The US war against Vietnam was the rallying point, set against the backdrop of a student revolution in France.
In India, the Sino-Indian war in 1962 and the far-flung effects of the Cuban missile crisis, leading to the confrontation of the USA and the erstwhile USSR, rattled the ‘fragile unity’ of Indian communists, causing the first break-up in 1964 and more fatally in 1967, leading to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). That was precisely the beginning of a new chapter of revolutionary politics in India that was markedly different from the days of revolutionary ‘terrorism’ in India, which was strongly nationalistic in character.
Dilip Simeon brings alive memories of those dizzy days when a group of starry-eyed students of Delhi’s elite Mission College — Mohan, Pranav, Rathin, Sin Taw and Divya — internalise the idea of revolution and choose to become its foot-soldiers. Their revolution fails — doomed as it was to — but not before slices of life encountered in slums, small towns and many dispossessed villages across India confront them with hitherto unknown perspectives. The foremost among which was the nebulous question: was violence necessary to create a just society?
The strong point of this novel is the clinical precision in narrating the situation on the ground, never ever losing sight of the larger picture. Deeply polemical and sharply insightful, the novel tries to prick many holes into the ideological contradictions of Naxalism that had a dim understanding of its class enemies and its politics of hate — and the subservience of its adherents to the Communist Party of China, often at odds with ground realities in India. The contradictions came to a head when a military junta ravaged East Pakistan, leading to the creation of what is now Bangladesh.
Past many a churning like no revolution can be imposed on those condemned to live a life like the peasantry in Purnea in Bihar (‘strenuous manual labour was not conducive to listening to recitations from the Red Book’) and that Muslims in Bengal were more drawn to religion than to revolution and that revolution must negate love — the way Pranav turns off his tender passions in a carnal moment with Divya (‘Love demanded normality, but normality was the opiated name for the System’), it turned out that revolution might also come to mean a negation of life. The society must be cured of injustices but the campus revolutionaries do not remain as certain about the fixities of violence as a means to change it.
Frankly, revolution appeals. Amitav Ghosh’s Hungry Tide explores the life of a failed revolutionary, Nirmal, whose idealism was shattered in the altar of reality. V S Naipaul has said many things on ‘failed’ revolutions in innumerable novels, including Magic Seeds. One can recall Octavio Paz here, whose prototypal utopia was the Spain of 1937. Paz had glimpsed a society which was not gripped in a life-denying ideology. The Mexican Revolution failed through, being too narrowly ‘political’. No ‘vital order’ was created, which might co-ordinate a world vision of a just, free society.
Many of the revolutionaries of yesterday are today’s doctrinaire idealists and stage-hopping socialites. The dream to have a better society ended, or so it seemed, in an internecine spiral of reprisal and violence, police encounters and liquidation of ‘class enemies’. The state did not wither, the comprador class did not cease to exist, but neither could the seeds of revolutionary politics be snuffed out.
As of 2009, Naxalites were said to be ‘active’ across approximately 220 districts in 20 states of India, accounting for about 40 per cent of India’s geographical area and Maoists have been adjudged as the greatest security threat to India. So, if one thought that the modern age has gone past the ‘zeitgeist’ of revolution that afflicted a few of the worthies like Nikolai Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Grigori Zinoviev of Russia; Chu Teh, Lui Shao-ch’i, Lin Piao, and Mao Tse-tung of China; Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, Troung Chinh, and Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam; Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara of Cuba before, it would be a serious mistake. After all, there are a wider number of people in India who failed to be co-opted by the ‘system’ and thus remain outside the kinship of privilege.
Revolution highway
Dilip Simeon
Penguin
2010, pp 201
Rs 299