WE usually think of democracy in terms of a hierarchy of three political forms – parliament, party and movement. We label different political formations differently, depending on whether they are defined predominantly by mass mobilization or electoral strategy or vanguardist action. We understand mass movements to be close to direct democracy, the supreme democratic form as it were, representational activities to be a somewhat diluted but practicable democratic form, and vanguardist action to be almost always anti-democratic and possibly violent and repressive. We believe Maoists in today’s India to be at the anti-democracy end of the hierarchy, irrespective of whether we see them as pushed to that corner by state and corporate violence or simply so by ideological choice.

In this essay, I shall however suggest a somewhat different formulation of the question of Maoism and democracy. The reason is as follows. I strongly believe that the three political imperatives of representation, participation and vanguardism almost always coexist, albeit in different mixes, in all political formations, which makes it difficult to work with these thumb-rule parameters in order to neatly classify diverse political forces as representing distinct democratic typologies. What might be a more fruitful way of thinking democracy, it seems to me, is to explore the many ways in which representation, mass action and vanguardism combine in different historical contexts and in different political formations. For that purpose it makes more sense to do a comparison across a continuum constituted by say the Maoists, the Hindutva forces, the Congress, the mainstream Communist parties and so on, rather than simply pit the Maoists on one side and all other political forces on the other.

 

One could ask, for instance, with regard to the question of violence, in what ways is Maoist armed struggle different from – and it is, I admit, different from – other modes of political violence operative in India today? The latter would include not only forms of legalized armed occupation by the state, such as through AFSPA, but also ‘direct action’ by quasi-legal offshoots of mainstream political parties, such as the Bajrang Dal, the Salwa Judum, the Koya Commandos and the Harmad Bahini. It would also include what is variously called ‘riot’, ‘insurgency’ or ‘crowd action’.

One could also ask, with regard to the matter of vanguardism, questions about decision-making processes in diverse political parties like the Maoists, the Congress, the BJP, the DMK, the BSP and so on, on the ground that a political party, by its very form, invariably involves some degree of vanguardism. One can ask about the place of internal elections in a particular party or about the extent to which on the spot decisions are made by activists of different political shades. Above all, one can ask about the basis of leadership in each case – about whether leaders in particular parties emerge through constituency-claim, election, ideology, lineage, identity, or indeed, martyrdom and sacrifice.

Regarding the issue of mass participation, one could in fact analyze what is a very complex map of movements and mass fronts in today’s India. At stake in such an analysis will be the relationship between Maoists and local struggles against mining and SEZs – such as currently in Orissa and Chhattisgarh – but also other relationships, such as between BJP and its mass fronts, RSS and VHP. The media will also emerge today as itself a mass interface or mass front within the same framework of analysis.

 

In other words, I am suggesting that the specificity of the Maoist question can be better understood not by isolating Maoism as an archetypal limit-case, but by complicating the general map of democracy in India and locating Maoism in it. In fact, one could make the same argument by quoting history. After all, the from early 20th century, armed action, mass movements and representational claims have simultaneously operated, sometimes bolstering and sometimes undercutting each other, within nationalism. Not only was the pre-independence Congress constituted by seasoned parliamentarians, revolutionaries and ardent boycotters working from the same forum, Gandhi himself was deeply skeptical of parliamentary politics and saw the true satyagrahi as distinct from the masses and somewhat of a vanguard.

So one could, for instance, posit that the dynamic of modern politics per se comes from the constitutive tension between the three moments of representation, vanguardism and participation. And also that it is by no means obvious that elections always have a democratic fallout, or that armed action is necessarily undemocratic. After all, elections can at times be thoroughly media manipulated, as we have known to our peril in 2014. And armed action can ensure dalit, landless labourers’ right to vote, as it did in central Bihar in the 1980s.¹

One can see all the three moments at play within Maoism itself in today’s India. In their interface with state and security forces, the Maoists espouse armed action and refuse participation in elections. And yet, in their interface with people, such as in Dandakaranya, they mobilize for elections as a legitimate procedure in the formation of the janatantric sarkar in the liberated zone, which they see as an already existent ‘people’s democratic state.’ This immediately makes the Maoist armed squad similar to a legitimate army of the state, as it were. Even more interestingly, the Maoists run schools, health centres and road and irrigation works within the liberated zone in a way that reminds us of the governance and development discourse of mainstream politics, once again belying the seeming alterity of Maoism as such.² The Maoists also create mass fronts and enter mass movements despite being banned, underground and deeply vanguardist and their mass fronts often spiralling out of control of the party as the Indian Peoples Front did by the mid-1990s vis a vis the CPIML (Liberation).

