“All is peaceful in the little Gaulish village we know so well, and, as usual, everyone is cheerful and friendly…”
So begins one of the Asterix comic series that narrate the adventures of the people of the village of ancient Gauls holding out against Roman occupation. They do so with the help of Getafix, the venerable village druid, whose magic potion gives the drinker superhuman strength. The story of these indomitable villagers led by a chief whose only fear is that “the sky may fall on his head tomorrow” attracts us because it is the story of underdogs taking on the mighty Romans.
This comic fantasy world created by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo could have been in the mind of Arundhati Roy when she started writing Walking With The Comrades about her visit to the forest near Dantewada controlled by Maoists. Laying out a script of an unequal struggle between the antagonists, she says: “On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion.”
Despite the attractions inherent in her portrayal of the cuckoo land of armed rebellion by local tribals led by the Maoists against the mighty Indian state, one finds it very difficult to read through the whole essay, written in a prose that uses all the story-telling techniques at her disposal, unless one – like her – lives in a fancy reality where the Indian state is a monster and the Maoists the epitome of a struggle for good.
This narrative perfectly fits her esoteric world of the forces of good rebelling against the forces of evil. The only problem with that narrative is that it can also be taken as a denial of that black and white world where the state tyranny is encountering people’s resistance which she represents. She wants us to believe that India is a state controlled by instruments of tyranny. But the very fact that she can write the essay and get it published in a prominent magazine without courting any trouble that normally one expects of a monster state contradicts her view that India is a country, which calls itself a democracy, with a Constitution that is unjust and unfair.
The problem with Arundhati Roy is that she enjoys the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution to give vent to her wrath against the state which, for its part, does not suppress her (or people of her ilk), even when she has gone so far as endorsing the Maoist violence that will undermine the very democracy without which she could not have said what she said.
Roy can’t have the best of both worlds, can she? If she thinks that she can express her views – however subversive they are – freely in this country and faces no trouble for that, it is a clear sign that India has yet to metamorphose itself into a state of tyranny. Before we rush to see the landscape of her battleground that separates her dreamland full of guns and IEDs and the badlands of tyranny, we should ask her if she is sure that all the democratic institutions in the country have failed so completely that there is no other option but armed struggle. What will happen to her if she is in a real state run by instruments of tyranny – Iran or North Korea, for example?
One gets the impression that Arundhati Roy’s real purpose is to shame people living in territories far away from that landscape of armed insurgency and violence. The rest of us with ‘liberal conscience’ are living off a myth that “the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty and have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian State.” Since the country is already a monster, the people with ‘liberal conscience’ are enjoying the fruits offered by that monster unashamedly, fruits that are harvested from the homelands of the poor tribals who have been deprived and dispossessed, she seems to imply.
But the rest of the country with ‘liberal conscience’ is yet to be convinced that India is already what she portrays it to be. The fact that the rugged landscape is not without its peaks and valleys defy her simple but romanticised format where the state is engaged in a conspiracy to make the tribals aliens in their own homelands and the latter backed by the Maoists are carrying out an armed rebellion to stop it. The rest of India with ‘liberal conscience’ is not convinced because they use the moral scale to see that Indian democratic experiment, however deficient it may be, is way far better than the absolutist and collectivist ideology of Maoism. In her passionate admiration for that kind of ideology, she chooses to ignore that democracy is a continuous political experiment based on reason.
Progress comes from human choices of better alternatives. And democracy is definitely a better alternative than armed insurrection that will subvert that democracy. “Common, buddy”, somebody may tell me, “are you not as passionate about democracy as Arundhati Roy is about armed rebellion?” He or she may advise me to read Foucault to know that my idea of democracy itself is nothing but a dominant belief system accepted as common knowledge that defines what is right and what is wrong. My belief system, he or she may say, is just my way of seeing the world.
Yes. Arundhati Roy and people of her ilk thrive in the free-floating postmodernist fantasy land, where there is no moral scale to differentiate good from bad, right from wrong, democratic experiment from totalitarian systems, because the moral scale itself is, for them, nothing but what defines power and hegemony. We are all engaged in a never-ending drama of power and resistance, they may say.
The comrades she walked with in the Dandakaranya forest are not the Gaulish villagers resisting the Romans, nor are their guns and IEDs the equivalent of Getafix’s magic potion that can give them superhuman powers. The villagers in the comic series forget their troubles at the end of every adventure against the Romans and are re-united for their traditional banquets, celebrating, among other things, the end of hostilities. In the script laid out by the Maoists, there is no end of hostilities, but a perennial war, violence and bloodshed.
