Well, for a start, they insist that India achieved independence and became a sovereign state in 1947, not in 2014. What could be more subversive?

They believe that the Mughals were one warring group among many others of the time, who made India and Indians of all hues their own–as soldiers, administrators, artists, even blood relations–rather than expropriate Bharat’s wealth to furnish growth in some other land. They lived, built, died in India, generation after generation.

“Urban Naxals” peddle the notion that prior to the coming of the British and the beginning of the “drain of wealth” from Bharat, India’s Gross Domestic Product comprised a quarter of global wealth, and that colonial exploitation and expropriation began after the British East India Company acquired the Diwani Right to levy and collect taxes from us after winning the battle of Plassey in 1757.

What could be a more treacherous exoneration of the cruelties of Muslim rule?

They hold that our first all-India national struggle against enslavement by a foreign power was the one that Indians across all religions, castes, gender divides, language affiliations and class distinctions waged against the British from 1857 all the way up to 1947, although some of our regional rulers, they rub in, had indeed taken on British forces in the 18th century as well (Tipu Sultan in Mysore).

Once again a view calculated to excuse the depredations wrought here by the Sultans and the Mughals.

Thus, perniciously, “urban Naxals” dub sporadic fights against the Mughals not as “national” upheavals but limited skirmishes in which many Hindu soldiers and Hindu generals fought on either side.

“Urban Naxals” are particularly dangerous because they propagate that those who did not support the alleged anti-colonial freedom movement against the British, rather abetted it, have no claim to lecture Indians on patriotism – a contrivance to weaken our assault on the liberals and Gandhians.

As is their view that real “Indianness” does not reside in any single denominational identity but in the supposedly time-tested, cohesive living of a vast spectrum of diverse cultures and more than one race (the Dravidian, the Aryan, etc). Such a notion is anathema to our nationalist conviction that India is in “essence” a “Hindu Rashtra”.

Following from that, they push the perfidious thesis that the Republic as wrought by the Indian Constitution supersedes civilisational constructions of identity, and furnishes the only valid definition of citizenship and of rights and obligations thereof;

and that these rights and obligations must be validated and protected by laws “fairly” enacted by “fairly” elected legislatures rather than by the diktats of Dharam Gurus, or Godmen and Godwomen of sundry self-appointed vintage.

Pray, how is Bharat to be Vishwaguru if Godmen and Godwomen are thus derided?

“Urban Naxals” , corrupted by wanton Western liberalism, believe that all branches of government – the legislature, the judiciary, the executive – must be co-eval, and that no leader, however popular, must be accorded the privilege to co-opt state institutions and agencies, nor appropriate the fourth estate to their own “undemocratic” and “unlawful” purposes; and that all state institutions, including the military must remain answerable to “we the people”, and at all times be accountable to the rule of law.

Most heinously, “urban Naxals” point to allegedly relevant articles in the Directive Principles of State Policy which state that all resources belong to the people, that inequalities of income must be reduced to a minimum, that wealth must not be allowed to be accumulated to forge monopolies, (Articles 38-43); that recourse to the provisions of the Directive Principles must not be selective, picking a provision that may suit the ideological fancy of some dominant section of the polity but ignoring others that seek to further values that seem subversive to “majoritarian” (their word) fancies.

“Urban Naxals” most perniciously wish to turn educational materials, institutions, pedagogies into tool kits calculated to enhance what they call free and critical thinking, such as is, in their distorted opinion, enshrined in the provisions of the Constitution, rather than mass producing, they calumniate, unquestioning foot-soldiers for “nationalist” purposes.

Even more criminally, “urban Naxals” insist that the right to peaceful assembly and mass protest against constitutional “transgressions”, “usurpation” of people’s rights, executive “excesses”, violation of “human rights”, “sectarian” applications of law, official corruption, citizen “surveillance”, “fraudulent” data, etc. must remain an ineluctable feature of democracy at all times, barring episodes of external aggression etc.

They thus hold that such people’s rights must be lawfully distinguished from what they demean as “vigilante” activism and forms of “vigilante” justice so indispensable for aiding the exertions of the state to keep the polity in proper nationalist check.

And worst of all, it is the sacrilegious opinion of the “urban Naxals” that religious faith and observance must remain strictly private matters, as if the enforcement of morality and the cementing of the collective warrior spirit could be entrusted only to a secular constitution and to educational institutions, however rigorous in high-minded introspections and evaluations.

In short, these “Urban Naxals” spell disaster for a land which for millenia has taught the virtues of obedience to and compliance with the edicts of realised souls whose truths remain far too sui generis to require either a constitution or a democratic order of things for certification.

Thus we say, have at them if you be a true Bharatiya.

Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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