Editorial Note: This is an opinion piece. It represents our editorial position. It should be read, argued with, and disagreed with if you think we’re wrong.
The Most Important Distinction in Politics
There is a phrase this platform will return to constantly:
A grievance can be legitimate without making violence legitimate.
This is not a comfortable statement for either ideological camp. The left hears it as a dismissal of genuine suffering. The right hears it as moral permission to ignore genuine injustice. Both readings miss the point entirely.
What the Statement Actually Means
A farmer in Chhattisgarh who has been dispossessed of land that has been in his family for generations — that is a legitimate grievance.
A tribal community whose forest rights have been systematically violated by mining corporations operating with state licences — that is a legitimate grievance.
A Dalit family denied access to public wells in 2025 — that is a legitimate grievance.
The legitimacy of these grievances is not in dispute. The evidence for them is abundant. Any honest political observer — regardless of ideology — must acknowledge them.
But what follows from the acknowledgement of a grievance?
This is where the argument begins.
Two Paths from Injustice
Every serious political movement begins with an injustice. The question that defines it is what it does next.
Path One: Democratic Mobilisation
→ Organise the affected community → Build political coalitions → Contest elections → File court cases (and India has courts that have repeatedly sided with tribal and Dalit rights) → Conduct sustained journalism → Engage with national and international human rights mechanisms → Build economic alternatives
This path is slow. It is frustrating. It often fails. Democratic systems frequently protect powerful interests over weak ones. This is a real problem.
But it is a problem that democratic reform can, at least in principle, correct.
Path Two: Armed Revolutionary Struggle
→ Recruit cadres → Establish military control of territory → Eliminate political opponents (including those from the same oppressed communities who choose to cooperate with the state) → Force the state into counter-insurgency response → The civilians caught between both forces bear the cost
This path has now been running in the Indian Red Corridor for over 50 years.
What has it achieved for the tribal communities whose suffering it invoked?
The honest answer is: it is not obvious that it has achieved anything that sustained democratic mobilisation could not have achieved at far lower human cost.
The Human Cost We Don’t Discuss
The victims of the Maoist conflict are overwhelmingly not landlords, mine owners or politicians. They are:
- Tribal villagers accused of being police informers
- Schoolteachers who refused to close their schools
- Lower-level government functionaries — often themselves from poor communities
- Security personnel from rural, often poor, backgrounds
- Journalists who tried to report from conflict zones
- Political workers from all parties who tried to organise the affected communities democratically
According to MHA data, since 2000 there have been over 12,000 deaths in Left Wing Extremism-related violence. The majority of victims are civilians.
This is not a political talking point. It is documented reality.
The Romantic Problem
The problem with revolutionary violence is not that it attracts evil people. It is that it attracts idealistic ones.
The romanticisation of armed struggle — the vision of the guerrilla in the jungle, pure in motive, fighting the corrupt system — is one of the most seductive narratives in modern political culture. It appears in literature, cinema, music, academic papers and social media.
But romanticism is a form of selective attention. It focuses on the guerrilla. It looks away from the village.
The Constitutional Answer
India’s Constitution is not perfect. No constitution is. But it provides a framework that few countries in the world have matched for the aspiration — if not always the practice — of constitutional protection for the powerless.
Article 21: The Right to Life includes the right to live with dignity. Article 17: Abolishes untouchability. Article 46: Promotes the interests of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Article 39: Directs the state to ensure adequate livelihood and prevent concentration of wealth.
These articles have produced real outcomes — not always, not consistently, not without failure — but real outcomes that armed revolution has not.
The Supreme Court has ordered forest rights to be protected. Courts have overturned wrongful convictions. Constitutional mechanisms have sometimes worked.
The argument is not that democratic India has been just. The argument is that democratic India is reformable in ways that territories controlled by armed movements are not.
Our Position
We will not romanticise political violence. Not because we are indifferent to injustice. But because we believe democratic constitutional mechanisms — however imperfect — provide the only framework for change that does not require one oppression to replace another.
The strength of a grievance is not an argument for the legitimacy of its response.
Democratic India has failed the tribal communities of the Red Corridor in many documented ways. That failure should be named, documented and challenged through every constitutional mechanism available.
But choosing armed revolution over democratic mobilisation is not a response to that failure. It is an abandonment of the people whose suffering it claims to avenge.
Disagree? Write to us at editorial@dimaginaxalite.com. We publish substantive responses.