 

By saying all this I am neither trying to ‘normalize’ Maoism nor deny Maoist difference, so to speak. I am merely saying that the Maoist difference could conceivably lie elsewhere – in an unlikely question that it might be posing to Indian democracy. This, I am suggesting, is not the question of violence versus elections anymore – because that is a common question across the political spectrum with Maoists on one end and Congress and BJP on the other, all of whom mobilize forces that are unelected, extra-parliamentary and at times, even illegal in nature.

 

An important difference lies in the fact that Maoism in India raises the question of economic democracy. Conventionally we think of democracy as a political form and equality as an economic principle. Issues of economic inequality do get raised in democratic spaces such as the street and the assembly (so the attack against corruption in India and the corporate ‘one per cent’ in the US recently). But the democratic space is not usually understood to be structured as an economic formation because, as Aditya Nigam reminds us, in capitalist times state and market, politics and economy, are held apart by strict administrative fiat as well as by epistemological and disciplinary mechanisms.³ That separation can be called the first principle of capitalism as a political formation, masquerading as it does as purely an economic system. Maoism in India belies this separation, not because as Marxists they are economic determinists but because they help expose the economy as counter- or even anti-democracy in its contemporary operations.

In its earlier Naxalite version, Maoism fought against landlordism and labour servitude and for redistribution of land amongst the landless and fair share of productivity for labour. The principle was that exercising democratic rights required some amount of economic autonomy for the poor. Else, as Ambedkar said in another context, the servile classes remained mere instruments in the hands of the masters and failed to acquire a free political subjectivity.⁴ Indeed, Ambedkar had once argued, in an apparent paradox, for independent India to have political democracy but nationalized land and industry in the manner of socialism, implying thereby that democracy had to have an appropriate economic formation in addition to political franchise and equality before law.⁵ Maoism continues to belabour this point even today.

 

Today, the fact that Maoism has become a predominantly tribal question – in the interiors of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Andhra – further proves the point about economic democracy and ties it up with the question of autonomy (rather than representation). Tribes and adivasis in India have, since the 1930s, engaged in powerful autonomy movements which involved, apart from claims of cultural autonomy, claims of political autonomy and of the right to decide over the land, forest and mineral resources in tribal regions. Significantly, the ‘tribal question’ in India was never fully addressed by the representational aspect of democracy, for the simple reason that the very small number of tribes and adivasis in India made them ineffectual as a formal minority participating in demography based electoral processes. Ambedkar himself admitted to the same earlier.⁶

Today’s adivasi struggles against land acquisition, forest appropriation and deep-earth mineral extraction by corporations and against forced displacement by developmental projects such as dams and nuclear plants further establishes the autonomy question as constitutive of democracy. It is not accidental that Maoism finds deepest roots in this context. Evidently, at stake here is not just the imagination of land as resource – which grounded the earlier communist slogan of land to the tiller – but also the imagination of land as an autonomous space, with its particular ecology, particular cultural meaning and above all, political territoriality. The demand for self-determination of such geographies – including its economic administration by local communities themselves, not necessarily or not always in terms of growth or productivity parameters – clearly takes us away from the question of federalism towards that of autonomy. Additionally, it takes us towards a notion of sovereign territoriality within the very heart of the nation – tending towards, as is the case in Maoism influenced areas, a case of a state within the state.⁷

 

My proposal, accordingly, is that we must think – via the adivasi and Maoist question – of the economic aspect of democracy, not in terms of economic equality – as we have thought so far from within Marxism – but in terms of autonomy. The question of autonomy has been an unthought of Indian democracy, right from the time of the Constituent Assembly debates. In debating the tribal question, the constitution makers faced not only the question of representation and participation of adivasis in the mainstream, but also the powerful adivasi claim of being an autonomous and self-governing community. While the democratic aspects of representation and participation were taken care of by the institution of reservation in the Parliament and in jobs and education, similar to representation for ex-untouchables, the autonomy aspect was much more difficult to negotiate. At the time, adivasis were not only claiming cultural autonomy, but also autonomy of their lands, forests, and indeed, territory. Thus P. R. Thakur, the Namashudra leader from Bengal, said that tribes constituted a unique ‘political minority’ (as opposed to social minorities such as dalits or cultural minorities such as Muslims) precisely because they possessed distinctive practices of self-government.

