 2002, some years after the essay appeared, I was questioned by more than one concerned professor about the state of affairs in the Narmada valley. They cited Roy's essay and admired her courage to use her celebrity status to canvass for "good causes." What struck me then was the affective or emotive quality of her writing, her ability to represent subaltern voices without being patronizing in the typical colonial-liberal manner. She was someone who had obviously read her Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, but more importantly, Edward Said and James Clifford. The challenge of representing accurately yet evocatively seemed insignificant for someone whose Booker-winning novel portrayed poignantly the social and emotional dimensions of her early years in the paradoxically caste-ridden communist milieu of Kerala. Yet her way with words did not obscure her utter inability to comprehend, like most Westernized Indians, the mechanics of power and contestation in contemporary India. When a reactionary, activist judiciary sentenced her, Medha Patkar and their comrades to a brief jail term, she did not follow Patkar's "Gandhian" advice to serve her time in jail, but decided to raise a thousand rupees in the form of one-rupee contributions from her metropolitan supporters. It did not go down well with her comrades, most of whom saw her as hungry for publicity and superficial in her political activism.

For some years thereafter, Roy kept a low profile, restricting herself to her friends and associates in New Delhi. She clearly realized she had burnt her fingers in her first foray into the cauldron of Indian politics. During this time, however, she wrote essays on the state of India and the world, condemning multinational corporations for their ecological impact, the anti-people policies of neoliberal India, Narendra Modi's pogroms in Gujarat, and the new imperialist wars of George W. Bush. A seething rage expressed itself eloquently in these pages even though it seemed little more than an impotent rage against the state of the world at large. An essay in The Guardian on the AFSPA in Kashmir and its impact on subjugated populations in that region of South Asia caused a slight stir among her readership in London and New York though, predictably, it found few takers among the India Shining Public that had been evolving over the past decade or so. Buoyed by her marginal success, she consciously assumed a more public role by taking up, in particular, the proposed acquisition of adivasi lands in the Niyamgiri Hills of southeastern Orissa. Her conspicuous silence on parallel proceedings in neighboring West Bengal ought not to go unnoticed. It seemed messier than Orissa, where MNCs and adivasis could be cast clearly as villains and heroes. And as she visited these areas, she found nodes of subaltern agency that she could have barely imagined. Adivasis were organizing effectively to respond to the twin threats of MNC land-grabs and upper-caste Hindutvaization. Violent and non-violent tactics formed elements in a comprehensive strategy of resistance from below. The uniqueness of the new wave of adivasi resistance lay in its deep understanding of the weak spots of its opponents, the state, the MNCs, and right-wing Hindu groups led by the Bajrang Dal. They employed limited forms of violence to intimidate these opponents and stake claims to particular territories as theirs. Appeals to state-produced memories of adivasi wildness, primitiveness, and autochthony checkmated the state at its own game; a few kidnappings and extortion threats took care of the MNCs; and, a few strategically-targeted assassinations of Hindutva leaders took care of the their followers.

Roy surveyed from above this new wave of adivasi resistance with amazement and approval. Subaltern rhetoric drew on long histories of primitiveness produced by the state to make particular claims against the violence of corporate land-grabs aided and abetted by the state. Subaltern politics did not refer either to actual positivist-type histories of their region or the memories produced over time within their communities. They knew the state well, and hoped to bamboozle it at its own game. Roy simply followed suit. She projected the Niyamgiri bauxite-mining project as a shameless USD 3 trillion land-grab by the neoliberal state-corporate nexus (three times the current value of the Indian GDP), and characterized the local adivasis in the uplands of eastern Orissa in familiar colonial terms as primitive, peace-loving people who worshipped these hills as deities. In doing so, she pitted the cold economic rationality of the state-corporate nexus against a timeless adivasi consciousness rooted in nature. By subtly adapting her own grievances against neoliberal India in the light of the new subaltern rhetoric, Roy began a new engagement with everyday politics, one she hoped would end differently from her NBA involvement. It worked! Pressure grew in the UK, especially from human rights groups and the Church of England, and eventually, Vedanta was compelled to pack up and leave from Orissa. In her new role as champion of adivasi politics, Roy continued to visit Orissa and neighboring Bastar to make herself known in the region. Her typical trip, lasting no more than a couple of days, involves hectic travel and frenetic discussions with a range of social actors. Information gathering and social networking make it possible to write on these regions without always being there. It is a process familiar to academics and journalists, of course, in a postmodern age of global communication systems. How else, after all, could the South Asian academic perched atop his professorial chair position himself as an expert on matters several oceans away?

Next we come to the Maoists, a construct of the metropolitan mind much like thuggee in another era. The idea, then as now, is to criminalize certain sections of society in order to exclude or marginalize them. There are, of course, good reasons for the state to attempt to exclude and marginalize adivasi populations living in eastern Orissa, the Dandakaranya forests, or the Chotanagpur plateau. State formation depends, in the final analysis, on violent appropriation of common natural resources, or "primitive accumulation" in Marx's words; such resources are highly concentrated in these three regions. For this reason, all three regions share a common history of marginalization over the past century and a half, the continuities from the colonial to the postcolonial era being clearer than elsewhere in modern India. These "tribal" regions have been cast rather conveniently as exceptions to the mainstream of Hindu India, a notion spawned and promoted enthusiastically by colonial anthropology and governmental practice alike. Anti-state rebellions, signifying disorder, define these "tribal places" in the official view from above. In the language of the postcolonial state, they are incorrigibly backward, primitive, and thus resistant to modern industry and commerce, though the historical record tells us of the very modern production of tribal places and their impoverishment, immiserization, and marginalization in the subcontinent. The terms of trade and politics have been systematically stacked against them. It is as if someone is gagged by a bunch of goons, who then joke that the victim cannot speak. Yet even those who are gagged can kick, and that is precisely what we see today as before. The current ruling class has certainly outdone its equally exploitative predecessors: it's found a convenient outlet for its Sinophobia in an age where it has been outdone by China on the macroeconomic indicators it so values. Maoism is the new demon that must be exorcised, being as it is a "greater threat than even Pakistan" in Home Minister Chidambaram's words. The specter of the vanguardist Naxalite movement looms large in the metropolitan Indian imagination, conjuring up images of the enemy within and striking fear of total revolution that the "spring thunder" of '68 promised.

