DNA Edit: Navlakha disclosures - Urban Naxals are liaising with anti-nationals

Urban Naxals is an old Maoist formulation to focus on India’s urban centres for leadership to help organise masses, build a united front and engage in military tasks for the cause of a revolution. In 2004, the then highly influential CPI (Maoist), which signified a nationwide guerilla movement gathering momentum, published a document titled ‘Urban Perspective’, which elaborates on this strategy with one of the most important focus areas being gaining leadership from urban areas.

The Indian security establishment has since believed that with ageing leadership, Maoists have been looking at cities and towns for guidance. Naturally, this is in line with the tradition that most Urban Naxals are well-educated people from India’s top universities and colleges and include leading civil rights activists, writers and an entire ecosystem that has provided a steady stream of ‘revolutionaries’ to the cause.

As a matter of fact, the original Naxalbari movement in the late 1960s itself came from the ranks of Calcutta’s elite liberal intelligentsia. The Urban Naxals describe themselves as agents of change, whose final act of revenge on the system is to overthrow it and establish a new order. They do not buy the line that they are anti-national. That is why revelations about one of their foremost leaders, activist Gautam Navlakha, is further confirmation they are not above sleeping with the enemy.

The Pune Police has told the Bombay High Court that Navlakha, an accused in the riots that took place in Bhima-Koregaon, and the Naxal groups that he was linked with have been in touch with Pakistan’s terror outfit Hizbul Mujahideen and Kashmiri separatists. They received weapons from the terrorist organisation during the Bhima-Koregaon violence in 2018. Incriminating evidence retrieved from the laptops of his fellow travellers and co-accused, Rona Wilson and Surendra Gadling, suggest that Navlakha and his group had conducted talks with Hizbul leaders.

In fact, Navlakha had been liaising with banned terror outfits based out of Pakistan since 2011. The police say he was also in touch with separatists like Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Shakil Bakshi between 2011 and 2014. Geelani and Bakshi, mind you, are loath to talk to any brand of Indians, yet they thought it fit to entertain Navlakha.

Last year, he was booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). On July 5, the high court had granted him interim protection from arrest till July 23, and on Wednesday it was extended till further orders. The police believe that inflammatory speeches at Elgar Parishad conclave in Pune on December 31, 2017 led to violence near the Bhima-Koregaon war memorial the next day, and the Parishad had been supported by Maoists. The UAPA is the law needed to deal with Left-wing violence that has used gullible sections of the population to instigate violence against the state.