 

This was a claim of democracy such that Jaipal Singh could argue that tribal modes of self-government were already democratic in nature unlike in caste society. What was needed for true democracy in India, according to him, therefore, was a ‘daring redistribution of provinces’ that took into account existing self-governing units rather than simply religion (as was the debate just prior to Partition) or a map of elite vernacular languages (in the manner in which linguistic states in India would later be imagined). Opponents of autonomy, such as Lakshmi Narayan Sahu from Orissa, strongly argued that allowing ‘tribal’ forms of self-government in place of a uniform administrative structure across India would enable tribes to evolve politically along discrete lines and, by that logic, evolve into politically autonomous units. And Yudhisthir Mishra from Orissa reported with distress that he had received memoranda from adivasi groups stating that adivasis did not consider the Constituent Assembly to be representative of them and were, therefore, not obliged to follow the Indian Constitution as their own constitution.⁸

Decades after the Constituent Assembly debates, the autonomy question continues to be contentious in tribal areas, which are also often Maoism influenced. Let me, by drawing on the work of Ajay Dandekar and Chitrangada Choudhury, take the example of the 1996 Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act or PESA.⁹ PESA became law after prolonged debate in the Parliament and the public sphere and now formally acknowledges the right of communities of Schedule V areas to self-governance. (Here, we cannot go into the long and contentious process of ‘scheduling’ in independent India by which regions came to be officially acknowledged as inhabited by indigenous communities with a tradition of cultural and political autonomy. Sagar Tiwari’s thesis on scheduling bolsters the argument that this was a history constitutive of the autonomy aspect of Indian democracy.¹⁰

 

As a law, PESA acknowledges the gram sabhas having prior right over decisions regarding a range of governance issues at the grassroots level – such as land acquisition and prospecting/mining for minor minerals in tribal areas, land alienation, ownership of minor forest produce, regulation of the sale of liquor, control of moneylending to tribals, control of local health, education and other social plans etc. Clearly, at stake here is an attempted democratization of economic operations in tribal areas, which historically have been highly exploited for their land, forests and minerals. The gram sabha is meant to be the collective of all adults that make up a habitation or settlement, which might or might not be coterminous to an administrative unit of the state.

 

Clearly, the point of defining the gram sabha in this way is to enable a face-to-face assembly of people who routinely interact in everyday life for the purpose of debating issues of resource use on the one hand and the overseeing of state institutions on the other. Whether we call this an instance of direct democracy or not, it is obvious that what we are looking at is an imagination of an unmediated deliberative agency which is meant to function without being hampered by formal administrative procedures, including writing, petitioning and so on, in its collective decision making.

However, in the actual working of the PESA in many states, we find officials functioning with definitions of the ‘village’ that are purely administrative – such as the village as a revenue unit or as coterminous with the panchayat committee – definitions that nullify the very idea of an unmediated, face-to-face, local assembly. Clearly, there is a deep contention between an imagination of democracy as economic autonomy and self-determination of a people and a model of democracy as a lateral and vertical elaboration of a single, centralized administrative structure in the name of extension and decentralization.

Similarly contentious is the question of the legal status of decisions taken by gram sabhas – especially with regard to the current debates around land acquisition and mining. In many states, for example, decisions taken by local assemblies appear to go against state laws ‘currently in force’, in which case, such as in Odisha, state laws are given precedence over community decisions. Even in areas such as Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where gram sabha decisions are taken more seriously, ‘due regard’ to existing relevant laws are demanded from village assemblies. And above all, there is the matter of gram sabha decisions being ‘in harmony’ with the Constitution.

