Why I Agree with Raj Thackeray.

The two giant states of India, i.e. UP and Bihar have a huge population which lives in utter chaos, just like the rest of India. While UP is the most populous state of India with a total population of approximately 200 million (2011 Census), which is more than Pakistan’s population and actually puts UP on par with Brazil, it’s neighboring state Bihar has the 3rd largest population in the country with approximately 100 million people living in the state.

It is obvious that a state with such population should have adequate resources to cater to its population but UP and Bihar do not have such resources, not at least visible to the naked eye. An average person wants food, electricity, employment, education, and a bit of peace. Uttar Pradesh boasts of a couple of top notch universities, for e.g. Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). It’s an entirely different thing that AMU, offlate, breeds and nurtures separatism (I shall throw light on it some other time). I haven’t included Allahabad University which was earlier known as the “Oxford of the East”, as it no longer acts like that. Even though I am not a huge fan of Oxford University, but let’s just follow a bit of status quo in this piece.

It’s good to have great universities but the students become a bit clueless as to what to do after they have completed their studies. If they are lucky, they get into public sector organizations and if not then they opt to travel to bigger cities, to study more or to work as there is absolutely nothing in the state to cater the needs of the young folks. In short, the middle class abandons the state and moves out.

Now, what happens to the other people who do not have the resources to go for higher studies? Mired with poverty, caste biases, hunger pangs, and a desire to earn money, they too pack their bags and move to the bigger cities. It needs to be noted that when a poor travels to another place, he/she brings along every possible baggage with him/her to the new place. The same story is with Bihar too. There is absolutely no vision of the state administration to make it a resourceful state which can generate more jobs and income for its people. They too for the almost same reasons migrate to the bigger places.

I will cut you short here and take you to certain occurrences and utterances in a big city.

Raj Thackeray comes across as a chauvinist Maratha who doesn’t want anyone from UP and Bihar to live and work in Maharashtra, especially in Mumbai, the erstwhile Bombay. He cites that the rise in crimes, involving petty thefts, rapes, murders, etc is due to the scores of migrants flocking the city. Every time a Bihari gets caught in any of the above mentioned crimes, his cry goes louder and news channels get all the spice for a week or so. Then comes the “condemnation” from the different political parties claiming such utterances are not good for the unity of the country. When any such incident happens, the politicians of these states throw a dare at Thackeray that they will perform “Chhath Puja” in Mumbai and ask him to take action on them if he has guts, much to the applause of their audiences.

A “Bhaiya” in me seems to get disturbed with what Raj says, sometimes angry too.

Funny enough, I, sometimes, echo Thackeray’s sentiments too. It all happened when I heard his interview on Times Now, which was conducted in Hindi and was meant to be watched by the Hindi belt. He had never given an interview in Hindi earlier. Obviously, he felt the need to clarify a few things to the people of U.P and Bihar. He talked about the rise in crimes, mentioned accurate facts and events, and asked people to introspect with an open mind. What he also mentioned that while the Bhaiya folks are flocking the city, there are many illegal Bangladeshi immigrant who cross the border to West Bengal or Assam, reach Bihar and then join the flocking migrants to reach Mumbai. He also said that terrorists from Pakistan are traveling to Nepal (which for some reason is too soft on trespassers) and from there they cross the border into Uttar Pradesh and join the brigade which travels to Mumbai. Now, that is frightening, because one of the bordering regions of Indo-Nepal is Behraich, and the environment isn’t too comfortable there. Almost every terrorist finds refuge there, and the Islamic clerics run the show instead of the secular government of Uttar Pradesh which has turned a blind eye to everything for the sake of their supposed votebank.

All of it isn’t a good sign, not just for Mumbai, but for India in general too. I am not going to get into the details of threats from the illegal Bangladeshis and will stick to the deeds of my own folks. I am also not going to talk about the deeds or misdeeds of any other ethnic community in India and what they do in Mumbai. This is about me and my own.

What Raj Thackeray didn’t tell us that all these Bhaiya folks, when travel to Mumbai, have their economic benefits in mind, which of course will be given to them by the generous and resourceful Mumbai. When it comes to gaining economic benefits, they flock to Mumbai, but when it comes to repaying the city, they opt for the political parties which have screwed their own states and are the reason they were forced to migrate in the first place. Most of the labour class votes for Samajwadi Party (SP), even in Mumbai, largely because SP candidates are from their home towns and constantly remind them of it as well. This in simple words is back stabbing. There is a maxim in Hindi “Jis Thaali Mein Khana, Ussi Mein Chhed Karna” which roughly translates to “Biting the hand which feeds you”.

Not just this, they would live in ghettos, and spoil the entire area with dirt and garbage galore. Mumbai is a slum city and all thanks to these low life migrants who are too happy dwelling there with the blessings of political parties who allow them to not only stay in their rat holes, but to build more and more slums. All this in return of a huge votebank. I can hold a moral high ground on being an anti-regionalist. Even when I was in England, I voted not for the Labour Party (which was too migrant friendly) but for the Conservatives as I found substance in the native Britons’ outcry when they lambasted the incumbent Labour Govt for their immigration policy, even if that meant I am to be sent back to India. I had/have same issues with the ruling UPA Govt in India.

I have recently moved to Mumbai, and it didn’t take me more than a week to realize what keeps the city filthy. I could have written about it earlier, but I wanted to have the first hand experience of the entire issue. It’s my own people who have transformed the once safe and vibrant Bombay to a shithole called Mumbai which stinks from every nook and corner. If the migrants from U.P. and Bihar have an ounce of selfrespect, they would call out Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav (who have destroyed the future of 3 generations of their states) and ask them to explain the disease called UP and Bihar, instead of confronting Raj Thackeray on why they should be thrown out of Maharashtra. The only thing I can blame Raj and his supporters for is the language in which they complain about it. It wouldn’t be acceptable if you are threatening to throw somebody out of the state for being from a different state. But that is it. I have no other issues, whatsoever.

Liberals’ Romanticism of the Maoist Terrorists

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 CRPF (Central Reserve Police 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