Presentation at the Hyderabad Seminar, 9-10 August 2024

An extended war of extermination of adivasis is going on in India. Where resistance by adivasis (called Bhumkaal) is at its sharpest, most political, challenging the sovereign writ of the Indian deep state and world imperialism — it is in this faultline that the extermination intensifies, slipping into what looks like genocidal intent. Remember how the International Criminal Court made a big deal about “intent” — Israel’s genocide in Gaza versus the “intent” at genocide. In the case we are considering, the “intent” is surely there, even though the scale of military mobilisation might be limited by the given conditions. Israeli weaponry is being actively used in central India, showing clear connections with world imperialism.

This intent is clear from the targeted aerial bombings conducted in Bastar. It is also clear from the following operations, military operations: Operation Green Hunt, Operation Samadhan Prahar, Operation Kagar. These Operations are carried out against the adivasi resistance against big capital in Bastar, Gadchiroli and adjoining areas in the Dandakaranya forests. The attack on the resistance is an attack on adivasi life itself.

Unlike most other “failing democracies”, India is supposed to uphold the doctrine of the basic structure of the Constitution: with vigilant Courts, robust Parliament, civil society and media. Fundamental rights are a key component of the basic structure doctrine. The Chief Justice of India,

DY Chandrachud, recently called the doctrine a North Star “which guides and gives a certain direction to the interpreters and implementers of the Constitution when the path ahead is convoluted.” This doctrine is supposed to keep the basic principles of constitutional democracy in place, making sure we do not diverge from them.

However, it seems like an impossible task to recognise the obvious point that Operation Kagar violates the fundamental rights of adivasis; it violates the separation of powers since the government of the day does not put up this policy for deliberation in Parliament, nor does the Constitutional Courts intervene to decide on its constitutionality; and, above all, it violates the basic principle that a state cannot wage war against its own citizens.

The intellectual class’s refusal to recognise the severity of the extermination process is mind boggling. Through a kind of erasure if not straightforward denial, the “democratic idea of India” thereby continues miraculously unblemished in the face of these abominations!

We want to ask: is Operation Kagar and the extermination of adivasis life consistent with the basic structure doctrine of the Indian Constitution?

2.

Just in the recent elections to the Parliament, the main plank of some of the biggest political parties was “Save Democracy, Save Constitution”!

These two slogans have occupied our headspace of late. They are regarded as the touchstone of progressive politics in the country, part of the liberal pundit’s incessant call to defend the democratic idea of India. We hear it said that the RSS, the BJP, violate the constitution and democracy. For example, when it is said that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was unconstitutional, an assault on democracy. Or that Hindutva is against the very spirit of the Constitution.

¹ “All India Seminar on Adivasi Rights, Corporate Destruction, Solidarity Movements”, Solidarity Forum for Adivasi Rights Struggle, Hyderabad.

But we do not for some reason hear it said, surely not in the same breath, that Operation Kagar or Operation Green Hunt is against the constitution, against democracy. That Operation Samadhar Prahar is unconstitutional.

At the very least, the urgency of connecting opposition to Operation Green Hunt with the necessity to Save Democracy and the Constitution is lacking. Indeed, the idea of India itself was not considered to be in peril even though Operation Green Hunt along with the vigilante Salwa Judum unleashed a genocidal violence in adivasi areas during 2009-14

When confronted with the extra-constitutional violence of Operation Green Hunt, maybe we think of conducting a fact-finding investigation. Fake encounters and fact-finding almost rhyme in our heads, the one is followed by the latter — they are like the building blocks of the civil liberties movement on the ground. But I have often felt that “fact-finding” assumes that something has happened “there” for which the facts of the case must first be collected and highlighted in order to “make our case”. No problem with that.

However, this suffers from what can be called the empiricism of “case-to-case” basis. It is as though without the “facts” we cannot make a case about the necessary relation between the “normal” functioning of democracy and constitution, and extra-legal violence so frequently deployed by the state. Each time we must “prove the case”, we cannot come to any conclusion or theoretical insight for us to be able to act with any force to change the situation. What is going on? Why should this be so?

The problem seems to be this again: Fighting Hindutva is about saving the soul of India’s democracy. Opposing Operation Kagar is about throwing extra light on what is always taken to be an unblemished and eternally beautiful soul of India’s democracy!

3.

Now I am not arguing that, well let us uphold the Constitution and democracy such that we can stop Operation Kagar. No. What I am saying is that the operation of the constitutional democracy has it in its DNA things like Operation Kagar. That it is precisely constitutional democracy which internally generates “exceptions” of extra-legal violence. The extra-judicial killings or laws like the UAPA might not even be extra-judicial or extra-legal. It could be intra-judicial, intra-legal. Let us clarify.

Ramachandra Guha has openly suggested that the democratic idea of India might find it necessary to use extra-legal violence to suppress the revolutionary movement. [Any revolutionary political space outside of the caged terrain of constitutional democracy is dismissed, nay demonised as, “the cult of the gun”!] This amounts to saying that Operation Kagar might be part of the necessary paraphernalia of the Constitution and democracy, if not their true spirit. It is like the story of the 300 Spartans who value liberty and democracy but must now go to war to defeat the Persians — a story repeated by the votaries of Western democracy.

