Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 235
capital accumulation in these areas, through various army,
police, and paramilitary bodies as well as a state-backed
citizens' militia, the SalwaJudum, as a counterweight to
Naxalite militance. It is not coincidental, as many progressive
activists and scholars point out, that the Indian government
sensationalizes the threat in order to justify the militarization
and extralegality by which it controls unrest in
these regions of great potential wealth extraction as well as
endemic local poverty. Simply by slapping on the Naxalite
label, any human rights activist or reformer who works in
those areas can be accused of sedition-that is, any sort of
criticism of the Indian government, which is again a move
taken directly from the British colonial playbook of the
early twentieth century-and made vulnerable to lengthy
imprisonment or extrajudicial killing.38
Acknowledging the need to incorporate ecological
awareness on the long march to socialism, Archana Prasad,
a researcher known for her work on forest policy and tribal
issues, has criticized environmentalists fo r equating modernization
with colonization. The difference, she argues, is
that colonization means development for someone else's
benefit; current development is for Indians' own benefit.39
But this contention is somewhat misleading. First,
we can't reduce modernity simply to development and/or
industrialization. It's possible, as many have already done,
to criticize industrialization while proposing an alternate
modernity. This is a genuine point of disagreement between
the new social movements and the CPI(M): ifindustrialization
is the road to revolution and progress, because it will
generate the revolutionary class, then the priority must be to