Article Post a April 2010 - Revised

8/8/2019 Article Post a April 2010 - Revised

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Free Speech, the Media and Operation Green Hunt

Over the past few days there has been quite a lot of vehement discussion, in the print andaudio-visual media, about the IPL scam, the enormous sums of money that cricket is

today mired in, and the sheer lack of accountability of those who play with that money.

Consequently, some media personnel have envisioned dramatic changes in theadministration of the game so much so that there is already talk of this as the

Tharoorgate scandal, and of what the post-Tharoorgate cricket scene is going to be like.

But this piece is not about those matters. This piece returns to two other matters that gotconveniently buried by the Tharoorgate scandal: one, the declaration of assets by our

esteemed parliamentarians, and two, the killing of 76 CRPF jawans in Dantewada earlier

this month. As seems to be the wont with the media these days, there had been talk of

pre- and post-Dantewada eras in Indian politics, referring to the incident as marking atransformative moment in policy; this form of periodisation then morphed, quite

inexplicably, into the pre- and post-Tharoorgate eras. (It is of some significance that there

is no suggestion to periodise our politics in terms of pre- and post-asset declaration; on

the owning of extravagant assets by large numbers of our political class, it seems, there isa general understanding that nothing will change) This piece is about the unfolding of

these developments in the media.

We can begin by remarking on the first periodisation that came along in the media: pre-

and post-Dantewada. I was going to remark on the irony that, it is almost as if Dantewada

the place itself only came into existence after the incident except that (doublyironically!) this, in some ways, is in fact the case. Dantewada barely existed in the

national consciousness prior to 6 April 2010. It would not have remained there for very

long either, had it not been the site of the killings that apparently rocked the air-conditioned early-summer haze of the urban middle classes. And even then, sure enough,

it faded away like mist in summer, the moment something more salacious was deliveredto these same salivating classes by this same sensationalist media. But before we discussits disappearance, Id like to dwell a little on its appearance in the media.

It all began with reports that 76 jawans of the CRPF lost their lives to Maoist forces.Much of this discussion was suffused with outrage and strident calls for vengeance

against those who struck our boys down. No one thought to ask the obvious questions:

What were they doing there? Who sent them there? When the government sends

troops into what it has itself declared a war zone, on what basis can it deny responsibilityfor the loss of their lives? And when Home Minister P Chidambaram finally did accept

ultimate responsibility for these deaths, it was treated bafflingly! as moral heroism on

his part, rather than as an acknowledgement of culpability. Instead, in a disgracefuldisplay of scapegoating, blame was transferred to, and then traded between the state and

central police forces, finally leading to a call for an inquiry to establish who was

actually responsible. And instead of the Home Minister being held to account for thisinsane loss of lives, the importance of his policies, manifested in Operation Green Hunt

(or OGH) was reaffirmed and celebrated with rare unanimity and fervour in parliament.

So, what gives? What drove this fervour to justify the sacrifice of these jawans?

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The first step in this justification, of course had already been taken, in the claiming of

these jawans as our boys. One TV anchor in particular, his spectacles gleaming with

paternal fervour, loudly claimed these jawans as our boys, though he would hardly be ofan age to have sired any of them. More pertinently, they belonged to a class (and possibly

castes) that he would otherwise probably not even acknowledge, given his own eminently

upper caste and upper class status, let alone profess possessing paternal relations with. (Irealise it may seem somewhat callous to mock this anchor in this way, given the

enormously tragic loss of lives; however, the intent is not to disrespect those young men

or their families, but to show up this mawkish and sham sentimentality for what it was:an enormous emotional fraud that was perpetrated on media consumers across the

country. This will become clearer as we go along.) The young men who lost their lives in

Dantewada that day would probably not even be permitted to sit in the presence of this

TV anchor and his ilk, in our oh-so-profoundly hierarchical societies; and yet, the middleclass media of urban India was suddenly full of familial feeling for these boys and their

families. We were repeatedly shown images of grieving families, bereft spouses,

bewildered children in short, the entire gamut of familial relations garbed in tragedy

aimed specifically at invoking a sense of identification, empathy and most importantly, adesire for catharsis in the viewer (yet another point I will return to in a moment). What

drove the fervour to claim these boys as ours which in this instance was supposed tosignify the collective us of the Indian nation, but actually meant no more than the Great

Indian Middle Class (or GIMC) that was apparently so outraged by their deaths? How is

it that jawans from the mofussil heartlands of UP and Haryana were suddenly albeit

posthumously (or perhaps because posthumously) finding a seat at the masters familytable?

