Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy

Author:Arundhati Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

A TRANSIENT MEMORIAL TO THE MARTYRS

A few more speeches. Then the drumming and the dancing begin. Each Janatana Sarkar has its own troupe. Each troupe has prepared its own dance.

BHUMKAL BEGINS

Happiness is taken very seriously here, in the Dandakaranya forest. People will walk for miles, for days together to feast and sing, to put feathers in their turbans and flowers in their hair, to put their arms around each other and drink mahua and dance through the night. No one sings or dances alone. This, more than anything else, signals their defiance towards a civilization that seeks to annihilate them.

It’s a great disservice to everything that is happening here that the only thing that seems to make it to the outside world is the stiff, unbending rhetoric of the ideologues of a party that has evolved from a problematic past. When Charu Mazumdar famously said, ‘China’s chairman is our chairman and China’s path is our path,’ he was prepared to extend it to the point where the Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya Khan committed genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Because, at the time, China was an ally of Pakistan. There was silence too over the Khmer Rouge and its killing fields in Cambodia. There was silence over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Silence over Tibet. Within the Naxalite movement too, there have been violent excesses and it’s impossible to defend much of what they’ve done. But can anything they have done compare with the sordid achievements of the Congress and the BJP in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat…. And yet, despite these terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar, in much of what he wrote and said, was a man with a political vision for India that cannot be dismissed lightly. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone we cannot judge him too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of ‘the non-violent way’ and his notion of Trusteeship: ‘The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society.’

How strange it is though, that the contemporary tsars of the Indian Establishment—the State that crushed the Naxalites so mercilessly—should now be saying what Charu Mazumdar said so long ago: China’s Path is Our Path.

Upside Down. Inside Out.

China’s Path has changed. China is on its way to becoming an imperial power now, fuelled by the raw materials of other countries. But the Party is still right, only, the Party has changed its mind.

When the Party is a suitor (as it is now in Dandakaranya), wooing the people, attentive to their every need, then it genuinely is a People’s Party, its army genuinely a People’s Army. But after the Revolution, how easily this love affair can turn into a bitter marriage.

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