Free Speech, the Media and Operation Green Hunt

Over the past few days there has been quite a lot of vehement discussion, in the print and
audio-visual media, about the ‘IPL scam’, the enormous sums of money that cricket is
today mired in, and the sheer lack of accountability of those who play with that money.
Consequently, some media personnel have envisioned dramatic changes in the
administration of the game – so much so that there is already talk of this as the
‘Tharoorgate scandal’, and of what the post-Tharoorgate cricket scene is going to be like.
But this piece is not about those matters. This piece returns to two other matters that got
conveniently buried by the Tharoorgate scandal: one, the declaration of assets by our
esteemed parliamentarians, and two, the killing of 76 CRPF jawans in Dantewada earlier
this month. As seems to be the wont with the media these days, there had been talk of
pre- and post-Dantewada eras in Indian politics, referring to the incident as marking a
transformative moment in policy; this form of periodisation then morphed, quite
inexplicably, into the pre- and post-Tharoorgate eras. (It is of some significance that there
is no suggestion to periodise our politics in terms of pre- and post-asset declaration; on
the owning of extravagant assets by large numbers of our political class, it seems, there is
a general understanding that nothing will change…) This piece is about the unfolding of
these developments in the media.

We can begin by remarking on the first periodisation that came along in the media: pre-
and post-Dantewada. I was going to remark on the irony that, it is almost as if Dantewada
the place itself only came into existence after the incident – except that (doubly
ironically!) this, in some ways, is in fact the case. Dantewada barely existed in the
national consciousness prior to 6 April 2010. It would not have remained there for very
long either, had it not been the site of the killings that apparently rocked the air-
conditioned early-summer haze of the urban middle classes. And even then, sure enough,
it faded away like mist in summer, the moment something more salacious was delivered
to these same salivating classes by this same sensationalist media. But before we discuss
its disappearance, I’d like to dwell a little on its appearance in the media.

It all began with reports that 76 jawans of the CRPF lost their lives to ‘Maoist’ forces.
Much of this discussion was suffused with outrage and strident calls for vengeance
against those who struck ‘our boys’ down. No one thought to ask the obvious questions:
‘What were they doing there?’ ‘Who sent them there?’ ‘When the government sends
troops into what it has itself declared a war zone, on what basis can it deny responsibility
for the loss of their lives?’ And when Home Minister P Chidambaram finally did accept
ultimate responsibility for these deaths, it was treated – bafflingly! – as moral heroism on
his part, rather than as an acknowledgement of culpability. Instead, in a disgraceful
display of scapegoating, blame was transferred to, and then traded between the state and
central police forces, finally leading to a call for an inquiry to establish who was
‘actually’ responsible. And instead of the Home Minister being held to account for this
insane loss of lives, the importance of his policies, manifested in Operation Green Hunt
(or OGH) was reaffirmed and celebrated with rare unanimity and fervour in parliament.
So, what gives? What drove this fervour to justify the sacrifice of these jawans?

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The first step in this justification, of course had already been taken, in the claiming of
these jawans as ‘our boys’. One TV anchor in particular, his spectacles gleaming with
paternal fervour, loudly claimed these jawans as ‘our boys’, though he would hardly be of
an age to have sired any of them. More pertinently, they belonged to a class (and possibly
castes) that he would otherwise probably not even acknowledge, given his own eminently
upper caste and upper class status, let alone profess possessing paternal relations with. (I
realise it may seem somewhat callous to mock this anchor in this way, given the
enormously tragic loss of lives; however, the intent is not to disrespect those young men
or their families, but to show up this mawkish and sham sentimentality for what it was:
an enormous emotional fraud that was perpetrated on media consumers across the
country. This will become clearer as we go along.) The young men who lost their lives in
Dantewada that day would probably not even be permitted to sit in the presence of this
TV anchor and his ilk, in our oh-so-profoundly hierarchical societies; and yet, the middle
class media of urban India was suddenly full of familial feeling for these ‘boys’ and their
families. We were repeatedly shown images of grieving families, bereft spouses,
bewildered children – in short, the entire gamut of familial relations garbed in tragedy –
aimed specifically at invoking a sense of identification, empathy and most importantly, a
desire for catharsis in the viewer (yet another point I will return to in a moment). What
drove the fervour to claim these ‘boys’ as ‘ours’ – which in this instance was supposed to
signify the collective ‘us’ of the Indian nation, but actually meant no more than the Great
Indian Middle Class (or GIMC) that was apparently so outraged by their deaths? How is
it that jawans from the mofussil heartlands of UP and Haryana were suddenly – albeit
posthumously (or perhaps because posthumously) – finding a seat at the master’s family
table?