It is not that the master has suddenly lost sight of class and caste distinctions (and if thathad been the case, we would have at least that to thank the Maoists for). One report in a

prominent English daily even remarked on the apparent irony in the fact that, although

Maoists claimed to be fighting class enemies, in these 76 jawans, they had killed menfrom the very class that they claimed to be representing. Without commenting on the

shallowness (if not outright illiteracy) of such a remark, we need to note first how, for the

middle classes that both produce and consume this garbage that passes for news analysis,the jawans were clearly presented as notbelonging with them, but instead were explicitly

identified as lower class. We need to understand that, these unfortunate young men, till a

few weeks ago, were indistinguishable from thousands of others like them who join the

paramilitary forces or the armed forces, or the police, or for that matter, the postalservice or the railways or the transport department simply because it means food on the

table for their families, clothes on their backs, a roof over their heads, education for their

children, a bank account for the future in other words, the means to meet the quotidianaspirations of the many millions striving and struggling to achieve membership in that

very same middle class. Their deaths, in this sense, were less tragic than the shattering of

the worlds of those they left bereft: their survivors are left to engage with the viciousnessof life under capitalism without them. Yet, despite the tragedy of their deaths, and the

greater tragedy of those who survive them, there can be no question that they remained

outside the pale of middle class-dom in their lives; it is only in their deaths that they

acquired a sort of entry, and that because the GIMC was made to believe that these

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jawans died defending them and their country against the red terror. The justification of

their deaths otherwise a horrendously unjustifiable and meaningless waste of lives

caused entirely by the hubris of the Home Minister and his single-minded pursuance ofOGH lay in presenting them as martyrs to the cause of the nation of the GIMC. It is

through this belief that the catharsis I noted earlier was generated, and became possible.

This catharsis was important: the increasing doubts being cast in the minds of the GIMCabout OGH by various sections of civil society, was in that one cathartic moment of its

media sensationalisation transformed into an affirmation of OGH. The images of grieving

families and bereft children made possible the sense of identification so essential tocatharsis, of the GIMC with the jawans class, even as parallel texts reiterating the lower

class status of those families reassuringly permitted that very GIMC to maintain the

emotional distance also required of the cathartic moment. And the GIMC media cried,

and cried out, Enough is enough! Take OGH to the next level! Call in the army, the airforce, the heavy artillery! Our boys must be avenged! The media did its job superbly in

this instance. And of course, the profound tragic irony of our class society that it was

not the Home Minister who paid for his hubris but these 76 young men, and their families

was lost completely in all the patriotic noise (truly is it said that patriotism is the last or perhaps, in this instance, the first refuge of the scoundrel).

Perhaps the most important operative factor here, was the fact that these troops belonged

not to any particular state service but were part of the central paramilitary force being

deployed in Chhatisgarh. They were national troops, defending the nation at large

which we all know, is an entirely middle class construct. More than anything else, thisallowed the GIMC to identify cathartically with the families of these jawans. And it is

precisely the absence of this national profile in the case of the innumerable adivasis slain

in OGH, that disallows identification with them not to speak of additional factors like asingularly alien ethnic identity, utterly lower class status and an incomprehensible

otherness in terms of life-style. In this sense, the adivasis do notbelong to the same class

as the jawans, with whose class aspirations the GIMC could still relate; no, they belong toa class that constitutes that enormous, polymorphous section of Indian society that lives

far Below the Poverty Line, which the urban GIMC would prefer not to know about at

all, and which it variously sees as a national shame or as a national hindrance. (Onerecent estimate of this section noted that, if we calculate the BPL on the basis of less than

