befitting our heritage and collective genius.
Guided by an instinct for
survival, and according to Thomas Hobbes, a fear of
lawlessness that is encoded in our collective conscience,
we seek an order.
aghast at
the blindness to constitutional limitations of the State of
Chattisgarh, and some of its advocates, in claiming that
any one who questions the conditions of inhumanity that are
rampant in many parts of that state ought to necessarily be
treated as Maoists, or their sympathizers, and yet in the
same breath also claim that it needs the constitutional
sanction, under our Constitution, to perpetrate its
policies of ruthless violence against the people of
Chattisgarh to establish a Constitutional order
The problem rests in the amoral political
economy that the State endorses, and the resultant
revolutionary politics that it necessarily spawns
the governments have in
practice treated unrest merely as a law and order problem.
Predatory forms of capitalism, supported and promoted by
the State in direct contravention of constitutional norms
and values, often take deep roots around the extractive
industries. In India too, we find a great frequency of
occurrence of more volatile incidents of social unrest,
historically, and in the present, in resource rich regions,
which paradoxically also suffer from low levels of human
development.
Instead of locating the problem in the socioeconomic
matrix, and the sense of disempowerment wrought by
the false developmental paradigm without a human face, the
powers that be in India are instead propagating the view
that this obsession with economic growth is our only path,
and that the costs borne by the poor and the deprived,
disproportionately, are necessary costs.
