The search and seizure operation at the residences of 46 journalists associated with NewsClick and the arrests of two people are transparently part of the same politics that resulted in the invention of the still ambiguous phrases ‘tukde-tukde gang’ and ‘Urban Naxal’.Sohail Hashmi, Prabir Purkayastha, D. Raghunandan and Urmilesh are my JNU contemporaries of the 1970s-1980s. Abhisar Sharma invited me to NDTV to discuss Naxalism and Indian politics a few times and I interacted with Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in seminars. A friend since 1973, Sohail Hashmi and I resided in the newly-constructed Kaveri hostel at JNU. From a leftist freedom fighter family and a member of the Students Federation of India, our political convictions differed. Yet, a rewardingly amalgamating political atmosphere brought most of us together. Political lines did not matter even during the JNU Students’ Union (JNUSU) elections. His transformation into a cultural historian post-JNU and his activism under SAHMAT with sister Shabnam continue. However, his being part of any anti-national activity is as much true as Kabir, Guru Nanak Dev and Baba Gorakhnath discoursing spirituality together!Prabir Purkayastha was also a prominent student activist of the SFI at the JNU campus. A cultured soft-spoken, ever-smiling personality, his ideology never came between personal friendship across the political spectrum. He was a remarkably motivating speaker whenever we gathered to discuss national or international politics. I vividly remember his kidnap-style arrest in front of the School of Languages building on the old campus on September 25, 1975 during the Emergency. An Ambassador car driven by Indira Gandhi’s henchman DIG P.S. Bhinder himself stopped near him and he was dragged in. As he was driven off, the late Professor K. Seshadri of the CPS lunged forward but the car raced past him, all but running him over. But despite the allegations about NewsClick‘s funding from Neville Roy Singham, his being part of any anti-India design is as strong as any myth passed on as history today. In the late 1980s, we met once a month at the Vasant Valley School where our children went.K. Raghunandan, an aeronautical engineer from the Rolls, who came to the Centre for the Study of Social Systems to do an M.Phil in 1977, is the director of Delhi Science Forum and is engaged in Innovation Technology. My personal contacts with him have been few and far between. He was an SFI member and was elected president of JNUSU. I would really be shocked if the charges of anti-national activities against him are proven.Urmilesh was several years my junior. I remember him as an unassuming, smiling, soft personality. Our meetings post-JNU were in academic or social gatherings. As a Hindi journalist, he has remained a prolific writer with substance and style, but he did not ever write anything that could be called treason. We also shared a dais on panel discussions a few times.Can any of these or the 40-odd others be termed an ‘Urban Naxal’? Far from it. But let me also demolish the myth of this nomenclature.A protest against the Delhi police’s swoop on journalists and others associated with NewsClick, at the Press Club of India, October 4, 2023. Photo: Yaqut Ali/The WireFrom Naxalism to ‘Urban Naxal’: the incongruitiesA new category of dissenters, deprecated as anti-nationals, is ‘Urban Naxal’. This came into use since the Elgar Parishad case in 2018. A meeting of human rights activists, lawyers and others in Pune on December 31, 2017, known as the Elgar Parishad and meant to commemorate the bicentenary of the Bhima Koregaon battle, turned into a pretext to round up a number of ‘leftist’ activists under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). Several continue to be imprisoned even today. Since they had defended persons falsely implicated of being Naxals, the invented incongruous nomenclature of ‘Urban Naxal’ is given to them.It is incongruous because the term ‘Naxal’ was used without an understanding of what Naxalims is. Let me use my two research papers – ‘India’s Experiment with Revolution’ and ‘Old Revolution, New Context: Maoism in a Globalizing India’ – to explain. The latter was quoted by Justice B. Sudershan Reddy of the Supreme Court in the Salwa Judum judgment in July 2011 to highlight the socio-economic inequalities that led to ‘Naxalism’.In brief, the attempted Marxist-Maoist ‘revolution’ began in 1946 in Telangana, died there in 1951 due to the impact of the bhoodan movement by Acharya Vinoba Bhave, re-emerged in 1967 in Naxalbari (hence Naxalism) village in north West Bengal, was crushed there by the beginning of the 1970s, sprouted in Srikakulam (Andhra Pradesh) in the 1970s, spread further from there. And gradually between the 1980s and the beginning of the millennium, when the CPI (Maoist) was formed (2003), it affected over 200 of over 600 districts in Andhra Pradesh (undivided), Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh (undivided), Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. I identified three root causes of this ‘revolution’: (i) development deficit, (ii) development dichotomy and (iii) displacement-rehabilitation hiatus. The conflict for land and resources has been at the root of the grassroots support and its expansion in the country. Even the erstwhile Planning Commission study (2006) pointed to these issues.However, despite a brief attempt in the 1960s, it never had an urban impact. However, the urban Marxist intelligentsia did work for the defence of those tribal and rural citizens who were caught in the collateral zone and were harassed and arrested by the police. The Indian state since 2014 turned astringent against this intellectual support base consisting of lawyers, journalists, university teachers, civil rights activists and social workers. Since this section also opposed the saffron politics, they were dubbed ‘Urban Naxals’, incongruities therein notwithstanding. Even though this disconsonant term has not been used, the methodology of the current crack-down remains the same.In brief, whether or not this nomenclature is used, the mindset of the powers that be is working on these lines. However, a case against any of these people for being either a deshdrohi or an ‘Urban Naxal’ is far from the truth. Ajay K. Mehra is a political scientist. He was Atal Bihari Vajpayee Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2019-21 and Principal, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Evening College, Delhi University (2018).