USD 1 (yes, one) per capita per day, this section constitutes 400 million; if we increase

that to USD 2, per capita per day, that figure jumps to 800 million. Its at times like this

that that endearing Americanism, Go figure!, comes to mind.) The jawans deaths,profoundly tragic though they were, are therefore in every sense less tragic than the

hundred and thirty odd deaths this year alone, that have gone unreported (forget

sensationalised) in the media, of adivasis in the Bastar region alone. They are less tragic because the families of the killed jawans will ultimately be aided by the state:

compensations will be paid, jobs will be reserved, social networks will be mobilised, to

ensure that those bereaved do not lose allopportunities to participate in the race towardsmiddle class-dom. Who will offer these to the adivasis? Not the GIMC, and certainly not

the Indian state. Theirdeaths, under the many avatars of OGH Salwa Judum, mining

mafia strong-arm thugs, SPO storm troopers, paramilitary forces; but also through

decades of neglect and savage callousness, and what Binayak Sen recently termed,

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horrifically, an epidemic of [mal]nutritional AIDS will remain, so to speak, properly

buried. There will be no visuals of grieving mothers and destitute children, not because

death works differently among the tribals, but because human empathy, it seems, isdriven by class interests and class affiliations. There is nothing in their lives for the

GIMC media to identify with so completely alienated from the nation have they been

rendered by decades of neglect and poverty and therefore will they remain unheard,unseen and unspoken for in this national media. And, in this ghastly competition of

tragedies inevitable, in one sense, to a social environment that is witnessing the

inexorable intensification of capitalist predatoriness the greatest tragedy may yet be thattragedies are now being played out competitively.

No, the adivasi populations at the receiving end of OGH are not national, nor nationalist,

nor in anyway identifiable with the Great Indian Nation of the GIMC. No tribal or lowercaste, lower class person can feel a genuine sense of identification with this idea of the

Indian nation, because it simply does not exist in tribal, lower caste, lower class terms.

Mahasweta Devis brilliant short story Doulati was about precisely this alienation. More

recently, feminist scholar Karen Gabriel has shown quite convincingly that theiconography of the nation as Bharat Mata is profoundly upper class, upper caste and in

many ways, explicitly North Indian. When the understanding of the nation, in its verypublic imagings and imaginations of this sort, is so profoundly exclusivist, how can we

possibly expect anything but dissension in the ranks of society? It cannot be mere

coincidence that the regions in Indian territory that have for decades been the theatres of

insurgency, have all been profoundly alienated from this iconic understanding of thenation: Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Meghalaya, Telengana; and now,

Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, Orissa, parts of West Bengal or more specifically, the tribal

territories of these states. How much longer can we afford to remain blind to this blatantempirical reality, continue to pretend that these are problems of law and order, and insist

on dealing with them coercively, repressively, murderously? And as this national socius

is revealed to be more and more heterogeneous, with greater and greater levels ofinequality, disparity in living conditions and opportunities, and with its better-off sections

increasingly and publicly not just displaying their wealth, but doing so with an

unprecedented degree of sheer indifference and callousness can we expect anything elsebut violentdissension in its ranks? On the one hand we have a competition of tragedies;

on the other, a competition of ostentatious wealth: it doesnt take much to join the dots

from there.

Which brings me to the second issue that I want to touch upon, that was buried by the

IPL obsession of the media: the declaration of assets by our parliamentarians. The issue

that came up around the 24th of April, was that 51 MPs had not declared their assets,despite having to do so within 90 days of taking oath almost a full year ago. Along with

this came figures of the assets of those who had actually declared them. An astounding

300-plus MPs in the current parliament have assets of over a crore, and the largestnumber of these by a long shot (137), belong to the ruling Congress party. No doubt these

figures will rise further still, when the remaining 51, so coy about their finances, declare

their assets. (At this point we will not take into account another astounding statistic,

which is the shocking figure of150 MPs in this parliament bearing criminal records, but

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merely leave it to the reader to continue joining the dots.) But these details must be

viewed in the light of something else: the fact of the matter is that the first spate of MoUs

with multinational corporations (for accessing the wealth of natural resources in theregions currently under OGH) was signed under the NDA regime, and the policy

continued with the next government. The Salwa Judum the vigilante force that was set

up by the state, to combat the Naxalites we tend to forget, was a joint creation of theCongress and the BJP at the time. This is the reason why the strongest defence of P

Chidambarams policy, even after Dantewada, came from the BJP; the CPMs backing of

this policy, we can surmise, was for similar reasons, given their newfound andenthusiastic keenness to endorse a capitalist model of economic growth. At any rate,

post-Dantewada, it became clear that the ruling elite stood as one on the issue of OGH; so

when the declaration-of-assets issue became public, suddenly the underlying class

politics of the entire operation became crystal clear. The arguments coming from variousquarters that OGH was being undertaken on behalf of multinational corporations; that

the hundreds of MoUs that were waiting to be operationalised in these areas would

benefit, not the adivasi populations that OGH was displacing, but the political powers

behind the operation; that the adivasis were turning to violence because they had norepresentatives left in and to the Indian state; that they had been cleanly and totally sold

out by administrative machinery; etc. these arguments were suddenly becoming self-evidently true, on national television and newspapers. The mind-numbing disparity in

income and asset levels between those few hundreds who rule the country, and those

starving millions against whom OGH is being undertaken, was perhaps too shocking or

at least startling for even our thick-skinned urban GIMC media to countenance.

