‘Urban Naxals’, Mr PM?

Sustainable development vs rapacious growth

There exists a semantic quibble over ‘Urban Naxal’, a term coined by the BJP that resurfaced most recently when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing a ‘Chintan Shivir’ of state home ministers and DGPs of states in Surajkund, Haryana, made an urgent call to defeat all forms of Naxalism: “In recent years, all governments have acted responsibly to destroy the terror network’s ground network…We must deal with it by joining forces. We will have to defeat all forms of Naxalism, be it gun-totting or pen-wielding, we will have to come up with a solution for all this.” While there can be no theoretical opposition to his resolve to boost internal security, it becomes interesting when the appellation ‘Urban Naxal’ comes to include a host of antagonists taking exception to his version of development.

Earlier this year, Modi accused the Congress of having been “trapped by Urban Naxals” which, in his view, accounts for the thought process of the party being “destructive”. It enraged the Congress so much that it walked out of the House in protest. Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari has called Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal a big example of an ‘Urban Naxal’. Modi also mounted a veiled attack on the Aam Aadmi Party, a contender in next week’s Gujarat elections: “Urban Naxals are trying to enter the state with new appearances. They have changed their costumes. They are misleading our innocent and energetic youth into following them…They are agents of foreign powers.” Modi later blamed “Urban Naxals’’ and “some global institutions and foundations” for stopping “modern infrastructure” projects purportedly to raise the standard of living in India. Cautioning his impressionable audience against getting caught up in the “conspiracies of such people”, he admitted to the persuasive power of his adversaries who have been able to influence “even the World Bank and higher judiciary”. Whether such institutions are so naïve as to believe whatever they are fed is a moot point.

Historian Romila Thapar, who petitioned the Supreme Court against the house arrest of five Left-leaning activists – Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha – has urged the government to define the phrase ‘Urban Naxal’, heard in the context of the Elgaar Parishad case in Maharashtra related to the Bhima Koregaon violence of January 1, 2018. Following an application by India Today TV under the Right to Information Act, the Left-Wing Extremism division of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs revealed that it does not have any information on ‘Urban Naxals’ or their activities.

To examine the issue closely, it is worthwhile to check cases of activism standing in the way of infrastructure development.

Modi has for years held ‘Urban Naxals’ guilty for stopping the Sardar Sarovar dam, around which the Narmada Bachao Andolan was spearheaded by Medha Patkar and Baba Amte along with groups of farmers, tribals, environmentalists and rights activists. Surely, they were no Naxals.

An NGO fighting for the indigenous Kondh tribal community of the Niyamgiri Hills region in Odisha was accused of having “Maoist connections” simply because it resisted the lust of major corporations for mining the area’s bauxite reserves, given its ecological implications.

In Dandeli in Karnataka, which has become notorious for infrastructure and industrial activities at the cost of ecological degradation in the region, an environmental activist protesting against projects such as the proposed construction of a seventh dam on the Kali River was murdered, which was highlighted by the media and brought negative international attention.

India has witnessed a three-fold increase in the killing of environmental and land rights activists since 2016, according to a report by Global Witness. We are now fourth in the global ranking of countries in which environmental activists face violence.

The Bishnoi Movement at Khejarli, in Rajasthan’s Marwar area, to prevent sacred trees from being cut down by the king’s soldiers for the construction of a new palace dates back to the early 18th century. If that is a little too far back in history, the Chipko movement in the early 1970s to defend the Himalayan forests in Chamoli district, and later at Tehri-Garhwal district of Uttarakhand which constitutes the central Himalayan region, against destruction is one of the early instances of environmental activism in independent India. Chipko was a milestone not only for its being a war for the locals for fundamental survival but also for its adherence to Gandhi’s non-violent tradition. By the definition of the current regime, the Chipko movement leaders such as Sundarlal Bahuguna, Gaura Devi, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Govind Singh Rawat, Dhoom Singh Negi, Shamsher Singh Bisht and Ghanasyam Raturi (ah, the poet, the pen-wielding ‘Naxal type’) would all be called ‘Urban Naxals’ today. Perhaps even Jayaprakash Narayan, whose 1960s Sarvodaya movement inspired the Chipko movement, would be called that.

If we were to insist on a parallel to India, where environmental activism is blamed for stalling development, there is the instance of Brazil. Global Witness in 2020 ranked Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro the fourth most-dangerous country for environmental activism, based on documented killings of environmental defenders, some three quarters of such happening in the Amazon region. It estimated that some 227 environmental activists were killed in 2020 alone, expressing fear that the number of unreported cases could be much higher. Environmentalists say that loggers, miners and land-grabbers got to invade protected indigenous lands with direct patronage from Bolsonaro, whose responsibility it was to monitor the environment and enforce laws to protect the forest.

In India, the Adivasi peoples across states have to defend their lands against the onslaught of a massive corporate and governmental mining rush. Small wonder that environmentalists are sued, threatened, jailed or even murdered when their activities disrupt organised crime and other illegal profiteering.

According to the Global Climate Index report based on the data from 2000-2019, India held a prominent place in the list of countries worst affected by the climate crisis. In this era of ecological devastation and growing inequality, capitalism’s logic of endless growth and the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer pockets is plain unsustainable. If the chief grouse of our PM is that environmental hyperventilation stands in the way of ‘development’, the flip side is a scenario of mindless industrial boom and industrial development, guided often by corporate greed and corruption, with little or no environmental thought, in flagrant violation of government legislation protecting the environment. What we need is balance, not the Prime Minister raging against one side and coining disparaging terms such as ‘Urban Naxals’.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based
commentator on geopolitical affairs,
development and cultural issues)