What Makes an Urban Naxal?

Bernard D’Mello* writes about his former colleague, “urban Naxal” Gautam Navlakha.

 

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government and the Hindutvavadi “nationalist” movement’s demonic drive for cultural orthodoxy seems to know no bounds. What is alarming is the former’s support for and complicity in the acts of the latter, as also the Indian state’s control of its “necessary” enemies through the use of state terror, with the category “urban Naxals” singled out in the latest of such drives (in June and August 2018) that otherwise routinely target Muslims, militant oppressed nationalities, and “Maoists.” In the government’s categorisation, the “urban Naxals,” at least so far, are lawyers, rights activists, poets, writers, journalists, and professors, deemed to be “active members” of the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist).

# MeTooUrbanNaxal: Arundhati Roy

This morning’s papers (August 30, 2018) settle something that we have been debating for a while. A front-page report in the Indian Express says “Police to Court: Those held part of anti-fascist plot to overthrow govt.” We should know by now that we are up against a regime that its own police call fascist.In the India of today, to belong to a minority is a crime. To be murdered is a crime. To be lynched is a crime. To be poor is a crime. To defend the poor is to plot to overthrow the government.
When the Pune police conducted simultaneous raids at the homes of well-known activists, poets, lawyers and priests across the country, and arrested five people—high-profile civil rights defenders and two lawyers—on ludicrous charges, with little or no paperwork, the Government would have known that it was stirring up outrage. It would have already taken all our reactions into account, including this press conference and all the protests that have taken place across the country, before it made this move. So why has this happened?

V. I. Lenin On the Significance of Militant Materialism

''One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action. A vanguard performs its task as vanguard only when it is able to avoid being isolated from the mass of the people it leads and is able really to lead the whole mass forward. Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.''



Comrade Trotsky has already said everything necessary, and said it very well, about the general purposes of Pod Znamenem Marksizma in issue No. 1-2 of that journal. I should like to deal with certain questions that more closely define the content and programme of the work which its editors have set forth in the introductory statement in this issue.

This statement says that not all those gathered round the journal Pod Znamenem Marksizma are Communists but that they are all consistent materialists. I think that this alliance of Communists and non-Communists is absolutely essential and correctly defines the purposes of the journal. One of the biggest and most dangerous mistakes made by Communists (as generally by revolutionaries who have successfully accomplished the beginning of a great revolution) is the idea that a revolution can be made by revolutionaries alone. On the contrary, to be successful, all serious revolutionary work requires that the idea that revolutionaries are capable of playing the part only of the vanguard of the truly virile and advanced class must be understood and translated into action. A vanguard performs its task as vanguard only when it is able to avoid being isolated from the mass of the people it leads and is able really to lead the whole mass forward. Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.

“We Rise Together, Homie”

An interview with Antoine Dangerfield, whose video of an Indianapolis wildcat strike went viral this week — and led to his firing. He doesn't regret it, though.

Interview by Micah Uetricht 

Source: Jacobin Magazine

 

US labor history is full of moments of tremendous drama and upheaval. That history is riveting stuff, but getting a raw, unfiltered view of the human drama of workers fighting their bosses on the shop floor, the place where the day-to-day confrontation between workers and bosses takes place (and occasionally boils over), is rare.

Which is what makes Antoine Dangerfield’s recent viral video a must-watch. A thirty-year-old welder in Indianapolis, Dangerfield worked for a construction contractor building a UPS hub. On Tuesday, he says that a small number of Latino workers (millwrights, welders, and conveyor installers, in his telling) working for a different contractor but in the same hub were ordered home after disobeying the orders of a white boss he calls racist.
In response, the entire group of workers — over a hundred, in Dangerfield’s estimation — walked out.

India:Police fires at protesters. 13 dead. Interview with Varavara Rao

Thoothukudi firing reminds me of Nandigram, Kalinganagar; vested interest of big companies is causing these killings: Maoist ideologue Varavara RaoWe have seen the spine-chilling photograph of a policeman aiming a gun in Thoothukudi last week at the anti-Sterlite protesters. Why do you think police open fire on innocent people when there are other ways to handle law and order problem?

Not only that, you must have heard the voice of a police officer ordering to take at least one life, and seen the photograph of a police pulling a dead body saying he is not dead but pretending to be dead, and so heinously pulling him like a fallen and injured animal. In fact this was shot at neck, point blank for violating Section 144 and he fell to instant death. It is like Dyer closing the gates of Jalianwalah Bagh killing people indiscriminately. It is massacre deliberate and intentional…

Long live Ibrahim Kaypakkaya in the 45th anniversary of his assasination!

 

It's the 45th anniversary of the assasination of the representant of the international proletariat in Turkey, the founder of the TKP/ML (Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist) Ibrahim Kaypakkaya.

Comrade Ibrahim Kaypakkaya was only 24 when he was murdered by the severe tortures from the fascist Turkish state on the 18th of May. Kaypakkaya founded the TKP/ML when he was 23 years old.

Ibrahim Kaypakkaya succeeded in becoming the permanent leader of the communist idea and the right revolutionary line in Turkey.

He is one of the best disciple of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He evaluated his own ideas and the TKP/ML, which he founded, as products of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Back when Marxist-Leninist ideas were active globaly, when in the 1960s and 1970s the struggles for revolution and Socialism were developing themselves, the class struggle in Turkey was making incredible progress. Especially under the conditions of the 1968 Movement, which encompased the whole world, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist revolutionary waves formed between students. This movement has reached its 50th anniversary this year. On this occasion, we salute this movement, which made the world shake and stroke fear among imperialism and the ruling powers.  

Vasantha Kumari: It’s the State that’s violating the Constitution, not us

Vasantha Kumari, wife of Prof GN Saibaba, on their shared life and struggle for an idea of India in which myriad political beliefs can coexist

At a south Delhi housing complex, Vasantha Kumari, wife of Prof GN Saibaba, waters the plants in her backyard in quiet reflection. Some of them, large tubs of month-old flower saplings, shoot up defiantly under the hot April sun. Gardening was something they loved doing together. The tubs hold vivid memories — him exerting himself on the wheelchair, insisting on sowing all the seeds, and her chiding him to rest instead. Days later, on March 7, he would be locked away inside the Nagpur Central Jail, to serve life imprisonment, after being convicted by the Gadchiroli sessions court under sections 13, 18, 20, 38 and 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and section 120B of the Indian Penal Code for connections with the banned Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), an organisation allegedly affiliated to the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist).