ABSTRACT
The financialization of the economy and the criminalization of politics in India which has led to the rise to power of the Indian neoconservatives led by the Bharaitya Janata Party (BJP) have created a splintered secular democratic opposition and a declining parliamentary left. Without a doubt the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the consequent entry of India into the not-so-brave world of neoliberal capitalism. The old ideologies of secularism, socialism and non-alignment (the three pillars of the ruling ideology of India until 1991) are now forgotten for an aggressive hyper-capitalist and ethno-nationalist ideology. For those who are pessimistic about the given course of things, especially with the complete surrender of the parliamentary left to bourgeois politics, the Maoists seem a ray of hope. However a counter-narrative is put up by the ruling elite for whom the Maoists are not only terrorists, but anti-nationalists declaring war on not only the Indian state, but the Indian republic itself. This essay, while being a review of Bernard D’Mello’s book India After Naxalbari, is also a reflection on the Indian Maoist movement. The following questions are fundamental to understanding the Indian Maoist movement, namely whether it is a genuine democratic and revolutionary mass movement or left adventurism that degenerates into ‘anarcho-terrorism’, which instead of helping the cause of the working class, is actually helping the state move in a more rightwards direction. It also states that the Maoist movement in India itself has to be located within a rigorous epistemological break from Marx’s original repertoire and that this Maoist ideology has to be understood less with dialectics and people’s movements and more with sophistry and messianic apocalypse.
