Myth of the Urban Naxal

There is no way to distinguish a social activist from a Maoist functioning undercover

Six years after acquiring notoriety in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case, the Urban Naxal threatens to haunt the citizens again, courtesy the Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill. Introduced but not passed in the outgoing state Assembly, it is feared the Bill could be promulgated as an ordinance before the next government is constituted later this year.

The citizens' fear of the Urban Naxal arises from the Bill's Statement of Objects and Reasons, which says that Naxalism (or Maoism) is no longer limited to remote areas but has acquired an increasing presence in urban areas through its frontal organisations. These organisations, the Bill says, provide refuge and logistics to the Naxal cadre, stoke social unrest, create public disorder, and propagate the Maoist ideology.

Frontal organisations are defined as those that have a legal personality and operate openly, but their clandestine mission is to further the agenda of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). It is for the State to determine whether an organisation is a Maoist front and ought to be banned. There, thus, always exists a possibility that those controlling the levers of the State, for the reason of ideological partisanship, could declare democratic organisations expressing social discontent through nonviolent protests as Maoists fronts.

The ambiguity inherent in identifying the frontal organisation creates an architecture of suspicion: there is no way to distinguish a social activist from a Maoist functioning undercover. This architecture the Hindu Right exploited to construct the persona of the Urban Naxal-villainous, operating in cities under the veneer of middle-class respectability to execute the Maoist agenda of destroying the Indian State and capturing power.

Hindutva harnesses State power and control over the media to spawn the myth of the Urban Naxal. Typically, after arresting citizens, the State identifies them as Urban Naxals to the media, which disparages and demonises them. This was the ploy deployed to try to trigger a wave of national revulsion against 16 activists, arrested on the basis of allegedly manufactured evidence, in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case. Six years later, even the charges against the Bhima Koregaon accused for their alleged links with the Maoists are yet to be framed.

Indeed, the myth of the Urban Naxal is designed to turn citizens suspicious of each other, and persuade them to perceive social movements and protests as a grand Maoist plan to destablise India. The Urban Naxal is Hindutva's weapon of depriving its ideological opponents of popular support, apart from hoping to scare them into silence.

For comprehending the dangers of the Urban Naxal myth, turn to filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri's urban naxals: The Making of Buddha In a Traffic Jam. In this book, he says he began to write the script of The Making Of Buddha after it dawned on him that he needed to tell the "story of the invisible enemy, the most dangerous terrorist. The Urban Naxal." Comparing the invisible enemy to a snake under the bed, Agnihotri writes, "I shiver imagining that someone in my ecosystem - a writer, a lawyer, a journalist, a social worker, an officer, a professor, a historian, a painter, a filmmaker, anyone just anyone can be an Urban Naxal."

Every educated person, in other words, is a potential Maoist.

The Naxalite's game plan, according to Agnihotri, is to split the Indian society into two warring groups. On one side will be the Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims and other "forgotten people", consolidated behind the red flag, to challenge the bourgeoisie, elites and Brahmins. Their confrontation is designed to demolish the Indian State, and erect upon its debris a Maoist State. The Naxalite in the forest fights with the gun. The Urban Naxal weaponises the citizens' mind and turns them into implacable foes of the State, Agnihotri argues.

In a 2018 interview to the Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Agnihotri laid out the markers for identifying the Urban Naxal. He said, "First, anyone who is not willing to give any space to Hindu civilisation has an agenda... Why would anyone not want to preserve this great civilisation?" He believes the Urban Naxal is opposed to the Hindu civilisation because s/he seeks to break Hindu unity by creating a Dalit-Islamic bloc.

The other markers of the Urban Naxal are that s/he would be involved in the anti-development movement or inclined to showing "unnecessary compassion" for the "enemies of India." The meaning of anti-development in Agnihotri's lexicon was best captured in Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel's 2022 speech, wherein he labelled activist Medha Patkar as an Urban Naxal for opposing the Sardar Sarovar Narmada project. Those exhibiting excessive sympathy for the enemies of India would include a lawyer defending a person accused of waging war against the State; or even an organisation's press statement against human rights violations by the security forces.

Agnihotri's definition of the Urban Naxal keeps out of its ambit the adherents of Hindutva, all those who endorse the extant development model, and the legions of the apolitical. Hindutva, through its construct of the Urban Naxal, wishes to make this mammoth bloc of Indians politically paranoid - and tap their unfounded fears to rally them behind the State, regardless of its conduct and policies.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste

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