Arguably, if these figures had emerged in the public domain at any other time than post-

Dantewada, the media would have had a field day commenting on the wealthiness of theruling elite, and the profound irony of their ruling over a country teeming with millions of

poor. It would have been safe for them and for their political masters to do so

(indeed, it would have been tom-tommed as another instance of the triumph ofdemocratic free speech), because the teeming millions of poor would have continued to

remain silent, exploited and invisible, the media would have simply used this to generate

a powerful sense of moral superiority in the GIMC, and the MPs would continue toaccumulate their crores: everyone (who mattered) would have been happy. But in the

harsh light of OGH, when the poorest of the poor became so inconveniently visible, and

especially after the explicit collaboration between the government and the opposition,

post-Dantewada, these revelations were not so safe. No wonder the media leapt at the IPLscam. It brought the national obsession of cricket to the foreground, and through a second

moment of catharsis, shifted all the doubts that might have surfaced about the probity of

the ruling elite, onto the unfortunate persons of Shashi Tharoor, Lalit Modi andSunanda Pushkar. No more was the public to reflect on why OGH, what actually

happened in Dantewada, why was the BJP and the CPM more keen than the Congress, in

backing OGH further etc. Instead, it was fed on a strong diet of cricket, sleaze andfinancial trickeries. No doubt the red terror will be back in the media: but after enough

of a gap for the public to forget the doubts that had begun to creep in. And of course,

there will be little or no discussion of the assets of our MPs.

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Instead, when the issue of OGH comes back, it will return in its most common avatar, the

one that the media is most comfortable garbing it in: as one of violence versus non-

violence with the Maoists (and for that matter, anyone protesting against OGH) firmlypositioned as votaries of violence, almost for its own sake. As I conclude this piece then,

a few remarks on this particular debate would not be out of place. In one sense, these

strident calls for non-violence on the part of the Maoists, from the GIMC and its media,are almost hilariously hypocritical: this is the same class, and the same media, that took

war hysteria to new heights, during the Kargil episode. Threats of incursions (wildly

represented as an invasion) into the sacrosanct national territory of this class were metwith extravagant militancy, dire threats, extreme ultimatums. Some of the more hawkish

elements of our media even suggested, quite seriously, exercising the nuclear option

against Pakistan. Wherefrom then, this sudden demand for pacifism, when it comes to the

adivasi populations whose territories have been actually invaded by the Indian state andwe must not forget that, under the 5 th schedule of the Indian constitution, these territories

are inviolably theirs? But this returns us to the old question of empathy: when there is

none for the adivasis, the GIMC can only seek the moral high ground of exhorting non-

violence, from which to speak. (Patriotism, it seems, can be invoked to justify violence asmuch as to demand non-violence: once again, truly is it a scoundrels tool.)

But this has its own problems. Writer-activist Arundhati Roy has, quite rightly,

repeatedly pointed out that non-violence requires an audience, a theatre of visibility in

which it must be performed, in order to be effective. But as importantly, non-violence

makes sense, as a moralposition, only when the party professing it is actually capable ofachieving victory or at least a stalemate through violence but stays its hand. Non-

violence here is a moral choice: I can fight my (ideological-political) battle by

perpetrating violence, inflicting damage, causing injury and deaths, but I choose not to, Ichoose instead to seek to establish my position non-violently; therein lies the moral

strength of my non-violence. (Therefore, the power of Gandhis position, for instance, lay

as much in the fact that he treated non-violence as a spectacle a gesture in a politicaltheatre as in the fact that he demanded it of millions of his followers who were rearing

to turn violent, and reined them in.) But what happens when there is neither theatre norchoice? Roy has already spoken of the absurdity of performing non-violence in thejungles of Jharkhand, where there is no one to witness it; it is equally absurd to perform

non-violence when to do so is to die. It is absurd to demand non-violence when the

enemy (in this case, the Indian armed forces with the second largest army, the fourth

largest air-force and the fifth largest navy in the world) is so much more powerful thatneither violence nor non-violence can make much of a difference to the outcome of the

confrontation. In such a situation, where one may die whether or not one is violent, but in

which to be violent increases ones chances of survival in such a situation, it would beutterly puerile (not to say patently partisan) to demand non-violence from the threatened.

