Violence and Political Culture

Violence, no matter in what name it is courted - tactic, expediency or compulsion - blurs the distinction between emancipatory and retrogressive, the Left and the Right. As a political method it functions on the principle of absolute dualism, permanent war between the good and the evil god and satan. The Ultra Left in Bihar began its career by following the violent path already taken by a number of individuals between 1967 and 1971. It picked up the argument of the 'inevitability of violence' involved in individualised cases of resistance and turned it into a 'party-line', a generalised political wisdom, into a social good. Not surprisingly, in the Ultra Left's extreme vision there was little space for self-criticism, doubts, ambivalence and thus for dialogue and democracy itself. Today the Ultra Left, unable to break the vicious circle of violence, is doomed to follow the politics of marginality.