Alishan Jafri

Urban naxalism is one of the many salient major threats that new India faces apart from the minor ones like poverty, rapes, saffron fanaticism, lynchings, hate speech, farmer suicides, children dying due to lack of oxygen in hospitals, riots, an undeclared emergency, unprecedented attacks on muslims, dalits, public intellectuals, political opposition and journalists etc. I as a sane citizen of this nation understand this grave threat in its true sense.

First of all, our jails are full of people from the depressed sections of society. Most of them are under trials since years. However, what we fail to see here is that our jails give a roof to so many muslims, dalits and tribals. They (the intellectuals) keep crying for dalits and muslims but they don’t want them to enjoy the social security that our jails offer. How can these urban naxals be so cruel? Why do they want to take away their shelter and make them homeless again?

The current onslaught on activists/lawyers who redundantly take stands for the ‘vulnerable other’ makes them so fearful. This is exactly not what advocate Indira Jaising foolishly calls it- ‘an attempt to kill the defense of the defenseless’. Tell me if you can think, will the defenseless be safer in jail or outside it? It is certain that the move to quell this artificial dissent is as big a masterstroke as demonetization. Everyday these urban naxal journalists, professors and writers pollute young brains who otherwise have the opportunity to join nationalist organizations like the satan sanstha. They can visit it to learn the art of making indigenous pistols and swadeshi bombs that can be used in case we have a war with Pakistan or at least unleash a Kasganj, Koregaon, Kathua or Una. The satan sanstha still hold press conferences to make us even more nationalist than Thou.

I am thankful that I could listen to a newslaundry interview where a maoist expert said that 40% Indians are urban naxals. His figures are impeccable, contrary to what the black hearted curly haired satirist anchor wanted you to believe. This figure is not as shocking as the sudden appearance of Atal Bihari Vajpayee on all the DUSU posters of the ABVP. I am a DU student and it is really satisfying to see nationalist organizations promise students, an urban naxal crackdown on campus once they come to power. It is the most important thing to be tackled. Issues like increasing fees, HECI, women safety, student rights and the recent attacks on students in various colleges are redundant. DSJ, my own college, that charges the maximum fees for minimum facilities in the entire Delhi University is a non issue for every student political organization. No one talks about how efficiently public education has deteriorated in the recent times.

These virulent intellectuals even criticise men who have died for the nation. Had they not killed Akhlaq, I and you would not have known of Dadri. Similarly I only came to know of Palwal because of Junaid’s lynching. How on earth would have these places become smart without getting famous? Why can’t fellow citizens whose ancestors forcefully stayed back in ‘47, pay the rent by dying and make their homeland great again. I really hate this Urban naxal scepticism. When Muslims are ready to be sidelined/ humiliated/ killed for the greater good of a would be majoritarian India, these urban naxals shamelessly talk about sickularism. How can they stoop so low?

Maybe the 40 percent Indians who somehow have access to the Internet or TV are so urban naxal that they still feel pained about Pehlu Khan and Rakhbar who have managed to get so much media attention for Alwar. A land where an eight year old innocent Asifa’s killers and rapists get immunity by ministers taking out marches with the tricolour. Despite the fact that these ministers admitted to have acted in consequence of clear orders from the ‘high command’, we were keen to have the PM speak up. Forcing people to speak and take stands, when they don’t want to, is absurd to those urban naxals. Firstly he did not utter a word for weeks but after all the struggle when he rose up to condemn, still it was hard to ascertain what made him lose his ferocious eloquence. If he did not wish to speak we should have let it be; it would have gone down in history, although it is interesting to hear him out! He neither condemned his ministers who took out marches in support nor did he object to the use of tricolour for such a vile cause. His generic statement made everybody happy: the accused’s side and victim’s side; both.

Although the urban naxal audience was rendered unimpressed by this monotonous but cute rhetoric. It was rather disturbing to them. We don’t need to imagine how dangerous that assassination plot letter was, or how dangerous the guns/weapons in the allegedly stolen catalogue are, for 2 reasons. First: one does not need to imagine or dream of reality. We should endure it, resist it, we may like or dislike it but we ought not to ignore it. Second: As they say that imagination is the beginning of creation, however in our case it is the beginning of the end. It is evident that anyone cannot simply search about them on the internet.

When you knit the horrors of people around you into a narrative it is cardinal to restrain your intellectual scrutiny within a pragmatic frame of reference, with which you can distinguish between your present misery and your wounds from the past. Doing so is a difficult task as often the ambits of our past overlap with our present. This may be due to either a consciously architected mala fide intent of an ideology, person, group, myths, and history itself that plagues the masses or due to a prolonged period of agony like that in Palestine, where there is a constancy of pain that has detained their ability to tell apart their sorrows of the past from their present plight. New India has incorporated this feature to paralyze our discourse.

We keep looking for issues that can divert the attention of public. Apart from Urban Naxals there maybe libero-jihadists, urban-saffronists and others hiding in our cities. Who knows? We need another book on these untouched political subjects as well.

These species are yet to be discovered. New Indian political taxonomists can do that in a matter of hours.

Nonetheless history remains the only instrument to gauge anomalous developments in the society. We have had examples. of how the critics of the erstwhile dictatorial regimes were silenced before democracy died there. We have seen and lived through the emergency. Urban naxalism crackdown on TV debates is an attempt make India great again. The list of urban naxals is out on Twitter. Those researchers who have made this list know what it can lead to. Our patriotic mobs can be easily incited to kill these urban naxals. Real courts take so much time to prosecute and it even asks for concrete evidence to pronounce a sentence. Is that really necessary? We all know that how the doctored tapes at JNU produced anti-nationals on 9th feb, 2016. Why can’t our courts understand what so many of us seem to desire? On the other hand our great Media courts seem to have sentenced them to death. Lastly, are we fed up of being democratic? Come on, it’s been 70 years; ‘ let us just move on’ remains the only audible message in the silence that sorroundings all this Urban Naxal talk.