 

Needless to say, and not just around PESA, the current debate around the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act of 2013 and its various amendments also involve the same issues of economic democracy and autonomy. Apart from social impact assessment, rehabilitation and resettlement issues which come into play around acquisition of land for ‘public purpose’ by the state, at stake above all is the issue of ‘consent’ of the gram sabha – a matter in dispute right from the late 1990s with the coming into effect of PESA.

Even as private corporations vie to acquire land, mining licenses and infrastructural business in the heart of tribal India, what is at stake in the current debates is actually the right of the state itself (a la eminent domain) in its face-off with right of the community (to govern itself). While everybody knows the role of private interests in this matter, it is indeed via the state – such as through private-public partnerships – that private capital comes into play in autonomous regions. In other words, what we are seeing today is a tremendous churning around the question of what economic democracy actually can be. If it is no longer conceivable as a form of state socialism, is economic democracy then conceivable as the coming into play of autonomy in economic decision making at the grassroots level?

I dwelt at length on PESA and LARR, in what might appear to be a digression, in order to foreground the unresolved and conflicted nature of the autonomy question in our times. I also wanted to flag the significant fact that this question is particularly intractable in the tribal lands of our nation. It is in the tribal lands that two histories come together – one, a history of peoples claiming autonomy in the name of sovereign traditions of self-government and two, a history of resistance, invoking both cultural and ecological choices, against the modern economic imperatives of productivity and growth. These two histories articulate to produce the most difficult aspect of our political present – namely, the aspect which calls for a thinking of economic democracy in terms of political autonomy of peoples of our nation.

 

It is thus not surprising that Maoism finds its home today mostly in such tribal lands. I believe there is more to this than simply the fact that tribes and adivasis are the most impoverished and oppressed groups in India today and, therefore, more hospitable to radical politics of change. Without identifying Maoist activists with their tribal constituency entirely, one could say that there is something specific to today’s Maoism that makes this possible.

In terms of its official ideology, Maoism – like many other shades of communism – has the ultimate goal of capturing state power. In actuality, however, Maoism promises quite something else – namely, the possibility of creating zones of functional autonomy within the existing state structure, by keeping at bay the operation of state laws and state institutions. If this takes the form of a perpetual civil war, it is because we are yet to conceptually work out a form of political autonomy which is other than the creation of a state within a state, or a counter-state. By virtue of the same reason, we are also yet to imagine a crucial aspect of democracy – namely, economic democracy.

 

Footnotes:

1.Bela Bhatia, ‘The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar’, Economic and Political Weekly 40(13), 2005, pp. 1536-43.

2. This is confirmed by reports from journalist-ethnographers in Maoist areas, such as Sudip Chakravarty, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. Penguin, 2008; Suvojit Bagchi, ‘Red Star Over Bastar: 34 Days with Guerrillas’, in Robin Jeffrey, Ronojoy Sen and Pratima Singh (eds.), More than Maoism. Manohar, Delhi, 2012, pp. 223-70.

3. Aditya Nigam, ‘Political Econographies and "Capital": Revisiting the "Passive Revolutuon" Argument’. Paper presented at the seminar ‘Theorizing Today: 25 Years Later’ on the occasion of the Silver Jubilee of the Forum for Contemporary Theory, Baroda, 10-11 February 2014.

4. Vasant Moon (ed.), Philosophy of Hinduism, Babasaheb Ambedkar:Writings and Speeches (BAWS). Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra, Bombay, 1987, III, pp. 3-94, 40.

5. M.G. Chitkara, Dr Ambedkar and Social Justice. Aph, Delhi, 2002; Mohammad Shabbir, Ambedkar on Law, Constitution and Social Justice. Rawat, Delhi, 2005.

6. ‘Communal Deadlock and a Way to Solve It’, BAWS, vol. 1, 1945, pp. 355-79.

7. Alpa Shah, In the Shadow of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism, and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2010.

8. Constituent Assembly Debates, particularly of 19 December 1946 and 24 August 1949, http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/ debates/vol1p9.htm and http://parliamentof india.nic.in/ls/debates/vol9p17a.htm, accessed on 30 December 2014.

9. ‘PESA: Legislation as Myth’, in More than Maoism, op. cit., pp. 151-62.

10. Sagar Tiwari, ‘Tribe and Development: Nation-Making in Bastar, Central India (1930-80)’, PhD thesis, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2014.