ANIRBAN GANGULY
Indian communists, like their counterparts the world over, have always practised the most violent and vicious forms of politics. The more intense the democratic opposition to communist rule in a particular state, the more intense and brutal the suppression of workers of opposition parties. The demands for tolerance, for preservation of democratic rights and for dialogue that communist cadres and their “articulate” leaders often make is actually meant for the consumption of the sanitised studios of the national capital, for the consumption of the Western media and academia and for elite intelligentsia and the NGO networks and networkers.
In fact, wherever they have ruled, communists and their regimes have left a trail of devastation – systemic, administrative, cultural, intellectual and spiritual. They have decimated and destroyed institutions that people and societies have nurtured over the ages and those which have anchored and given direction to our continuing existence as a civilisation. In the West – especially in communist regimes of Eastern Europe this was the norm – in West Bengal they have destroyed such institutions and dissolved opportunities for generations.
The CPI(M) and its ‘Left Front’ allies ran one of the most violent regimes in West Bengal for over three decades. The violence and rapaciousness of its cadres and comrades is now the stuff of legend. Worshipping Stalin and Mao and paying lip service to the proletariat, the communists depleted West Bengal’s resources, eradicated its industries, started desertification of its education system, starved its tribals and finally shot its farmers. In short, communists in West Bengal ran one of the most fascist and authoritarian regime that democratic India has ever seen.
In Kerala, communists have repeatedly killed and maimed their political opponents. It has carried an unending series of targeted killing of BJP and RSS cadres – most of them ordinary party workers, swayamsevaks coming from disadvantaged sections of society and to whom the RSS and BJP had reached out and had given hope and support. The Kerala communists have, in a sense, overtaken their counterparts in West Bengal in the practice of violence. Hurling of bombs and hacking away of limbs are but a few techniques that they have mastered and put into determined practice while their elders in Delhi cry and wail over a false dawn of fascism.
Today there is no Hindu Rashtra that the communist need fear in Kerala, but rather under Vijayan, one of their leading proponents of violence, a “Fascist Raj” is certainly entrenching itself. This is the actual reality of those who hoodwink people through dialectics and perennially pose as the protector of rights of the marginalised and the oppressed.
Communist politics in Kerala has always been a stark expression of fascism and the “tallest” leaders of that violent and blood-thirsty politics were the ones who spearheaded an international propaganda campaign to heap calumny on Narendra Modi and to curtail his democratic and constitutional rights. It is these same leaders who while directing abetting assaults and attacks on political opponents shed tears for terrorists and separatists. In a sense their agendas match.
The Nationalistonline starts a 12-part series documenting how communists have murdered BJP and RSS workers simply because the latter belonged to a different world view and thought and had the audacity to practice a politics that was different from theirs. The saga of brutality and of sacrifice has mostly gone unnoticed among the vast majority in the country. No tears have been shed in the national media over the death of these workers, no prime debate or magazine space has been devoted to examining and exposing the phenomenon of communist violence and in recording the details of its victims.
In reality, where the communist rule – the Constitution, democratic rights, human rights, right to dignity and to security, and the right to life itself, stand suspended or are non-existent.
(The writer is columnist.)