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.
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