The
Maoist leadership claims that it had nothing to do with
the Jnaneshwari Express accident that killed 150 persons.
I am willing to take their word for it. But this also
means that those who caused the sabotage, while nominally
belonging to the ranks of the Maoists, were acting on
their own. Nobody commits such a heinous crime against
innocent people, unless the person is psychologically
distanced from the victims, i.e. unless the victims
are perceived as belonging to ''the other'', an amorphous
mass against whom one is supposedly antagonistically
arrayed. And it was not one or two individuals who were
involved in the crime, but a whole organized group.
We are, in short, in the presence of ''identity politics''
of the most violent kind. Underneath the veneer of ''Maoism''
we are witnessing a particularly vicious form of ''identity
politics''
This
is not to say that the Maoist leadership, in a conscious
fashion, is merely promoting ''identity politics''. As
a Marxist, I am totally opposed to the perspective of
the Maoists, who, if ever successful, will in a conscious
fashion foist upon this country a one-Party dictatorship
that is the very anti-thesis of socialism (no matter
how unavoidable it might have been in history) and that
(in the Indian society in particular, which apotheosizes
inequality) negates the only revolutionary gain the
people have ever achieved, namely one-person-one-vote.
But I would not accuse the Maoist leadership of conceptually
privileging identity over class politics. Nor is identity
politics of all hues anathema for me. For super-oppressed
groups like the tribal population, not taking cognizance
of ''identity'' makes a mockery of all politics. All class
politics must reckon with their ''identity''.
But while class politics can have room for reckoning
with ''identity'', there is no route from identity politics
to class politics. The idea ''let us start organizing
the tribal people and then we shall move on to organizing
workers and peasants'' can never work. At that point
of transition, if not much earlier, there will be an
inevitable rupture between the militant advocates of
identity politics and those who wish to merge it into
class politics. In the case of the Maoists, the sabotage
of Jnaneshwari Express is a portent of this rupture.
The reason for the inevitability of this rupture is
simple: identity politics is essentially exclusionary,
while class politics is essentially inclusive. The objective
of class politics, which aims to be system-transcending,
is to polarize society at each moment of time into two
camps: ''the camp of the people'' and the ''camp of the
enemies of the people'' (to use Mao's words), with the
latter kept as small as possible through political praxis.
Class politics therefore is necessarily about forming
united fronts, about uniting as many people as possible
at any given moment in the ''camp of the people''. But
identity politics is by nature not system-transcending:
it is either reformist (to get more benefits for the
identified group), or secessionist (often the case with
oppressed groups), or in extreme cases downright fascist
(demanding ethnic cleansing). For it to merge into class
politics it must negate itself as identity politics,
and while some may be willing to do so, others in the
movement will not be. This inevitably leads to ruptures
and attempts to garner mass support (within the identified
group) through acts of even greater mindless militancy.
The recent happenings within the Gorkha movement are
instructive in this respect.
This exclusionary nature of identity politics makes
most such movements unthreatening from the point of
view of imperialism (except of course those directly
aimed against imperialism itself, and even in their
case it is more a nuisance, even a serious nuisance,
than a real threat). Indeed, in India recently the central
government has made extremely skilful use of political
formations based on identity politics to push its neoliberal
agenda.
But the precise course of development of movements based
on identity politics does not concern me here. The basic
point is that while class politics can and must reckon
with certain forms of identity, class politics cannot
be approached via identity. (A possible exception is
where the two more or less coincide, i.e. the classes
that must constitute the ''camp of the people'' have the
same identity; but this is not germane here). The fact
that, let alone moving from one to the other, even the
mixing of the two can be problematical is underscored
by the experience of the Marxist Co-ordination Committee
of A.K. Roy which had combined for a while with the
Jharkhand Mukti Morcha; the combination came apart and
the subsequent history of the JMM is all too well-known.
Hence, even leaving aside questions of whether the Maoist
vision of the future society is a desirable one or not
(in my view not), and whether, even if it were desirable,
it could be achieved through the mode of struggle adopted
by them, which glorifies armed struggle and abjures
all forms of political activity possible within the
Indian polity, there remains a basic problem: the impossibility
of moving to class politics from identity politics.
It may of course be argued that the Maoists never had
a choice in the matter. Driven out of Andhra Pradesh
they had to regroup wherever they could. The tribal
belt of Central India is where they could seek refuge;
they had therefore to adjust to its ethos.
But this argument is both irrelevant and erroneous.
It is irrelevant because what is under discussion is
their present predicament and not how they got to it;
and if their predicament is seen as the outcome of the
logic of their praxis, then that praxis has to be critiqued
from the perspective of this predicament. Above all,
however, this argument is erroneous, because there is
always a choice, and a rectification in praxis can always
be made.
When the Indian forces had marched into the erstwhile
Hyderabad state to put an end to the Nizam's rule, against
which the Telengana peasant uprising was being conducted
by the Communists, the undivided Communist Party of
India could have continued its armed struggle on the
basis of the support of the Koya tribesmen. The choice
before it was either to call off the struggle and bargain
with the government for a defence of its gains, or to
continue the struggle on the basis of reduced support,
confined only to the tribesmen. It chose the former
course. One can only be grateful for that choice, for
otherwise the most significant national force that exists
in India today in defence of democracy, secularism,
and modernity and the only consistent bulwark against
neoliberalism and ''strategic alliance'' with imperialism,
would have been absent from the scene, busy chasing
a will-o'-the-wisp in the jungles of Andhra Pradesh.
This choice is open to the Maoists. If they persist
in the present praxis their predicament will only worsen.
Confronting the Indian State on the basis of the meagre
social support of the tribal population is bad enough
(no matter how much of an advantage the terrain provides);
but the fact that this meagre social support cannot
be widened (for that involves the impossible task of
moving from identity to class politics), and can only
dwindle over time (because of the logic of identity
politics), makes it a tragic denouement. Will the Maoists
show the wisdom that the united Communist Party had
shown at the beginning of the fifties?
|