But alas, this phantom exists in the minds of metropolitan Indians who constitute the ruling class. Ask them who is a Maoist and they will talk of disillusioned intellectuals in universities and gun-toting soldiers following their bidding. Nothing could be further from the truth. And that is exactly why Arundhati Roy's Outlook essay has ruffled so many feathers. She is one of "us," they say, someone who won the Booker prize and brought recognition to a country starved of heroes. How could she write such anti-establishment essays, biting the very hand that feeds her? And how could she possibly say that Maoists are ordinary men and women with real dreams and ambitions that are being denied to them by those who sit on the high table of metropolitan India? How could she decry "development," their get-rich-quick ideology, to defend these poor, dirty scoundrels in the jungles? And last but not least, how could she possibly attribute agency to these wretched of the earth when they are meant to be mere victims, upon whose carcasses academics and journalists can build dazzling careers? That the pseudo-intellectual chattering classes are asking these questions in response to Roy's essay is telling. Hardly anyone in this milieu has experience of these areas, yet they feel competent to challenge Roy's descriptions. Hardly anyone even knows the histories of these regions, yet they have the temerity to defend the status quo. That they are complicit in producing these areas as backward and marginal to the postcolonial polity is conveniently ignored by these mall-going, IPL-watching classes.

The most disingenuous critics of Roy are, however, located in academia, especially on the Indian Left. These are men and women who claim no affinity with mass politics: how could they anyway, after transforming from Maruti Marxists to Mercedes Marxists over the past generation? After all, these are Leninists and Stalinists who repose their faith in The Party, elitist, corrupt, violent and oppressive though it may be, and woe betide those subalterns who have dared to lead their own movement against the state. These "adventurers," as the Leninists traditionally label such people, are actually somehow against popular interests, which of course only the Left aristocracy in India is privy to. Arundhati Roy is a soft target; the real issue is the failure of the Indian Left to mature into a party that represents anyone but itself, let alone the popular classes. They sit on academic chairs, debating fashionable texts and feigning radicalism, but make no mistake, this is the most reactionary class in South Asia today. In familiar brahminical positions atop the postcolonial social order, they disdain any attempt to disturb that settled order. They know that a handful of intellectuals in JNU and Jadavpur are not masterminding the movement, as the state-media nexus suggests. The various rebel groups labelled "Maoist" do not draw their leadership from the metropolitan elite in India. The PWG in Telengana-Bastar and the MCC in Bihar-Jharkhand have plied their trade for over three decades against the oppression of the state and its landed upper-caste allies in society. Seemingly countless smaller groups with vaguely leftist aims are better seen as Birsaite than Maoist anyway: their politics seeks not a Maoist-style encircling of the capital city, but adivasi control and ownership of jal, jangal, jameen (water, forests, and land) in a neoliberal era of state-sponsored land-grabs and violent repression. These rebellions against the state, say our leftist academics, are meant to fail so that they can be commemorated by later historians seeking to move up the academic hierarchy, preferably in the North Atlantic world. Disappointingly, however, the new wave of adivasi politics seems to be more than holding its own against the state and its allies. For the intellectual cream of metropolitan India, this is the greatest possible challenge to the phony radicalism that allows it to speak for the subaltern classes.

Against this context, we can easily see why Arundhati Roy's essay has met with the disapproval of the Indian Shining public, especially among pseudo-radical academics. Hers is a shameless attempt to repay the state's propaganda against "Maoists" in its own coin. Moreover, by laying open the emotional and affective registers of anti-state violence in Middle India, Roy has put the gauntlet, as it were, on the table, challenging the Indian state's right to rule in these areas. The creation of non-state spaces in eastern and central India are significant victories for popular sovereignty, fragile achievements though they may be. The state no longer has a monopoly in terms of control and sovereignty in these spaces. It exists and acts increasingly through non-governmental organizations, but its favored mining projects in Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Orissa have all failed to materialize. Civil society and the state are in retreat; political society and those operating at the civil-political society interface are on the ascendancy. A plethora of political possibilities are possible. It is not at all clear what the future holds for these regions. What is clear, however, is that state's final bid for primitive accumulation in Middle India has led to a spectacular defeat at the hands of ordinary men and women who may pose with bows and arrows but in fact wield guns and words that can no longer be ignored.

P.S. Since, as many of you know, I am neither Marxist nor Maoist by way of ideological persuasion, I defend the right to rebel in purely liberal terms. We are not, as Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj, obliged to obey a government that consistently acts against our interests. I should add, with much amusement, that the Hobbesian justification for renegotiating the social contract when faced with a despotic sovereign shares considerable similarities with the radical anti-state positions taken by anarchists since time immemorial.