Sing like an Urban Naxal-He seeks to liberate language and thought for democracy. He is the citizen of the future

         A song for all

• We summon ideology to combat ideologically, reducing debate to the level the state wants it to be.
• The singer and his song refused to play the opposition game, capturing the sense of freedom that dissent entails.
• The student’s vision must embody the spirit of any response to the label/libel of ‘Urban Naxal’.

        McCarthy meets Orwell

• Linguistically the word is a clever one.
• It hides the art of scapegoating, the ritual of witch hunting by sanitising the word into a disease.
• What the song celebrates is dissent as a grammar of diversity.
• The word seeks to destroy that world, reworking the margins, the minorities, the pluralism of dissent into one curse word: Urban Naxal.
• It creates a climate of suspicion which hides the fact that it is an invented word and a constructed world.
• There is a slickness, a sophistication in the label ‘Urban Naxal’ that the earlier charge, pseudo-secular, does not have.
• The latter has a heaviness of tone, resembling a clerk’s caricature.
• ‘Urban Naxal’ has the deviousness and maliciousness of a crafty advertisement.

       The case of T.M. Krishna

• Look at the list, T.M. Krishna, Ramachandra Guha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha.
• One feels honoured to be a part of this group because it sounds like an honours list of dissent and creativity and not a litany of threats.
• Urban Naxalism as a label strikes at the root of dissent and creativity.
• We face a government which wants patriotism, music, culture to march in uniform and utter the language of uniformity.
• The label Urban Naxalism as a tactic seeks as anti-national what is one of the most powerful pleas for freedom and diversity.
• It is this prospect of freedom and diversity that the label proscribes.
• But the tragedy does not cease there. The danger lies in the shrewdness of the state propaganda, in its ability to name some of the country’s finest intellectuals as threats to security, as devaluers of democracy and culture.
• The power of propaganda seeks to destroy the creativity of civil society.

       All about thought control

• Each player uses majoritarianism as a tactic to create a uniformity of thought and thought control before election time.
• All seek to subjugate civil society, creating or imposing a substrate of conformity.
• The real crime of the so-called Urban Naxal is his lack of conformity, his ability to challenge the crowd and the mob, to stand up to coercive words such as security, patriotism, border.
• The Urban Naxal seeks to liberate language and thought for democracy.

The Hindu