Liberals’ Romanticism of the Maoist Terrorists — Replug
While Kashmiris and Assamese human rights’ “watchdogs” bring down the ceiling over the deployment of armed forces in the bordering states J&K and Assam, the journalist fraternity along with the intelligentsia cries in unison over the supposed atrocities on the forever innocent civilians. All this while they conveniently ignore the other regions of the country, to be precise, the regions which give the central government fuel to run its pyro techniques, an electoral strength to take a firm decision without having to worry about the parliamentary obstructions. Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to Bihar.
Gangwars, religious strife, mass slaughters and (un)ruled robbery was the way of life in the state. One leaf out of those episodes is the Maoist/Naxalite insurgency. While the Maoist insurgency was rampant in Bihar in the 90s, the administration did very little to curb it. Instead, the Chief Minister of Bihar in the 90s, Shri Lalu Prasad Yadav had almost given a free reign to the Maoists/Naxalites to kill, rape, loot and plunder as the victims, almost all of them, were from the forward classes and contributed bare minimum to Yadav’s vote tally. The rural badland of Bhojpur suffered a lot due to the Maoist threat as the “revolutionaries of the socially backward class” had made life of the people an ongoing nightmare. Apart from the killings, rapes and abduction, they also extorted Rs 20,000 from each farmer apart from the guns and a piece of land, i.e. Bigha. The “landlords” tried to negotiate but the deal failed and the armed Maoists created a blockade of the agricultural land which belonged to the Brahmin farmers. The killings, however, still continued. This resulted in the local landlords, mainly Bhumihar Brahmins, forming a private militia, i.e. “Ranvir Sena” to derail the insurgency. It was a bloodied battle and the murders by Naxals were met with slaughters by the warrior clansmen. The Marxist media termed it as “genocide” of the poor and called it a caste and class war. What went unnoticed that the blood spill resulted in the Naxals being chased out of the region. While the naxals are still active in the region but their activities are not as dominant as they were in the past. However, subsequently, the private militia was banned in July ’95 and termed as a “terrorist” organization by Lalu Yadav’s administration. Too many false charges of murders, loot and even rapes were slapped on the militia members. There is nothing much one can say about Lalu Yadav who’s goons would abduct doctors, jewellers, and other wealthy businessmen in the broad day light and ask for ransom which had to deposited in the party fund for RJD. The tribesmen, however, have no regrets over what they did, as an armed intervention was the need of the hour.
The human rights machinery never came to the aid of the victims of naxalites, and continued branding them as communal and castiest bigots. It all started in the quiet night of February, 1992 when scores of the upper class or Savarna men had their throats slit by the Maoists. If one has to give the gruesome act of murder a typical Marxist gloss over, it will sound like a mutiny of a sort. In the words of the “literary giant” of the Urban city dwellers, William Dalrymple, “On the night of February 13, 1992, 200 armed untouchables surrounded the high-caste village of Barra in the northern Indian State of Bihar. By the light of the burning splints, the raiders roused all the men from their bed and marched them out into the fields. Then, one after another, they slit their throats with a rusty harvesting sickle.” While Dalrymple shrugs it off by calling it a struggle of “Maan-Sammaan” by the poor class, Bindeshwar Pathak, a renowned sociologist, bluntly marks it as the fallout of an undeclared war between the Savarna Liberation Front and the Maoist insurgents. So much for his knowledge that Dalrymple didn’t even know that Bihar is not in the Northern India but the Eastern. What he also doesn’t understand that the people from the upper class stopped using their real last names or family names and started using “Kumar” as their last names which some think signifies neutrality or classifies them as “downtrodden”. That was done to avoid any attention from the Maoists and also to gain attention of the state which was catering only to the scheduled caste and alienated the upper class. This was a rank discrimination which escapes the hawk eyes of the intelligentsia.
