God made me Maoist

Someone whose identity is immaterial  said the following about Arundhati Roy's essay describing her visit with Maoists in Chattisgarh.


http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738-1

The beauty of her prose was lost in my distaste for her attempts to turn these criminals and cowards into heroes. Communism is a failed idealogy (even China does not adhere to it) and the "comrades" are bereft of a genuine idealogy - at least as it benefits the masses.  -XX

Dear XX:

If your read the essay in its entirety you would know that far from grandeurs of ideology, this is a lesson of the simplicity of struggle. The ordinary language of everyday resistance to a bombastic repression - a repression of greed and acquisition - that seeks to displace and decimate a people, drive them into illiteracy and poverty, hinduize them and bribe their leaders into false Brahmindom - for the resources of their land - bauxite and aluminium - for pauper rates given for bamboos and bidris.  

This is a story of a woman, a comrade if you will, who has lost two partners in encounters. A mother who walks behind the corpse of her son hung, clothless, on a pole. Stories of young girls gang raped and killed, and how there is no longer any grass on the spot they were raped. This is a story about burned villages, and camps of barbed wire where villagers must surrender before they are hunted down for being maoist. This is about the maligning of a people, nationally, for standing up - and saying no to being squashed.  

This is a story about how resistance disciplines itself, and walks in patrols of concentric circles. How it "scavenges" a looted vehicle for parts before cremating it. How it smiles with the innocence of a generation to whom the 80s struggle against the forest department is a narrative from history.  




This is about when lawlessness strikes, and democracy fails, how people must take justice in their own hands, and chalk their own destinies.




Arundhati does not romanticize them - She judges them not with any explicit loyalty to China that was or Maoist rhetoric, or any allegiance to their more immediate leader/ideologue Charu Mazumdar -- but with the openness of heart of someone who sees internal security threats as miracles who traverse treacherous terrains with guns and loads with agility. Who understand the struggle in economics - who ask for techniques of organic farming and permaculture. Who thank that someone from Delhi cares and she disabuses them of that belief.

She far from romanticizes these people you disparagingly call comrades. It is instead you who, by the implied thrust of your comment, romanticize these tribals as people who must obligingly move away and make room for the Tatas and the other giant corporations - so that progress may shine upon India and "proper" ideologies be put in place. Ideologies that are already based in shattering principles. You want that killed and marginalized people shift to the fringes smilingly, and if not smilingly, then silently.  

What alternatives do you have for them? More importantly, what alternatives do you have for yourself? You can't be neutral when an avalanche hits your home. And when democracy, too, fails you.