It is not that the master has suddenly lost sight of class and caste distinctions (and if that
had been the case, we would have at least that to thank the Maoists for). One report in a
prominent English daily even remarked on the apparent irony in the fact that, although
Maoists claimed to be fighting class enemies, in these 76 jawans, they had killed men
from the very class that they claimed to be representing. Without commenting on the
shallowness (if not outright illiteracy) of such a remark, we need to note first how, for the
middle classes that both produce and consume this garbage that passes for news analysis,
the jawans were clearly presented as not belonging with them, but instead were explicitly
identified as lower class. We need to understand that, these unfortunate young men, till a
few weeks ago, were indistinguishable from thousands of others like them who join the
paramilitary forces – or the armed forces, or the police, or for that matter, the postal
service or the railways or the transport department – simply because it means food on the
table for their families, clothes on their backs, a roof over their heads, education for their
children, a bank account for the future – in other words, the means to meet the quotidian
aspirations of the many millions striving and struggling to achieve membership in that
very same middle class. Their deaths, in this sense, were less tragic than the shattering of
the worlds of those they left bereft: their survivors are left to engage with the viciousness
of life under capitalism without them. Yet, despite the tragedy of their deaths, and the
greater tragedy of those who survive them, there can be no question that they remained
outside the pale of middle class-dom in their lives; it is only in their deaths that they
acquired a sort of entry, and that because the GIMC was made to believe that these

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jawans died defending them and their country against the ‘red terror’. The justification of
their deaths – otherwise a horrendously unjustifiable and meaningless waste of lives
caused entirely by the hubris of the Home Minister and his single-minded pursuance of
OGH – lay in presenting them as martyrs to the cause of the nation of the GIMC. It is
through this belief that the catharsis I noted earlier was generated, and became possible.
This catharsis was important: the increasing doubts being cast in the minds of the GIMC
about OGH by various sections of civil society, was in that one cathartic moment of its
media sensationalisation transformed into an affirmation of OGH. The images of grieving
families and bereft children made possible the sense of identification so essential to
catharsis, of the GIMC with the jawans’ class, even as parallel texts reiterating the lower
class status of those families reassuringly permitted that very GIMC to maintain the
emotional distance also required of the cathartic moment. And the GIMC media cried,
and cried out, ‘Enough is enough! Take OGH to the next level! Call in the army, the air
force, the heavy artillery! Our boys must be avenged!’ The media did its job superbly in
this instance…. And of course, the profound tragic irony of our class society – that it was
not the Home Minister who paid for his hubris but these 76 young men, and their families
– was lost completely in all the patriotic noise (truly is it said that patriotism is the last –
or perhaps, in this instance, the first – refuge of the scoundrel).

Perhaps the most important operative factor here, was the fact that these troops belonged
not to any particular state service but were part of the central paramilitary force being
deployed in Chhatisgarh. They were national troops, defending the nation at large –
which we all know, is an entirely middle class construct. More than anything else, this
allowed the GIMC to identify cathartically with the families of these jawans. And it is
precisely the absence of this national profile in the case of the innumerable adivasis slain
in OGH, that disallows identification with them – not to speak of additional factors like a
singularly alien ethnic identity, utterly lower class status and an incomprehensible
otherness in terms of life-style. In this sense, the adivasis do not belong to the same class
as the jawans, with whose class aspirations the GIMC could still relate; no, they belong to
a class that constitutes that enormous, polymorphous section of Indian society that lives
far Below the Poverty Line, which the urban GIMC would prefer not to know about at
all, and which it variously sees as a national shame or as a national hindrance. (One
recent estimate of this section noted that, if we calculate the BPL on the basis of less than
USD 1 (yes, one) per capita per day, this section constitutes 400 million; if we increase
that to USD 2, per capita per day, that figure jumps to 800 million. It’s at times like this
that that endearing Americanism, ‘Go figure!’, comes to mind….) The jawans’ deaths,
profoundly tragic though they were, are therefore in every sense less tragic than the
hundred and thirty odd deaths this year alone, that have gone unreported (forget
sensationalised) in the media, of adivasis in the Bastar region alone. They are less tragic
because the families of the killed jawans will ultimately be aided by the state:
compensations will be paid, jobs will be reserved, social networks will be mobilised, to
ensure that those bereaved do not lose all opportunities to participate in the race towards
middle class-dom. Who will offer these to the adivasis? Not the GIMC, and certainly not
the Indian state. Their deaths, under the many avatars of OGH – Salwa Judum, mining
mafia strong-arm thugs, SPO storm troopers, paramilitary forces; but also through
decades of neglect and savage callousness, and what Binayak Sen recently termed,