So the extra-judicial turns out to be part of the internal or inner logic of constitutional democracy. Extra-judicial in theory, but intra-judicial in practice. De jure extra-judicial, de facto intra-judicial.

4.

Save Democracy, Save Constitution, one might argue, can be understood as part of a politics of United Front. The INDIA Alliance of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections is an example. I do not want to dismiss the strategy of United Front right away — not at all. But we must ask: Can we then deploy the strategy of United Front in order to fight Operation Kagar, if not to find a pathway towards the intensification of the revolutionary movement?

I am sure the civil liberties movement must have noted the absurdities and possibilities of such a united front when P. Chidambaram recently tweeted in support of G. N. Saibaba’s bail and release. Following from it, I had earlier asked why the Congress’s Bharat Jodo Yatra avoided going into Bastar

and connecting with the people’s struggle in places like Silger, Bechapal, Modonar, Sarkeguda and Gompad. Would that not have strengthened the united front Alliance against the oppressive Modi government? A journalist named Mandeep Punia had in fact posed this question to Rahul Gandhi. We are still waiting for real answers.

This is what happens when the field of politics is constituted around the post-2014 division between liberals and authoritarians, such that the liberals tend to come closer to certain progressive and even revolutionary tendencies. Liberals led by the Congress after 2014 showed this shift when Rahul Gandhi visited Hyderabad Central University to join the protests against Rohith Vemula’s institutional murder. Many think of it as a left-ward shift of the Congress. On the other side, the BJP tries to paint the Congress and sections of the Opposition as “urban Naxals” — a trend started by Arun Jaitley, who was of course part of the Lutyens elite. All of this does mean that the anti-BJP Opposition tends to naturally shift towards the left — but one must not take this shift seriously or rather one must view it tactically, dialectically.

However, from our perspective the liberal versus authoritarian framework also means that the contradiction between these two camps is highlighted while overlooking their unity. That is the unity of the political class with respect to the core interests of capital and the state. That is why again Operation Kagar never gets opposed by even the anti-authoritarian opposition in Parliament. That is why the Bharat Jodo Yatra avoided the places of people’s resistance in Bastar.

We also have smaller regional versions of united front. For example, when in 2010-11, Mahasweta Devi and Mamata Banerji spoke the same language of Porivorton. The revolutionary movement then must figure out which way to go — or refuse to choose between what might effectively be non-choices thrown by the slippery-slope contingencies of mainstream politics. For it seems fairly clear that it is the highest dharma of Constitution and Democracy is to crush the revolutionary movement.

5.

Here is then my proposition: the dominant discourses seek to place Operation Green Hunt and Operation Kagar outside the pale of politics. As though these are part of a “natural” response to a certain kind of stimuli. As though no one is taking a decision here. The political class and the ruling party acts as though they have not seen or heard anything.

Have we heard a debate in Parliament on Operation Kagar or earlier on Operation Greenhunt? There are such firebrand Members of Parliament now. None of the political parties, be it the ruling or Opposition parties, be they communal or secular, ever call for a debate on this issue. Unless when specifically pressured by civil society activists, the political class and its leaders never want to address this issue. It is very much like the elephant in the room.

Even if it is in support of Operation Kagar, let them say it, let them take a position. Let the media debate it, cover it. Let the commentators acknowledge that it exists. The aerial bombings in Bastar should be a matter of debate in Parliament. Even the state government of Chhattisgarh during the chief ministership of Bhupesh Baghel seem to deny that they were in the loop about these bombings, thereby making it appear that it was carried out by really secretive functionaries of the Home Ministry or PMO at the highest echelons.

It is cowardly on the part of the Indian democratic establishment and the opposition forces to let the extermination of adivasis happen on the sly. In avoiding a political debate, they are accepting that they are politically bankrupt and are ruling by dint of force. They cannot face scrutiny and deliberation. And if indeed the deep state must carry out such secretive operations outside the pale of politics, outside of all constitutional norms, purely for the preservation of the political system as a whole and hence towards which all the mainstream political players must stand in unison — then we want to hear that said, uttered or articulated. Otherwise, we will be forced to think of Operation Kagar not as an exception to the rule of law and the constitution, but rather their essential kernel, their hidden underside forbidden to public view and scrutiny.

It is easier for the Dhruv Rathees to lampoon Ambani weddings than to ask questions about Operation Kagar — even though the accumulated capital of Ambani or Adani is enabled in the first place by Operation Kagar and Operation Green Hunt.

Not that it is a puzzle, something we cannot understand as to why this is the case. Far from it. Just keep in mind what was revealed by the Electoral Bond expose just before the Lok Sabha elections. Companies like Vedanta, instrumental in the destruction of adivasi lives, had given money to Opposition parties. While the Opposition attacked Adani’s nexus with the Modi government, Vedanta was spared any such attack.

