The Maoist “Problem” and the Democratic Left in India

Abstract

One key paradigmatic subtext of Naomi Klein’s argument runs in her The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2008) is how the supposed undemocratic, violent character of ‘‘totalitarian’’ Marxist movements serve to justify repressive measures by the neo-liberal state. In inviting such a repressive response from the state, ‘‘undemocratic’’ revolutionary left movements are presented as causing the erosion of democratic spaces and the right to dissent. But what if upholding so-called democratic spaces by shunning the undemocratic, revolutionary left is premised on blocking off emerging possibilities of radical transformation, thereby ideologically legitimising capitalist democracy? Thus, today, even as dissident democratic leftists like Klein expose the repressive neo-liberal order and its double standards and hypocritical claims, they display a fundamental attachment to its basic premises, as they uphold and legitimise the norms of capitalist political democracy. They oppose their agonising attachment to democracy (and so-called democratic struggle, livelihood approach, rights-based discourse, subaltern approach and so on) to the ‘‘shock doctrine’’ and repression of the neo-liberal state in a way which excludes the revolutionary left from the field of acceptable, ‘‘legitimate’’ political struggle. However, as we see in India, in portraying the ‘‘undemocratic,’’ ‘‘totalitarian’’ Maoist movement as a mirror-image of the repressive state, the democratic left objectively speaks from within and, therefore, for the so-called democratic space of this neo-liberal, repressive state. This shows that the dissident left in India has accepted democracy or democratic struggle as the only game in town, a fidelity to formal democratic norms, thereby rejecting ‘‘undemocratic’’ political struggle as liable to be ‘‘shocked and awed.’’