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?