The liberal voices have squarely blamed “Ranvir Sena” for the entire carnage which happened in Jehanabad, Haibaspur, and Bhojpur while their educated audience lapped up to it, word by word. Anyone with an iota of knowledge about the armed violence of CPI(M) would know that it started quite a while ago in 1970, whereas Ranvir Sena was formed in 1993. The mental banckruptcy of the Marxists becomes evident when they mark any loot in the urban regions as the act of “goons” and reserve a special remark of “class struggle” when it happens in the rural badlands. One would be appalled to know that a renowned Bengali writer, Mahasweta Devi openly called for CPI(M)’s “just retaliation” against the slaughter of Maoists at the hands of Ranvir Sena. Her bias, however, was evident when she shed tears over the death of a Naxalite in her novel “Hazar Chaurasi ki Maa” which was later made into a movie by Govind Nihalani. Apart from the selective amnesia of many such Bengali “scholars”, most other liberal journalists who happen to sit in New Delhi have glorified the armed struggle of the Maoists as a virtue to be duly emulated, even though they feign anger when Maoists kill and maim the security forces as well as the civilians. This reminds one of an Egyptian-French scholar Samir Amin who in his book “The Future of Maoism” imagines the heavenly face of Maoism and it’s beauty while sitting thousands of miles away from China and having never visited the glorified land of “Mao-Se-Tung” or Mao Zedong for most readers.
This is important to note that Maoism or Naxalism finds it ideological support mostly from the elites and affluent society, who obviously have nothing to lose from their violence. From the prosperous western societies to the prosperous farming region of Central Bihar, Maoism has found refuge in the hearts of the urban educated youth. Rabindra Ray, in his The Naxalite and their Ideology points out that the roots of the naxal mindset is not found in the poor labours of the rural regions, but in the affluent urban class which believes their psychological traumas are not the traumas but an enlightenment of a sort. The reality is nobody understands Naxalism better than its victims, it’s a utopian world created by the wealthy in a bid to redeem themselves of their supposed sin which might have kept the poverty intact. It’s no better than a riddle which neither understood by the promoter, nor by the foot soldiers. One must ponder why if Naxalism has no value of its own, has no solution to any problem, and yet manages to find support for its revolution which has become obsolete and has no relevance with the current times. Paul Wilkinson tries to answer this in his book, Terrorism and Liberal State, “Rebellions do not generally fade away. They have to be put down ruthlessly and effectively, if normal life and business are to be restored.” The stance of the various Indian governments has been rather confusing when it comes to Maoist violence. There has been only one instance when the might of the state came down heavily on the terrorists and that happened in Punjab during the Khalistan terrorism. On one hand one sees the state coming down heavily on the Maoist bastions with large operations conducted by the paramilitary, whereas on the other hand state has its agents/interlocutors kid gloving the Maoists and media acolytes giving them an image makeover, ultimately leading them to the national scene where everybody pretends to believe that Maoists are the national heroes who have sacrificed their today for “our” tomorrow. One such inductee onto the national forum is Binayak Sen.
What doesn’t convince me is the pattern in which the communist states across the world have functioned/ declined while the Indian commies still glorify it and the leftist utopia is still dominant in India, sometimes in the name of the poor/oppressed or sometimes in the name of secularism. They have a history of ruling by killing everyone who opposes their view and hounding out everyone who they can’t kill. Commies dictate the political correctness in the country and would en masse toe the Goebbelsian tirade till the time everyone else falls in line. Every time an incident happens, the primary elements involved will be conveniently ignored and every analysis will go back to the same melodramatic “socio-economic factors”. The complicity of the criminals be damned, their primary background be damned, because the only thing which would matter is what happened to their forefathers some 1500 years ago. Certain Gandhians were shedding tears when there were talks of branding Maoists as terrorists. It’s hardly unknown that Arundhati Roy adores the Maoists as “Gandhians with guns”. Pretty cute, that was. Another renowned writer, Kamleshwar, argues that an organization with an acute socio-cultural base should not be classed as terrorists. I heard Al-Qaeda was planning to make such writers their resident media strategists. If they are not, they should. This way they can easily escape being called terrorists by putting their garb of “socio-cultural” propaganda.
Such a policy is never going to help erase the Maoist style terror events. The state has to stop beating around the bush and start calling spade a spade. The Maoist terror will not end if the Maoists and their sympathizers among the academia, intelligentsia and media houses are not forced to meet the blade of the state’s might. As the Professor of Sociology, Rabindra Ray remarks “If the Naxalite violence is to be checked, it demands the meeting of violence with violence.” Having lived for 17 years in regions which were de facto “Red Corridors” and were heavily guarded by CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) from all corners, I can vouch that I may have been one of the abductees of the liberals’ “poor revolutionaries”, had the security forces not been deployed, 24/7 for 365 days. If the state doesn’t do it, it has no right to sit on the throne while the security forces along with the unarmed civilians keep being maimed at will by the Maoist cadres.
Jai Bihar, Jai Bharat
