Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Kyunki Dilli Dur Hai
Rakesh Sinha has a very sensible column in the Express today, in response to the Jehanabad jail break. His argument is that the Red Menace can be combatted most effectively by an efficient police network with local intelligence, rather than by Central efforts to send in troops with no ground coordination. A must read for those interested in the strategic aspects of counter-terrorism in India.
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2 comments:
In all such movements whether PW or ULFA or JKLF, or the solo Veerappan et al, three things keep them going:
a). Political patronage
b). MONEY !!
c). The media
One has to accept that without these three Indian Masalas no movement will even start leave alone thrive. Can you imagine a single Veerappan leading three State governments, the Central government and their police forces a merry dance for years together ? He was reputed to have sold off Rs. 2000 crores of sandalwood trees alone not counting tons of ivory from ill-fated tuskers foraging in the Mudumalai forests. Yet when he was killed he died like a nondescript forest rat with his wife and daughter still living in poverty-stricken circumstances in their village shanty.The ransom money paid to him to release the over-the-hill Kannadiga film actor Dr. Rajkumar was rumored to be Rs. 50 crores alone. Where has all this money gone? No body who went into the forest came back alive unless it was cleared in advance with Veerappan. Recall the DMK's Karunanidhi's emissary who went in and out of the forest countless number of times and brought back fresh footage of interviews with the forest brigand to be aired across all TV news channels.It took Jayalalitha, when she replaced her arch-enemy Karunanidhi as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, to finish off Veerappan.Get the idea?
Cut to the original Naxalbari movement that started with the local tea garden labourers in the Doars 14 kms from Siliguri in West Bengal. The prime mover of this was the CPI(M) which wanted to destabilise the Congress government in West Bengal led by Siddharth Shankar Ray . The likes of Charu Majumdar, Jangal Santhal, Kanu Sanyal (the leading lights of the Naxalbari movement) were all from the CPI(M). After the violent movement took off with the killing of Sonam Wangdi the police officer under Naxalbari police station, the hypocritical CPI(M)which professes that Parliament is a Pigsty, distanced themselves from this group and left them high and dry to fend for themselves. West Bengal's Chief Minister Barrister Siddhart Shankar Ray, grandson of Chittaranjan Das (a legal luminary in the British days)was deadly serious in nipping this nuisance that went in the name of "peoples's revolution" a la Mao's "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Notice the common USP of this group throughout the Indian subcontinent;"China's Chairman is our Chairman." He called in his police chief Ranjit Gupta and instructed him to show no mercy to this group and wipe them out at the earliest. Mind you, most of the ideologically driven who joined this group soon were some of the best brains from Bengal's young intelligentsia hailing from its Universities and Colleges. The operation also had the PM's ("Indu" to Siddharth Shankar Ray and the mother of the 1975 Emergency)blessings.In no time Gupta set about to do his job with full dedication.(This may make the LLB(Left Liberal Brigade)and some misguided Human Rights wallas squirm. Through regular combing operations and mostly fake encounters with those captured, the leading lights of the movement were soon wiped out in West Bengal.
Thanks to the bounteous KGB funds (ref the Mitrokin Papers)doled out to the USSR's moles in Indian politics and the media, coupled with a succession of Leftist Education Ministers during the entire Congress rule from 1947 onwards the Left in India have come to occupy a far larger intellectual space in the Indian polity than their political presence and relevance in the country. The day the nexus of politicians,media,money on one side and terror groups on the other is broken, this movement too will end like the Khalistan movement.The countdown to smash this movement began the day Indira Gandhi, Zail Singh and Punjab CM Darbara Singh lost control over Jarnail Singh Bhindranwalawa, their own creation. The decision to take him out was prompted by the fact that the Sikhs comprised a paltry 1.97 % of the Indian voters who were confined to the sole Indian state of Punjab and were of little consequence to the Congress as a vote bank.
The ULFA, an active collaborator of Pakistan's ISI is in cahoots with the Congress party since its inception. Five of its major leaders were caught red-handed by the Central Forces while they were making extortion and ransom telephone calls to victims from the Gauhati residence of the Senior Superintendent of Police. The SSP was suspended.
