An article (link courtesy the Acorn) by Nandini Sundar that tries to examine the Maoist menace by drawing guidance from the Mahabharata, gets the Mahabharata portion almost wholly wrong.

Being what it is, you can dive into the Mahabharata, and you’re certain to find in it whatever you want to prove. The best bit is you can still get away with it. Actually, you don’t need to work even that hard. You can simply use the most famous tribute to it as your alibi: what is there here is found everywhere, what is not does not exist.

Nandini Sundar errs at the outset when she says

…if there is anything the Mahabharata teaches us, it is the futility of war.

War is only incidental in the epic. The real teaching of the epic lies here: about doing the right thing always. Dharma in other words. That demands absolute clarity and conviction, which none of the characters had with the exception of Krishna and Draupadi, to an extent. That again is the reason Krishna is worshipped as God. But that is irrelevant here.

In the plane of this article, Krishna’s Gita is transformed into:

Krishna’s advice to Arjuna in the Gita is not to be taken as a justification for war, but an ad hoc resolution of a moral dilemma.

An on-the-spot solution to what? Nandini Sundar fails to mention the one basic missing link: Arjuna’s vexation. I repeat myself: the war is merely incidental. Arjuna’s problem was, as the Gita itself says, faint-heartedness arising out of a lack of clarity and conviction. The Gita thus is simply a spiritual solution for a perennial, temporal problem that everybody faces and not necessarily on a battlefield. If it was an ad-hoc solution, why do people still turn to it for answers considering that it was a solution for a war-wrought problem, a war fought a few thousand years ago?

The Acorn rightly calls Nandini Sundar’s position as untenable simply because the premise is incorrect. The article, without the Mahabharata angle still fails to make sense.

This is perhaps a pacifist middle-ground position, but is untenable as an organising principle for a democratic nation. It has been rejected by the Maoists themselves… [The Acorn]

It is strange that she talks about lessons from the Mahabharata a great deal but fails to mention one important lesson the epic teaches us: the pitiable, and tragic failure of conciliatory/pacifistic measures with proven incarnations of evil. We don’t need to brand Maoists with such an extreme term: dangerous is sufficient. And pacifism definitely doesn’t work.

Nandini Sundar has bungled on both fronts: she displays a lack of even the basic understanding of the epic, and misleads the reader by assuming a symmetry between the nature of violence perpetrated by the state and a bunch of armed thugs.

The Maoist problem has escalated because the Indian state is weak.