Anirban Ganguly
The CPI(M) and the communists parties in general refuse to see the writing on the wall; that of their nearing political
decimation. They continue to remain active as a disruptive element on the political canvas, injecting violence and falsehood to maintain their hold
When in power or in majority, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and all other types and genre of communist parties in India have always displayed the most intolerant and fascist attitude, by hacking away at democratic systems, frameworks, institutions and approaches. Communists have generally displayed contempt and intolerance towards any kind of opposition, be it political or intellectual. When in a minority or out of power, they cry wolf and deftly act out the victim card, conjuring up the spectre of violence and claiming to be victims.
Years of mastering the techniques of Goebbels like propaganda and erecting a propaganda super-structure, which has enabled them to obfuscate issues and present a narrative that is always insidiously false and subversive in nature, the communists have succeeding in the keeping the lid on their records of governance and human rights in India. While communism and communist regimes the world over have been exposed and their diabolic record of governance has come out in the open, the record of communism in India is yet to be documented in its entirety.
The prop of intellectualism has been the Indian communist’s greatest cover for carrying on, undetected, their politics of violence and retribution. Over the years, the comrades have built up an ecosystem of acolytes, adherents and drum-beaters who are, at a given signal, ready to justify, divert and dialectically explain away the fads and excesses of their co-ideologists as the manifestations of an extreme revolutionary urge to cleanse the system of reactionaries and revisionists.
Over the years, this network and denial-web has worked to their advantage, and the Indian communists — though most regressive and violent in nature and outlook — have passed themselves off before the world as the most suave, articulate and conscientious protectors of India’s social fabric and national life. Never at the forefront of social or community service, never at the forefront when calamity strikes, never at the forefront when India’s integrity and safety is at stake — in fact, on these counts, the comrades can never ever equal the work of the RSS — the comrades have only excelled in widening faultlines, in keep embers of potential conflict alive and in trying to ensure that conflicts never abate but exacerbate.
Such an approach to Indian polity and public life has also ensured that the comrades continue to be feted, invited and celebrated among certain academic cartels in the West — cartels, whose sole research and academic objective is to somehow prove, despite contrary evidences and often lack of evidences, that India under Narendra Modi and the BJP is breaking and unravelling at the seams. The last two years, especially, have been particularly bad for the Indian comrades, faced as they with rising political irrelevance, and now academic marginalisation.
The comrades’ latest display of acute fascism and Stalinism in the form of extreme violence undertaken with the intention of liquidating political and intellectual opponents, began on the night of May 19, with the killing of BJP youth activist and swayamsevak Pramod, who was battered with bricks by a communist mob which was celebrating the LDF victory in the just-concluded Assembly election.
Eyewitnesses say 38 year-old Pramod was attacked with bricks on the head and was rushed in a critical situation to the hospital at Kodungallur, later to another hospital at Irinjalakkuda, and on becoming unconscious was rushed to a third hospital in Thrissur city, where he finally succumbed. This was followed by an unabated spate of attacks on homes and establishments of BJP and RSS workers, injuring and rendering a large number of them homeless. Women activists and youth activists in Kerala are bearing the brunt of these senseless attacks — with the self-styled ‘liberals’ remaining silent or looking the other way.
The spate of murders of BJP and RSS workers in Kerala has been on for decades and it aggravated especially from 2015 onwards, when the BJP began to be perceived as emerging and consolidating itself as a major force in State politics. Just before the Assembly election, a BJP worker and auto-rickshaw driver E.K. Biju, for example, who was ferrying school children, all of them below 10 years of age, was waylaid and attacked by the CPI(M)’s henchmen in Kannur district and lynched to death, with blood spattering on the school uniforms and bags of the children Biju was ferrying. The comrades, having seen the BJP’s electoral performance in the State, have realised that the ground beneath them will gradually shift away in the years and force upon them into oblivion and irrelevance in the State (as in West Bengal). Therefore, perhaps, there is desperation to take recourse to third degree methods in dealing with a political and democratic opposition.
Much in the same the line that they have followed in West Bengal in over three decades, the comrades have begun going about spreading terror and panic, in the districts of Kerala. In over three decades in West Bengal, adopting the same line, the comrades destroyed families, killed and maimed thousands of activists of opposition parties — then mostly belonging to the Congress and later to the Trinamool Congress. It was, therefore, pitifully ironical to see Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee share stage with the confused Congress scion Rahul Gandhi at an election rally in Kolkata, and State Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, felicitate Bhattacharya on the occasion.
It was in 1998 that in a public meeting in Behrampore in Murshidabad, Bhattacharjee, then Chief Minister, had called Chowdhury “an anti-social element who is trying to run a parallel administration” and who should be “dragged by the hair and locked up”. The blinded Congress central leadership agreed to an alliance of political opportunism and erected it over the memory and legacy of its forgotten workers murdered by the communists in West Bengal. Such is the level of politics that the present Congress leadership practices — shorn of ideology, of principles and of gratitude for the thousands of its workers who sacrificed themselves resisting communist rule in West Bengal.
The CPI(M) and the communists parties in general refuse to see the writing on the wall — of their nearing political decimation — and continue to remain active as a disruptive element in India’s body politic, injecting violence and falsehood while supporting elements that are clearly inimical to the country’s well-being. While Congress-mukt Bharat is actively on the way to becoming a reality, it is time to sound the bugle for a Left-mukt or a communist-mukt Bharat as well. Achieving this will signal true azadi.
(The writer is director, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, New Delhi)