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horrifically, an ‘epidemic of [mal]nutritional AIDS’ – will remain, so to speak, properly
buried. There will be no visuals of grieving mothers and destitute children, not because
death works differently among the tribals, but because human empathy, it seems, is
driven by class interests and class affiliations. There is nothing in their lives for the
GIMC media to identify with – so completely alienated from the ‘nation’ have they been
rendered by decades of neglect and poverty – and therefore will they remain unheard,
unseen and unspoken for in this ‘national’ media. And, in this ghastly competition of
tragedies – inevitable, in one sense, to a social environment that is witnessing the
inexorable intensification of capitalist predatoriness – the greatest tragedy may yet be that
tragedies are now being played out competitively….

No, the adivasi populations at the receiving end of OGH are not national, nor nationalist,
nor in anyway identifiable with the Great Indian Nation of the GIMC. No tribal or lower
caste, lower class person can feel a genuine sense of identification with this idea of the
Indian nation, because it simply does not exist in tribal, lower caste, lower class terms.
Mahasweta Devi’s brilliant short story ‘Doulati’ was about precisely this alienation. More
recently, feminist scholar Karen Gabriel has shown quite convincingly that the
iconography of the nation as Bharat Mata is profoundly upper class, upper caste and in
many ways, explicitly North Indian. When the understanding of the nation, in its very
public imagings and imaginations of this sort, is so profoundly exclusivist, how can we
possibly expect anything but dissension in the ranks of society? It cannot be mere
coincidence that the regions in Indian territory that have for decades been the theatres of
‘insurgency’, have all been profoundly alienated from this iconic understanding of the
nation: Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Meghalaya, Telengana; and now,
Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, Orissa, parts of West Bengal – or more specifically, the tribal
territories of these states. How much longer can we afford to remain blind to this blatant
empirical reality, continue to pretend that these are problems of law and order, and insist
on dealing with them coercively, repressively, murderously? And as this national socius
is revealed to be more and more heterogeneous, with greater and greater levels of
inequality, disparity in living conditions and opportunities, and with its better-off sections
increasingly and publicly not just displaying their wealth, but doing so with an
unprecedented degree of sheer indifference and callousness – can we expect anything else
but violent dissension in its ranks? On the one hand we have a competition of tragedies;
on the other, a competition of ostentatious wealth: it doesn’t take much to join the dots
from there….

Which brings me to the second issue that I want to touch upon, that was buried by the
IPL obsession of the media: the declaration of assets by our parliamentarians. The issue
that came up around the 24th of April, was that 51 MPs had not declared their assets,
despite having to do so within 90 days of taking oath – almost a full year ago. Along with
this came figures of the assets of those who had actually declared them. An astounding
300-plus MPs in the current parliament have assets of over a crore, and the largest
number of these by a long shot (137), belong to the ruling Congress party. No doubt these
figures will rise further still, when the remaining 51, so coy about their finances, declare
their assets. (At this point we will not take into account another astounding statistic,
which is the shocking figure of 150 MPs in this parliament bearing criminal records, but

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merely leave it to the reader to continue joining the dots.) But these details must be
viewed in the light of something else: the fact of the matter is that the first spate of MoUs
with multinational corporations (for accessing the wealth of natural resources in the
regions currently under OGH) was signed under the NDA regime, and the policy
continued with the next government. The Salwa Judum – the vigilante force that was set
up by the state, to combat the ‘Naxalites’ – we tend to forget, was a joint creation of the
Congress and the BJP at the time. This is the reason why the strongest defence of P
Chidambaram’s policy, even after Dantewada, came from the BJP; the CPM’s backing of
this policy, we can surmise, was for similar reasons, given their newfound and
enthusiastic keenness to endorse a capitalist model of economic ‘growth’. At any rate,
post-Dantewada, it became clear that the ruling elite stood as one on the issue of OGH; so
when the declaration-of-assets issue became public, suddenly the underlying class
politics of the entire operation became crystal clear. The arguments coming from various
quarters – that OGH was being undertaken on behalf of multinational corporations; that
the hundreds of MoUs that were waiting to be operationalised in these areas would
benefit, not the adivasi populations that OGH was displacing, but the political powers
behind the operation; that the adivasis were turning to violence because they had no
representatives left in and to the Indian state; that they had been cleanly and totally sold
out by administrative machinery; etc. – these arguments were suddenly becoming self-
evidently true, on national television and newspapers. The mind-numbing disparity in
income and asset levels between those few hundreds who rule the country, and those
starving millions against whom OGH is being undertaken, was perhaps too shocking – or
at least startling – for even our thick-skinned urban GIMC media to countenance.