You cannot ask a child to throw down a stone, in the name of non-violence, if that is the

only thing preventing it from being pulverised by a bully a hundred times bigger.

In spite of understanding this, to insist that the Maoists abjure violence (whatever that

means) is then to play up to the sentiments of the GIMC, without seriously engaging with

the principle of non-violence. It is possible to do so, in fact, because such a critique is

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coming from the comfortable position of the GIMC, oblivious to the unimaginable

hardships under which the adivasis are fighting for survival, and with a naivety

bordering on imbecility insisting on equating the potential for and practice of violenceon both sides, as if they were the same. But, in this instance, it is the Indian state that is

capable of inflicting unbelievable levels of violence, death and destruction, and to win

this war through violent means and not either the adivasis or the Maoists; there can beno comparison in the scales of violence possible. If therefore the Indian government

wants to propound non-violence, the moral onus of doing so falls on it, not on the

Maoists or the adivasis they are fighting alongside. Let the Indian government thereforetake the moral upper hand in this war, and cease with immediate effect, all hostilities. Let

it proffer this as a step towards creating a conducive environment for talks. And let the

media cease to be partisan, and begin to see and perceive and imagine the affected

populations in these regions (but also in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya,Assam, etc) as integral to the Indian socius rather than alien to it and then let it demand

the abjuring of violence.

Finally, it might be argued here that Maoism per se, as an ideology, espouses the idea ofthe violent overthrow of the (Indian) state, and that consequently, it is not an issue of not

having a choice, but in fact the converse that violence is the active choice of theMaoists, and therefore any attempt to defend their use of violence is ipso facto a defence

of their intention to overthrow the Indian state. Indeed, the latest directive, in the form

of a press release, from the Home Ministry, warns all citizens that they would be liable

to be punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or with fine or withboth, if they support, or even if they simply do not beware, the propaganda of terrorist

organisations like the CPI (Maoist) because their sole aim is armed overthrow of the

Indian State. This directive explicitly spells out the above argument. The governmentsown estimation of the strength of the Maoist cadre is as ranging between 20,000 and

30,000. Somehow the incredible absurdity of claiming that this number could

conceivably threaten to (let alone actually) overthrow the Indian state with, as wealready noted, the second largest army in the world seems to escape both the

government and the civil society voices in support of this position but we need not

dwell on such details. What is even more dangerous in this argument is that, byblanketing the entire range of protests and resistances urban and rural, tribal and non-

tribal, armed and unarmed under the rubric Maoist, and thereby implying that these

diverse resistances are all intent on overthrowing the Indian state, the government is

threatening to de-legitimise indeed to criminalise a very legitimate protest andresistance movement against the diabolical nexus between the functionaries of the state

and big business enterprises. In fact, by chanting the mantra of Maoism as a blanket

criminalisation, the state is seeking, like a small-time prestidigitator, to distract attentionfrom its own implicated-ness in the worse-than-criminal machinations that are underway

to displace and destroy entire communities and their properties and resources, as well as

in the appalling callousness with which it continues to treat the poorest of the poor of thecountry. And, unlike the almost ridiculous threat of an imminent overthrow of the state

by the Maoists, that the Indian government is loudly warning us about, the governments

own threat to prosecute anyone it even perceives as supporting the Maoists under the

draconian provisions of the UA(P)A, is a very real, very imminent and genuinely very,

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very dangerous threat not just to the individuals and organisations that are implicitly

targeted in the directive, but to the remaining democratic institutions, credentials and

fabric of the country. Rather than falling in line with the Home Ministrys diktat,therefore, it is the imperative need of the hour to strongly protest against its word and

spirit and the media must play a frontline role in that protest. Else, if this is quietly

allowed to pass as the law of the land, we are on the verge of a second country-wideEmergency.

P K Vijayan

Asst. Prof., Dept. of English,

Hindu College.

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Article Post a April 2010 - Revised