In case you were hooked to the telly for the all important IPL or were feverishly following the fates of Shoaib-Sania, it is likely you would have missed a ‘minor’ incident. For that matter, you would not have paid attention even if you did see the ticker, for the Chennai team actually won that day and also things turned Advantage Sania, as Shoaib’s ex-wife settled with him, thanks to the unsolicited brokering by the media that was hell bent on consummating the marriage. The minor incident I am referring to is the massacre of around 75 security personnel at one go by Maoists. Incidentally, they have been at it decades without end, and so owing to viewer fatigue, did not merit TRP! The security personnel, of course, merit nothing except official wreaths and statistical courtesy!
Why is it always the security personnel? Well, apart from the obvious fact that they are the ones in the killers’ firing range, they also represent the Establishment that the revolutionaries routinely loathe. Why? Because Establishment exploits! If so, who constitutes the E’ment? Politicians or securitymen? Okay, let us amplify a bit. Who constitutes the E’ment that exploits? Easy! Politicians! Now, how many such exploiting politicians have been eliminated by the Maoists, who claim a mandate to that effect? Nil. No, we are not suggesting anything sinister here but only trying to figure out the Great Revolutionary logic, handed down by Communism’s forefathers, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao – four fathers, actually! The question is simple: If the idea is to finish off exploiters and emancipate the exploited, how is it that, despite so many bullets and bombs, the exploiters are still exploiting the exploited?
Many such contradictions confront the Maoists, rather, Marxism itself that no comrade can run away from. In fact, Communists have always fancied themselves as belonging to a profound intellectual movement with answers for everything under the sun. Its ideologues from Marx downwards have always been obsessed with dialectics, polemics and endless academic discourses that are invariably light years away from practical ground realities. That does not mean they are well-meaning dreamers either. On the contrary, all the theorising are actually camoulages for sordid deeds: Marxism is just about 150-years vintage, but the trail of skeletons it has left and is still treading on, is legion. But the intellectual veneer draped on all acts, brutal or banal, makes the ideology seem eminently glossy to impressionable minds. The barbaric Maoists of India is one of the many groups in the Leftist catalogue that has enjoyed this cover, courtesy, comrades in the mainstream.
In the Germany of the 1850s, Marx was a struggling journalist who was finding it tough to make both ends meet. Marxism in all probability is an output of terminal boredom riding on ire and penury, and is the truest example of an idle mind being a devil’s workshop. But it is a devil that haunts us till date thanks to the romanticising of violence which is an abiding article of faith with Marxists. Marx’s ‘ism was a posthumous movement popularised primarily by Lenin, but adopted by many other ‘revolutionaries’ who wanted good, saleable slogans to hide their shady deeds. Small wonder, dictators and demagogues till date always have Marxism on their lips and guns at their hips. Of course, from Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, to Idi Amin and Pol Pot, all the modern messiahs of socialism had adapted it to suit their political and personal needs. So did Mao, in China, with his people’s war guerilla movement that has inspired our desi ones. And the violence that characterised all these ‘revolutions’ did not abate once State power was in grasp. Rather, State power became an instrument to subjugate and oppress the people further, the very people, poor and proletariat, that Communism was supposed to salvage.
The Maoists of India, who have united under one banner in 2004, want the Indian State to wither away at the boom of their guns. Neighbouring Nepal which is under Maoist rule, is an example of what such a fate would augur for India. Democracy is anathema to them. Even the so-called moderate Marxists here, for decades, never actually reconciled to a democratic and Independent India because according to them freedom from the British did not come by the means and methods of their book and therefore was no freedom at all. In the early years after 1947, many mainline Marxist leaders lived as fugitives, marshalling ‘red armies’ within the country for an armed insurrection, until the Russian and Chinese bosses instructed them to change ways, in deference to Nehru who they rightly deemed more Left than the Indian Leftists. The current Maoists are the residue from that genetic pool. The difference and distance between Marxists and Maoists is akin to that between the trigger and the barrel of the same gun!
There are more contradictions. The Maoists still talk of Class conflict, the classical haves vs have-nots debate. Apart from the security men, who are not rich, Maoists’ victimes include poor farmers and workers too. Maoists are actually known for taking protection money from petty bourgeois traders and black-marketeers, whom Marxism denounces as the biggest exploiters of the poor. And public service? Doctors, nurses and social workers dread to step into Maoist infested villages for fear of being killed, raped or kidnapped for ransom! Just a thin red line divides roaring revolution and rank rowdyism. In the Marxist/Maoist manual, abduction, extortion, robbery, murder, looting, arson and such other ‘revolutionary’ acts are all perfectly fair means. There are reports that Maoists are also into poppy and hemp cultivation in lands disguised by other crops on the fringes. Now, that’s Land reform! Of course, there is no way of knowing if the cadres, voluntary or those recruited by force, are paid minimum wages with all attendant employee benefits or if they are allowed to form a Union. But here is the real cold icing on the terror cake: LeT and Maoists are now comrades in arms. Maoist leader Kishanji is on record claiming that Islamic Jihad is perfectly legitimate because it fights globalisation and capitalism! We told you these bloody brainy chaps can justify anything!
Many last straws have come and gone. With the latest attack the Maoists have thrown another deadly gauntlet at PC, MSingh and their regime. They must take the challenge, forthwith deploy the army in the red corridor and send the Maoists packing to where Mao and Marx now reside. Otherwise, India will land there soon enough! A grave crisis, indeed!
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