Arguably, if these figures had emerged in the public domain at any other time than post-
Dantewada, the media would have had a field day commenting on the wealthiness of the
ruling elite, and the profound irony of their ruling over a country teeming with millions of
poor. It would have been ‘safe’ for them – and for their political masters – to do so
(indeed, it would have been tom-tommed as another instance of the triumph of
democratic free speech), because the teeming millions of poor would have continued to
remain silent, exploited and invisible, the media would have simply used this to generate
a powerful sense of moral superiority in the GIMC, and the MPs would continue to
accumulate their crores: everyone (who mattered) would have been happy. But in the
harsh light of OGH, when the poorest of the poor became so inconveniently visible, and
especially after the explicit collaboration between the government and the opposition,
post-Dantewada, these revelations were not so safe. No wonder the media leapt at the IPL
scam. It brought the national obsession of cricket to the foreground, and through a second
moment of catharsis, shifted all the doubts that might have surfaced about the probity of
the ruling elite, onto the ‘unfortunate’ persons of Shashi Tharoor, Lalit Modi and
Sunanda Pushkar. No more was the public to reflect on why OGH, what actually
happened in Dantewada, why was the BJP and the CPM more keen than the Congress, in
backing OGH further – etc. Instead, it was fed on a strong diet of cricket, sleaze and
financial trickeries. No doubt the ‘red terror’ will be back in the media: but after enough
of a gap for the public to forget the doubts that had begun to creep in. And of course,
there will be little or no discussion of the assets of our MPs.

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Instead, when the issue of OGH comes back, it will return in its most common avatar, the
one that the media is most comfortable garbing it in: as one of violence versus non-
violence – with the Maoists (and for that matter, anyone protesting against OGH) firmly
positioned as votaries of violence, almost for its own sake. As I conclude this piece then,
a few remarks on this particular debate would not be out of place. In one sense, these
strident calls for non-violence on the part of the Maoists, from the GIMC and its media,
are almost hilariously hypocritical: this is the same class, and the same media, that took
war hysteria to new heights, during the Kargil episode. Threats of incursions (wildly
represented as an invasion) into the sacrosanct national territory of this class were met
with extravagant militancy, dire threats, extreme ultimatums. Some of the more hawkish
elements of our media even suggested, quite seriously, exercising the nuclear option
against Pakistan. Wherefrom then, this sudden demand for pacifism, when it comes to the
adivasi populations whose territories have been actually invaded by the Indian state – and
we must not forget that, under the 5th schedule of the Indian constitution, these territories
are inviolably theirs? But this returns us to the old question of empathy: when there is
none for the adivasis, the GIMC can only seek the moral high ground of exhorting non-
violence, from which to speak. (Patriotism, it seems, can be invoked to justify violence as
much as to demand non-violence: once again, truly is it a scoundrel’s tool.)

But this has its own problems. Writer-activist Arundhati Roy has, quite rightly,
repeatedly pointed out that non-violence requires an audience, a theatre of visibility in
which it must be performed, in order to be effective. But as importantly, non-violence
makes sense, as a moral position, only when the party professing it is actually capable of
achieving victory – or at least a stalemate – through violence – but stays its hand. Non-
violence here is a moral choice: I can fight my (ideological-political) battle by
perpetrating violence, inflicting damage, causing injury and deaths, but I choose not to, I
choose instead to seek to establish my position non-violently; therein lies the moral
strength of my non-violence. (Therefore, the power of Gandhi’s position, for instance, lay
as much in the fact that he treated non-violence as a spectacle – a gesture in a political
theatre – as in the fact that he demanded it of millions of his followers who were rearing
to turn violent, and reined them in.) But what happens when there is neither theatre nor
choice? Roy has already spoken of the absurdity of performing non-violence in the
jungles of Jharkhand, where there is no one to witness it; it is equally absurd to perform
non-violence when to do so is to die. It is absurd to demand non-violence when the
enemy (in this case, the Indian armed forces – with the second largest army, the fourth
largest air-force and the fifth largest navy in the world) is so much more powerful that
neither violence nor non-violence can make much of a difference to the outcome of the
confrontation. In such a situation, where one may die whether or not one is violent, but in
which to be violent increases one’s chances of survival – in such a situation, it would be
utterly puerile (not to say patently partisan) to demand non-violence from the threatened.
You cannot ask a child to throw down a stone, in the name of non-violence, if that is the
only thing preventing it from being pulverised by a bully a hundred times bigger.

