Kobad Ghandy has gripped the popular imagination — what is the London-schooled son of a strawberry ice cream magnate doing in the thick of revolutionary guerrilla warfare? In interviews, he spoke with a sobriety that seemed at odds with the apocalyptic Naxalite vision — he spoke of schooling problems, of boiling water to beat disease, of reducing child mortality. His wife and comrade, Anuradha Shanbagh, also shunned her cushioned life after her encounter with urban poverty. Ghandy and Shanbagh were part of a category of young people who were jolted awake to politics, by the moral urgency of addressing widespread rural exploitation. At a time when the Congress and the big two Communist parties were situated on different points of a “democratic” socialist spectrum, the Naxalite revolt brought the “spring thunder” of Maoism to India, as Gail Omvedt puts it, with the goal of agrarian revolution and armed struggle.
Certainly, over the decades that dream disintegrated for many young revolutionaries, and the brutality of the Naxalite way has ensured that none but the most militantly committed to their extortionist ends have stayed on. The extremism of their goals and the excesses of their method make them the most dreaded enemies of the state. And yet, as a perceptive Planning Commission study admitted, growth and good administration has simply passed over certain geographies and people, and Naxalites thrive in this development and governance vacuum. When extremist movements of any stripe supply much-needed healthcare or schooling, they supplant the state’s legitimacy. If they are seen to provide a certain rough justice through people’s courts (violent and imperfect as they may be) or by the enforcement of minimum wages or forest rights, that is because the state is perceived as an indifferent, abstract entity.
But what is arresting about examples like Kobad Ghandy (however repellent their ideology) is the fact that what stirred them to action was a cause so utterly removed from their insulated worlds. That possibility of a fierce sympathy between someone from the urban overclass and a forgotten, faraway group of tribals, is fascinating. And while romanticising the Naxal cause is ignorant, hollow and extremely dangerous, it would be as short-sighted to ignore grievances that that cause feeds on.