Huge amounts of surplus capital accumulated through genocidal violence against the adivasis is ploughed into funding the electoral campaigns of political parties. The blood money sustains the everyday life of India’s constitutional democracy. We are reminded of what Karl Marx once said about the truth of the “very Eden of the innate rights of man”. “It is”, he said, “the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.” Yes, Property! The lesson is that the Fundamental Rights of the basic doctrine of the Constitution is inseparable from the rule of capital, from Operation Kagar.

The upshot is the following. In not allowing Operation Kagar to be part of political deliberation, a particular message is being conveyed. This is what makes Operation Kagar an “Operation” — that it is a necessary and undebatable aspect of Indian democracy. The revolutionary movement’s call for “election boycott” must be understood in this light.

6.

For clarity let us consider the term extra-judicial which is a key term deployed by the civil liberties movement.

We all know the significance of the term. First off, we immediately recognise that the term opens up space for civil liberties movement. This movement is dear to a lot of us. And yet we must unpack this conjugation and raise some questions.

We must also ask: when has the constitution ever worked without the extra-judicial? We cannot forget for example that right at the time of the founding of the Republic, the “Father of the Nation” was shot and killed. Alongside it, we cannot forget that the repressive might of the state was deployed in Telangana, even as the Constitution was being written. The democratic idea of India is therefore always constituted in the moment of the sovereign exceptional violence, such that the extra-judicial is also intra-judicial. Law is always constituted by non-law, something which Walter Benjamin pointed out already in the 1920s in Germany, as fascism was gathering steam.

As we noted, however, the term extra-judicial opens up the space for civil liberties activism. The challenge then is: how does one uphold the notion of intra-judicial and yet retain the space of civil liberties intervention based on the notion of the extra-judicial. Or rather it is better to put this way: how does one retain the notion of the extra-judicial and yet work within the horizon of revolutionary politics?

In the case of the legal struggle around the Bhima Koregaon arrests, I had occasion to reflect on precisely this last point in the pages of Monthly Review magazine. The legal struggle to seek bail might look very limited, but we have to ask if there is a way in which a “limited struggle” can still work within the horizon of a larger politics of social transformation.

7.

Arundhati Roy’s term, “the bio-diversity of resistance”, comes to mind. However the space of this bio-diversity must not seen as a flat one, in additive terms, where you keep on adding new ones without qualitative shifts and ruptures. We must see the space of this bio-diversity as internally differentiated, uneven and undergoing constant churning. One or only a few elements might be more dominant than the rest, at any given point in time. This means that there might be times when the possibilities

opened up by revolutionary movement might strengthen what looks like very limited legal struggles or sectional struggles. We know how gram sabhas have worked far more effectively when they even minimally partake of the fires of the revolutionary struggle. It is perfectly fine to give precedence to the revolutionary movement over other movements.

In areas without any adjacent revolutionary movement, the gram sabhas have often been a total sham, as the balance of political forces are in favour of big capital and the police state. What the Constitution mandates itself might work better in the light of energies that might emanate from real “non- constitutional” struggles on the ground. Or for that matter how the Bharat Jodo Yatra could have been catapulted to a new height if it had dared to stop by at Silger or Sarkeguda, or Gompad or Bechapal. Bio-diversity of resistance and the horizontality it assumes then must be seen as criss-crossing with singularity and a salubrious verticality.

Lenin’s singular contribution, if you recall, has been to see the working class as internally differentiated

— such a perspective allows us to think in terms of revolutionary strategy and tactics based on social class and social consciousness. It also allows us to break with populist notions of the People, Democracy, Civil Society and so on. It allows us to think dialectically by focusing on internal contradictions. One divides into Two.

Such would be the terrain wherein we must try to work out the relationship between civil liberties activism and the revolutionary movement.

We would then in effect be able to confront the iron law of constitutional democracies that seek to outlaw the class struggle, push it outside the pale of politics. This basic gesture creates what looks an acceptable space for the use of exceptional violence, extra-legal violence by the state in such a way that routine Parliamentary democracy continues as though nothing has happened. Thus the new Parliament in India refuses to discuss Operation Kagar and the ongoing extermination of adivasis. Where then even left-wing activists have to play along as now they end up presenting the intra-judicial, that which is actually internal to the functioning of democracy and rule of law, as merely an aberration, an exception, as “extra-judicial”.

No wonder, then, what seem to be progressive slogans of Save Democracy and Save Constitution then does not contain within it the call to end Operation Samadhan Prahar. As things stand today, it is easier to give calls to protect democracy and constitution but not so easy to give calls to stop the war against the adivasis.

We need to reverse this tendency.

Operation Kagar and earlier, Operation Samadhan Prahar and Operation Green Hunt have come to win tacit acceptance of all political parties in the Parliament of India. This is absolutely unacceptable and we must today pass a resolution against it, so that our message goes loud and clear.

Otherwise, we must be prepared to face the reality of another Bhumkal, the time of the earth (bhum), the time of Gundadhur, the time of the adivasi.