In spite of understanding this, to insist that the Maoists ‘abjure violence’ (whatever that
means) is then to play up to the sentiments of the GIMC, without seriously engaging with
the principle of non-violence. It is possible to do so, in fact, because such a critique is

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coming from the comfortable position of the GIMC, oblivious to the unimaginable
hardships under which the adivasis are fighting for survival, and – with a naivety
bordering on imbecility – insisting on equating the potential for and practice of violence
on both sides, as if they were the same. But, in this instance, it is the Indian state that is
capable of inflicting unbelievable levels of violence, death and destruction, and to win
this war through violent means – and not either the adivasis or the Maoists; there can be
no comparison in the scales of violence possible. If therefore the Indian government
wants to propound non-violence, the moral onus of doing so falls on it, not on the
Maoists or the adivasis they are fighting alongside. Let the Indian government therefore
take the moral upper hand in this war, and cease with immediate effect, all hostilities. Let
it proffer this as a step towards creating a conducive environment for talks. And let the
media cease to be partisan, and begin to see and perceive and imagine the affected
populations in these regions (but also in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya,
Assam, etc) as integral to the Indian socius rather than alien to it – and then let it demand
the abjuring of violence.

Finally, it might be argued here that Maoism per se, as an ideology, espouses the idea of
the violent overthrow of the (Indian) state, and that consequently, it is not an issue of not
having a choice, but in fact the converse – that violence is the active choice of the
Maoists, and therefore any attempt to defend their use of violence is ipso facto a defence
of their intention to overthrow the Indian state. Indeed, the latest ‘directive’, in the form
of a press release, from the Home Ministry, warns all citizens that they ‘would be liable
to be punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or with fine or with
both’, if they ‘support’, or even if they simply do not beware, the propaganda of ‘terrorist
organisations’ like the CPI (Maoist) because their ‘sole aim is armed overthrow of the
Indian State’. This directive explicitly spells out the above argument. The government’s
own estimation of the strength of the Maoist cadre is as ranging between 20,000 and
30,000. Somehow the incredible absurdity of claiming that this number could
conceivably threaten to (let alone actually) overthrow the Indian state – with, as we
already noted, the second largest army in the world – seems to escape both the
government and the civil society voices in support of this position – but we need not
dwell on such details. What is even more dangerous in this argument is that, by
blanketing the entire range of protests and resistances – urban and rural, tribal and non-
tribal, armed and unarmed – under the rubric ‘Maoist’, and thereby implying that these
diverse resistances are all intent on overthrowing the Indian state, the government is
threatening to de-legitimise – indeed to criminalise – a very legitimate protest and
resistance movement against the diabolical nexus between the functionaries of the state
and big business enterprises. In fact, by chanting the mantra of ‘Maoism’ as a blanket
criminalisation, the state is seeking, like a small-time prestidigitator, to distract attention
from its own implicated-ness in the worse-than-criminal machinations that are underway
to displace and destroy entire communities and their properties and resources, as well as
in the appalling callousness with which it continues to treat the poorest of the poor of the
country. And, unlike the almost ridiculous ‘threat’ of an imminent overthrow of the state
by the Maoists, that the Indian government is loudly warning us about, the government’s
own threat to prosecute anyone it even perceives as ‘supporting’ the Maoists under the
draconian provisions of the UA(P)A, is a very real, very imminent and genuinely very,

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very dangerous threat – not just to the individuals and organisations that are implicitly
targeted in the directive, but to the remaining democratic institutions, credentials and
fabric of the country. Rather than falling in line with the Home Ministry’s diktat,
therefore, it is the imperative need of the hour to strongly protest against its word and
spirit – and the media must play a frontline role in that protest. Else, if this is quietly
allowed to pass as the law of the land, we are on the verge of a second country-wide
Emergency.

P K Vijayan
Asst. Prof., Dept. of English,
Hindu College.