Apropos of your cover story His Jehad is His Very Own (May 24), the world has no dearth of fanatics who are willing to loot, rape and kill for anything—for religion, for nationality, caste and colour. Hatred is the breath of their lives. Whoever they are, they should get exemplary punishment.
Jaleel Khan, Lucknow
Interesting story on what makes an Islamic terrorist. What about a cover next on what makes an Islamic achiever? What makes the likes of Azim Premji, Shahrukh Khan, Irfan Pathan, Shabana Azmi, Sania Mirza, A.R. Rahman, Abdul Kalam and Fareed Zakaria tick? What is it that they were brought up on? There would be a lesson here, not just for Muslims, but for all Indians, for people across the world.
Vijaya Saran, Delhi
There are lunatics in every religion, but their ability to create havoc depends on the comfort level of the masses in the politicisation of religion. This is true of Hindutva too.
M. Vijayakumar, Bangalore
Syyid Qutb, the Egyptian considered the original ideologue of globalised jehad against the US, was nothing but a radical Leftist trapped in an Islamic zealot’s mind. Global Islamist radicalism merely took over the mantle of violence from communism and directed itself against the US. The chaos we see before us is a symptom of the decentralisation of Islamist resistance.
Varun Garde, Bangalore
All the aggression happening in the world around us based on any religious belief system shows that the difference between ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ is not well-understood. Religion, in my opinion, is an attempt to codify and formalise a spiritual experience. But that formalisation distorts and destroys what it is attempting to preserve in the first place.
Romi Sebastian, Doha
This is with reference to the Outlook cover (May 31) which says “Arundhati Roy’s portrayal of Maoists as Gandhians with Guns comes under heavy fire”.
I’m used to taking heavy fire for what I write. But when people begin to fire at a target they have fashioned for themselves out of an Outlook copywriter’s blurb (later mirrored in the Guardian magazine), I suppose I must rouse myself to make a clarification. At no point in my essay Walking with the Comrades (Mar 29) have I called the Maoists ‘Gandhians with Guns’. Here is what I said:
“I cannot believe this army. As far as consumption goes, it’s more Gandhian than any Gandhian, and has a lighter carbon footprint than any climate change evangelist. But for now, it even has a Gandhian approach to sabotage; before a police vehicle is burnt for example, it is stripped down and every part is cannibalised. The steering wheel is straightened out and made into a bharmaar barrel, the rexine upholstery stripped and used for ammunition pouches, the battery for solar charging. (The new instructions from the high command are that captured vehicles should be buried and not cremated. So they can be resurrected when needed.) Should I write a play I wonder—Gandhi Get Your Gun? Or will I be lynched?”Whoever infers from this that I have called the Maoists Gandhians with Guns is either a little slow or has no sense of irony or both. Do I really have to spell out what I was alluding to—of Maoist guerrillas who combine Gandhi’s principles of spartan consumption with their own very un-Gandhian belief in sabotage and armed revolution? Perhaps the confusion arises because the Indian elite would love to prescribe the opposite: conspicuous consumption for the rich and non-violent satyagraha for the poor.
The only other reference to Gandhi in the essay is in two paragraphs reproduced below, parts of which are quoted selectively by people who say that I have been uncritical of the Maoists and have valorised Charu Mazumdar as a “visionary” while criticising Gandhi. Here it is:
“Chairman Mao. He’s here too. A little lonely, perhaps, but present. There’s a photograph of him, up on a red cloth screen. Marx too. And Charu Mazumdar, the founder and chief theoretician of the Naxalite movement. His abrasive rhetoric fetishises violence, blood and martyrdom, and often employs a language so coarse as to be almost genocidal. Standing here, on Bhumkal day, I can’t help thinking that his analysis, so vital to the structure of this revolution, is so removed from its emotion and texture. When he said that only ‘an annihilation campaign’ could produce ‘the new man who will defy death and be free from all thought of self-interest’—could he have imagined that this ancient people, dancing into the night, would be the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest?Does this sound as though I’m calling Maoists ‘Gandhians with Guns’? Honestly, I’m almost embarrassed to have to write this letter.“It’s a great disservice to everything that is happening here that the only thing that seems to make it to the outside world is the stiff, unbending rhetoric of the ideologues of a party that has evolved from a problematic past. When Charu Mazumdar famously said, ‘China’s Chairman is our Chairman and China’s Path is Our Path’, he was prepared to extend it to the point where the Naxalites remained silent while General Yahya Khan committed genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), because at the time, China was an ally of Pakistan. There was silence too, over the Khmer Rouge and its killing fields in Cambodia. There was silence over the egregious excesses of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Silence over Tibet. Within the Naxalite movement too, there have been violent excesses and it’s impossible to defend much of what they’ve done. But can anything they have done compare with the sordid achievements of the Congress and the bjp in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Mumbai, Gujarat.... And yet, despite these terrifying contradictions, Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone we cannot judge him too harshly. Especially not while we swaddle ourselves with Gandhi’s pious humbug about the superiority of ‘the non-violent way’ and his notion of Trusteeship: ‘The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for the good of society.’”
