Mao TV. Actually, MoU TV. For days now, news TV has been bringing to us long conversations on Maoists with important people who have asked us to understand or admit that memoranda of understanding (MoU) on exploiting natural resources between the Indian state and domestic/foreign companies are the reason the state is waging a “war”. This seems to be the current grand narrative of the “we don’t support violence but the real fault lies with the free-market ideology” group. News TV seems somewhat shy in interrogating this thesis. Members of this group were asked several times if they condemn Maoist violence, but they were seldom asked to fully explain the MoU narrative. Even when some details were offered, anchors didn’t seem interested. I am puzzled because it is not as if the same anchors didn’t ask 20 questions on all the other stuff. Why not, say, two questions on the big economic claim?

Before expanding on this a bit more, let me first put on record that there was a moment when my sympathies were with Arundhati Roy. Roy, being quizzed by a CNN-IBN double-anchor team, was told Mahatma Gandhi would have appealed to Maoists to stop the violence. I am not Mahatma Gandhi, Roy said. Quite. Good answer to a very curious argument.

Roy appeared twice on CNN-IBN recently (the other time on Devil’s Advocate) and made a series of economic arguments, including the one on MoU, most of which went more or less uncontested. On Devil’s Advocate, she said:

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