Terms of Trade | Lessons from a Maoist balladeer’s state funeral
Maoist ideologue Gummadi Vittal Rao's death is a reminder of a time of feudal violence. Why do we not see such radical political figures/movements today?
On August 7, Gummadi Vittal Rao, better known as Gaddar, was laid to rest with full state honours in Telangana. Leaders from many political parties, including the chief minister of the state, lined up to pay their respect to the cultural icon and rabble-rouser par excellence.
The irony could not have been bigger. Gaddar is among the most popular icons of Maoist ideology in India, which describes the Indian State as an oppressive machinery, and finds parliamentary democracy to be a sham. In fact, it is said that Gaddar’s body carried a bullet from an alleged assassination attempt on him by the police. According to a PTI report, Gaddar voted for the first time only in 2018.
The Communist Party of India (Maoist), to be sure, had severed its ties with Gaddar in 2012, although a purported statement by the underground banned outfit has condoled his death. “Our party served a show-cause notice on Gaddar over his relations with the ruling parties in contrast to the party’s guidelines, and subsequently he resigned from the party in 2012. Our party accepted his resignation,” the CPI Maoist statement said according to a report published in The Hindu.
Gaddar’s mass popularity, especially among the poor who need not have taken up arms at the call of the Maoists, is among the highest ever as far as public figures who have actively advocated the cause of Maoism in India are concerned. To this author’s mind, his charisma, especially in Andhra Pradesh, is comparable only to that of late ideologue Vinod Mishra whose funeral procession in 1998 is said to be among the biggest the city of Patna has ever seen. Mishra, who was the general secretary of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation from 1975 to 1998, is credited with engineering the democratisation of an underground armed party in the late 1980s and early 1990s via the Indian People’s Front (IPF) experiment. Cadres of the CPI (ML) Liberation initially started contesting elections on the IPF’s platform in Bihar. Liberation is the biggest left group — relatively speaking; it is still smaller than the mainstream parties — in the state today.
To be sure, neither Gaddar nor Vinod Mishra’s Liberation are factors to reckon with as far as the larger political economy of today’s India is concerned. However, the popularity of personalities like Gaddar or Vinod Mishra, and the subsequent marginalisation of their political legacy/appeal, especially in electoral politics, should be seen as a result of the success, rather than the failure of their political projects.
When people of Gaddar’s and Mishra’s generation took up Maoist politics, India, as a society, especially in its villages, was an extremely oppressive society. Agrarian relations were still predominantly feudal, although capitalist development was slowly but surely taking root. The lack of capitalist development outside agriculture meant that an overwhelming share of the rural poor, especially those at the bottom of the social pyramid had no option but to work on land owned by upper caste or dominant groups whose exploitation did not restrict itself to the economic sphere.
The 1960s and 1970s were mired in an orgy of socio-economic violence which was driven by the dialectics of the social-economic underclass pushing back against the oppressive practices of the feudal elite.
The Maoists were not the only groups pushing back against such oppression. In states such as West Bengal and Kerala, it was the CPI (Marxist) which reaped the political rewards of land struggles without giving up on parliamentary politics. In states such as Bihar, backward class leaders from socialist formations played an important role in such struggles. The eventual fate of such political formations notwithstanding — the CPI (M) is almost extinct from West Bengal and the radical socialist stream in Bihar has been usurped by family-based dominant OBC parties such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal — almost all these political projects have made the current social, economic and political milieu more egalitarian than what would have been the case without them.
Why do we not see such radical political figures/movements today? At the risk of provoking a lot of people, this author would like to argue that the kind of discrimination and oppression which existed in the 1960s and 1970s simply does not exist in today’s India. While it is nobody’s case that caste or class violence or discrimination does not exist today, it can be said with a lot of conviction that the impunity which the perpetrators of such violence enjoyed back then simply does not exist today. At least three factors can be listed to explain why this has happened.
As India’s democratic system, based on universal franchise matured, the socially weaker sections have become far more politically empowered. All serious political parties today understand the importance of appealing to the hitherto weak social groups given their numerical significance among India’s electorate. In order to make this outreach sound sincere, all parties, willingly or unwillingly, have had to accommodate the concerns of dignity/representation of these social groups. The state paying its respect to someone like Gaddar by according to him a state funeral is nothing but an attempt to show itself on the right side of the historical battle for the dignity of the underclass in India.
Second is the gradual atrophying of economic power of the rural feudal elite with fragmentation of land holdings and the declining importance of an increasingly crisis-ridden farming. Today it is not very uncommon to see descendants of hitherto landlord families being forced to take up the same kind of manual work as their erstwhile tenants in urban areas. In other words, a lot of yesterday’s oppressors in Indian villages are themselves being exploited in the non-farm economy today. It will be a gross oversight if one does not admit the progressive disruption which welfare programmes such as the public distribution system and rural employment guarantee have created in tilting the balance of economic power in favour of the poor in Indian villages. The landlord’s threat of forcing a poor person to starve by evicting him from tenancy is not much of a threat due to such policies.
The third factor that has made this possible, and it is a big irony, is the rapid stride India has made on the path of capitalist development in the last three decades. While the post-reform economic trajectory has had many shortfalls, especially in terms of generating adequate jobs, high growth rates have given a fiscal boost to the state, thus making it possible to fund various welfare programmes including PDS and MGNREGS discussed above. While some people might quarrel with the point that India’s tax-GDP ratio has not seen a big jump, it needs to be kept in mind that the fiscal pool for such spending would have been much smaller had the GDP growth been lower than what it has been in the past three decades.
To cut a long story short, the average Indian poor have much less reason to give up completely on the deal the State has to offer and take up arms than they had in the 1960s and 1970s. The only exodus which is still attractive to the poor is the rural-to-urban exodus and there, the Indian State has been pragmatic enough to not impose restrictions as China has done. The only exception to this general trend is remote pockets where the fruits of development and democracy are yet to reach or where factors such as mineral wealth have created incentives for the state to unleash dispossession and repression on the local population.
Does the discussion so far mean that there are no reasons for socio-economic discontent in India or that discrimination does not exist anymore? Nothing could be further from the truth.
The biggest success and failure of the India growth story today is that it has (just about) managed to make sure that all citizens, no matter how poor, can be assured of basic calorie requirements and a dwelling. Everything else, from nutritious diets and quality education to jobs, healthcare and social security continues to remain out of reach for an overwhelming share of the population.
If the Indian economy cannot ensure a much higher growth rate than what it has been able to achieve in the recent past, there is good reason to believe that most of these problems will not be solved. The politically salient point, however, is that most of the poor are invested in the market economy and not in political struggle, to fulfil these aspirations. Articulation of this struggle in the realm of the political by poetry and songs, without any disrespect to the love and respect which cultural icons like Gaddar commanded from the masses is a far more difficult task than leading a rebellion against an oppressive semi-feudal order.
Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.
The views expressed are personal
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