If justice and equality are to be reclaimed effectively, it has to be done throu gh instruments which are egalitarian and just

too I am convinced of the impossibility of disinterested, humane violence. In her in fluential and eloquent essay, Walking with the Comrades , Arundhati Roy creates att ractive portraits of young and idealistic men and women whose gentle human quali ties (and even a measure of innocence) are untouched by the slaughter which is i ntrinsic to their chosen vocation. She is not worried by the young woman who pre fers to watch videos of maimed bodies from Maoist bomb explosions rather than th e popular film Mother India ; or the boy with a brilliant smile who can casually de scribe summary executions over a shared meal. I believe that violence inevitably brutalises those who use violent means. This has been the story of every violen t movement in Independent India. Maoists have been frequently effective in rooti ng out corruption by village, forest and development officials. But they are kno wn to finance their militant operations from extortion of corrupt forest contrac tors and builders of roads and bridges. The life-blood of many insurgent movemen ts, in India and the world, is trafficking of drugs and illegal arms. Roy lists many examples of extreme brutalisation of women, and by implication ce lebrates their choice to avenge and resist their humiliation and violation by pi cking up arms. I quote only one particularly moving testimony: I met Chamri, moth er of Comrade Dilip who was shot on July 6, 2009. She says that after they kille d him, the police tied her son's body to a pole, like an animal and carried it w ith them. (They need to produce bodies to get their cash rewards, before someone else muscles in on the kill.) Chamri ran behind them all the way to the police station. By the time they reached, the body did not have a scrap of clothing on it. On the way, Chamri says, they left the body by the roadside while they stopp ed at a dhaba to have tea and biscuits. (Which they did not pay for.) Picture th is mother for a moment, following her son's corpse through the forest, stopping at a distance to wait for his murderers to finish their tea. They did not let he r have her son's body back so she could give him a proper funeral. They only let her throw a fistful of earth in the pit in which they buried the others they ha d killed that day. Chamri says she wants revenge. Badla ku badla. Blood for blood . Similar stories The stories Roy records echo in so many ways literally hundreds of strikingly si milar narratives which I have heard over the last nine years in Gujarat, about t he brutality of the carnage of 2002. They reverberate with the same experience o f incredible cruelty, violence or complicity of State officials, and public humi liation and torture at the frontiers of human endurance. The moral justification that Roy offers for violent retribution by the savaged people of Bastar is almo st identical to the ethical claims to righteous violence canvassed by supporters of Islamist violence. For ethical consistency, if Roy and several others regard violent resistance by oppressed people justified in the context of Left militan cy, they must then accept the ethical justification for terrorism to avenge and resist oppression of religious minorities for nearly identical reasons. Yet, I must add that very rarely have the narratives of grotesque cruelty and in describable loss which I have heard the past nine years from hundreds of survivo rs in Gujarat, ended with a resolve among those who have suffered, to seek blood y revenge through terrorist violence. Instead, I have been deeply moved again an d again by how most have chosen to resist but without hate and shedding of blood , which they regard to be futile and both morally and politically repugnant. In Gujarat, for almost 10 years, I have been privileged to work shoulder to shou lder with peace and justice volunteers whom we called aman pathiks and nyaya pat hiks, literally those who walk the paths of peace and justice in a campaign call ed Nyayagrah, or a demand for justice. Many of these were working class young me n and women who suffered mortally in the carnage, losing loved ones and lifetime

savings, uprooted permanently from their homes and place of their birth, often by their own neighbours and friends of the past. Still they responded spontaneou sly to our call after the carnage to work not for vengeance or bloody resistance , but instead for healing and rebuilding. Despite a continued climate of hate, f ear, boycott and the subversion of justice, they have not wavered from this path the past decade. I wondered then and continue to do so today how many of us in their position would be able to summon the same inner resources to forgive so qu ickly and cheerfully help others in need, in the way they have done. *** Instead of a conclusion, I end by recalling one recent offbeat home-spun enterpr ise of alternate non-violent resistance to which I was witness. The year was 200 3, the location Godhra in Gujarat, the epicentre of the carnage of 2002. Exactly a year earlier, a train compartment was destroyed in a deadly inferno at Godhra , killing many Hindu women and children. It was immediately officially claimed b ut has still not been proved nine years later that terrorists had torched the tr ain; but this was propagated to instigate and justify the slaughter of Muslims a cross the state. On the first anniversary of the train burning in Godhra, Pravee n Togadia, rabble-rousing leader of the Bajrang Dal who crudely instigates hatre d against Muslim minorities, scheduled a programme to distribute trishuls or Hin du religious tridents (which can kill), as symbols of continued warfare against the Muslims. The openly sympathetic Right-wing state government refused to prohi bit the meeting. The Muslim population of the small town of Godhra again cowered in their ghettoes, terrified by the prospect of a repeat of the killings of a y ear earlier. Striking idea In this climate of palpable fear, in which a mere matchstick could have set the city ablaze again, a unique idea of resistance was propounded. The plan arose fr om the ranks of peace and justice activists the aman pathiks and nyaya pathiks ho we had recruited from working-class survivors of the carnage in relief camps. The scheme was not to block the trishul distribution, but instead to organise a n alternate programme on the same day. While Togadia would hand out trishuls, th e peace activists in another part of the town would offer to hand out roses. Bot h sets of organisers strenuously canvassed participation for their respective me etings. In the end, less than 200 young men finally assembled to receive the tri shuls from Togadia. More than a thousand people of both Muslim and Hindu faiths gathered to receive roses. The first anniversary of the deadly carnage passed of f in Godhra in a climate of complete peace. *** The human spirit is never crushed permanently, and its continuous and diverse as sertion marks the rhythm of human history, illuminating its cycles of oppression and resistance. As in all of human history, powerful injustice must be powerful ly resisted. New generations will and must reclaim the ideas of equality, frater nity and justice, brick by brick. But to do this, they will need to fashion new instruments to achieve these ends. Instruments which are also egalitarian, frate rnal and just.