Politicians start off such movements while the media romanticizes them and builds them up to dizzying heights as they have to sell their newspapers. After some time these anti-national elements gather some strength of their own and they begin to get out of hand of their political masters. The moment that happens the politicians give a call out for the Army/Central forces to contain their unruly proteges. The instant the Central forces come within striking reach of wiping out these elements another call out is given by our rulers to send the Army back to their barracks. This cat and mouse goes on ad nauseum as long as some juice remains to be extracted by the above named nexus. Only when their masters face the real threat of exposure from their erstwhile proteges that the call goes out to eliminate them.
The solution then? Well, I can only suggest that you don't ingest the garbage the media(print or electronic) doles out as news and views and begin to use your own intelligence to read between the lines. If you are serious, you can make a start by dispassionately reading several newspapers every day and try and guess which political dispensation/vested interest the columnist or paper belongs to. Further, whenever you sit down to read a newspaper, you should start from the last page and gradually work towards the front page. That way you are likely to move from fact to fiction and become a bit enured to be stirred by the sensational non-news emblazoned in several column wide bold font on page one. Ofcourse, there is no guarantee that the sports page doles out only factual events. Sourav Ganguly, the out of form erstwhile captain of the Indian cricket team is today in the midst of media speculation with the battle lines clearly drawn between the Maharashtra and Bengal lobbies. But that is another story altogether.
@anonymous
I do not know why you choose to be anonymous.
First of all, there are certain things that you choose not to mention. What about the Hindu fundamentalist movements,the ones that led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid, and that led to a man slaughter in Gujarat.
The role of the BJP in provoking the movemtn to satisfy its own political ambition is as clear as the day. However,dear anon, you choose to conviniently ignore that, true to your right wing legacy.
Then again,While you care to make a sound analysis,you are plagued by the perennial disease of over-generalisation. There is a fundamental difference between Virappan and the Naxalite movement in Bengal. The difference,my friend,is that of ideology.
Virappan was a mere sandalwood smuggler.
The Naxalites,however, were driven by an ideology of the "revolution of the proletariet".In this age, when politics is synonymous with power and corruption, this may seem ridiculous to you, but then, there is much more to heaven and earth,dear anonymous,than dreamt of in your philosophy.
there are several things that are totally unclear in your analysis about the Naxalites.
a)where did they get their money from??
nowhere do you make yourself clear on this.Even your much famed "mitrokhin papers" do not make any claim of soviet assistance to the Naxalite movement.
b)provide evidence to your facts: How did you come to the conclusion that Charu Mazumder belonged to the CPI(M).
on the other hand, if you do not know this, it is the State Police, with the blessings of CPI(M),that had slow poisoned Charu Mazumder in the jail.
The CPI(M) is not a communist party. It is merely a revisionist party.The fact that they had tried to use the Naxalite movement for their own narrow political gain, does not,in any way, make all Naxals CPI(M) chelas.
interestingly, the movement is again picking up momentum in the most underdeveloped parts of Bengal, and they proclaim the hypocritical CPI(M) to be their biggest enemy, if you are aware of this.
In the most underdeveloped parts of the country, such as Bihar and Andhra Pradesh,Naxalites continue to fight for the poor and the downtrodden. It is undeniable that they have given a voice to the lower castes in a place like Bihar where once the lives of the lower classes were subject to the whims and mercies of their feudal upper caste landlords.
While you may disagree with their methods of movement (although very strangely, the right wing pigs such as you see the merciless crushing of such movements,even by killing innocent people as logical and justified, but however the use of violence to wipe the society of its evils,the very methods adopted by the Naxalites,seem unjustified to you),however, you will surely agree that that they,unlike Virappan, are not smugglers and thugs, but fight for an ideology.
finally,to answer you:
"Left in India have come to occupy a far larger intellectual space in the Indian polity than............"
you know what, education is supposed to teach you human values,not fundamentalism. and since, to you left liberal idelogy is synonymous to the idea of human compassion, it is not surprising, that you find a large portion of the intellegensia as leftist. I think that atleast points out to you that there is something somewhere thats wrong with anaonymous commenters who compare Virappan with Naxalites, an dpretend to forget about people like Narendra Modi, the greatest man slaughterer that India has seen in the recent years.
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