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Gangrenous body parts. he pointed out. must be removed to save the whole. Therefore "war is inevitable when oppression cannot be stopped by any other means whatsoever. " 16 The article went on to invoke Krishna, Rama, and Kali as ex­ emplars of divine sanction for an avenging (and purifying) destruction-making this too a potential seed text for both anarchist- and Hindu nationalist-inflected radical rhetorics. Significantly, in the process of a dedicated practice by which the vanguard's hearts were to be forged and tested, while rousing and inspiring the p e ople, conventional mo­ rality became irrelevant : for "A nation yearning for free­ dom .

It didn't really matter what that myth might be ; it only mattered that it did the j ob. But of course, it does matter quite a lot to the out­ come. From this perspective the significance of these mo­ ments of dual p otentiality is not that anarchism converges with the Right but precisely that it does not. At a cross­ roads, choices matter most; here is where ethical orienta­ tion and content make the difference. What determined whether the myth of right-wing p opulist rhetoric or liber­ tarian socialism would prevail ?

Anarchism:=:: Decolonization Indian anticolonial radicals overseas after the turn of the twentieth century sought out active collabo rations in cos­ mopolitan cities with anarchist networks whose tactics and principles they saw as applicable to the needs of their cause. In t�lCt until the mid- 1 930s, the traits that difh:rentiated anarch ism from other sectors of the Left were also those that gave it affinities with contemporary anticolonial struggles- for example, the perception of the government itself as an evil and the state as clearly extrane­ ous to society, so that the primary sites of resistance were the defining mechan isms of state function, including both disciplinary and ideological apparatuses.