Centre must take action against fascist CPM and communist tomfoolery

February 03, 2008
The Moving Finger Writes

Centre must take action against CPM
By M.V. Kamath

The CPM has been and continues to be wedded to violence and anti-national behaviour. During the 1942 Quit India movement, it sided with the British. In 1962 when China invaded India, the CPM sided with China and betrayed Indian interests. The CPM is a party of traitors.

Here’s a question to Sonia Gandhi, Dr Manmohan Singh and Shivraj Patil: What on earth is happening in West Bengal? Is the government there not responsible to the Centre? Can the CPM-led Leftist government allow an independent—and armed—party cadre to enforce its aims on the people? Is that legal? Do our UPA (Congress) leaders understand the implications of such behaviour? The people of Nandigram protest against the State when it sets out to confiscate their land for the purpose of setting up a Special Economic Zone(SEZ). The land is their only source of income. Understandably they offer resistance to the government move.

The views of the people should have been respected. Instead cadres of the CPM—their appropriate designation would be ‘goondas’—over 300-strong, with the open connivance of the police go all out to suppress the democratic rights of the Nandigram residents. Such a thing has never happened before. As D.Bandopadhyaya, a former Executive Director of the Asian Development Bank has noted “thirty years of One-Party rule has resulted in the total subversion of impartiality of the bureaucracy and the police”. As Nitin Raut, an eminent lawyer, writing in Freedom First (November 2007) said, and quite rightly, “the CPM and its Left allies knew that its unconstitutional politburo dictate can be enforced brutally with impunity and without any fear of action by the Central Government”. Scores of villagers were killed by CPM goons to the point that the Governor of West Bengal, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, felt compelled to raise his voice of dissent.

But the UPA remains unmoved. The excuse is that law and order is constitutionally under the state government and the Centre cannot intervene. It is time the Constitution is revised. But the truth is that the Congress-led UPA government is scared that it will be thrown out of power if the CPM withdraws its support. This is the height of abject cowardice and the nation as a whole must protest against the UPA’s silence. To say that law and order is a state subject beyond the pale of the Union Government does not permit a state government to have an alternate and illegal armed force to enforce its dictat. If this is not understood, the time may come when in other states parties may raise their own armies to enforce their will, whether they are in power or not. This is inviting chaos and division of the country. This is not permissible.

The Central Government may be silent but the media—at least the intellectuals among the media—seems to have woken up to the situation. Writing in Mainstream(November 30, 2007) Neerja Chowdhury noted that in Nandigram “the CPM cadres led armed goons to recapture villages, kill innocent people, burn their houses and gang rape women”. The Government had withdrawn the police from the area on October 27 and by the time the CRPF arrived, the clean-up operation had been completed. The state colluded with the gangsters to teach “the other side” a lesson. The Chief Minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharya even openly defended the violence of the goons as ‘morally legal and justified”. Again, the excuse was that Maoists had taken Nandigram and it had become necessary to expel them.

It is open to question why the CRPF was not summoned earlier to do the job. Should it have been allotted to Marxist goons? If this action goes unchallenged, the consequences could be frightening. In the first place Maoism was originally a creation of the CPM itself. Let it be clearly understood: the CPM has been and continues to be wedded to violence and anti-national behaviour. During the 1942 Quit India movement, it sided with the British. In 1962 when China invaded India, the CPM sided with China and betrayed Indian interests. The CPM is a party of traitors. It was D.T. Ranadive who introduced violence in Telangana and it is the CPM which used terrorism to cow down landlords in West Bengal. Who, one might well ask, were the Naxalites? The Centre has to take action against the CPM and against the Basus and Karats. Being in power in West Bengal does not give its violence, administrative legitimacy. If the Centre remains quiescent, it would set up a bad precedent, with what consequences in the future, it is hard to predict.

Every political party might feel free to set up an independent army of its own—with the CPM cadres as model. If Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh do not understand this simple fact, they understand nothing. What has been sickening to watch is the absolute collapse of the constitutional machinery—and the deafening silence in Delhi. The government has not said a word to condemn the CPM-led brutality against innocent people. Stalin killed millions of agriculturists in the thirties; Nandigram is a repeat performance. Not a single Congress leader has dared to visit Nandigram as if it is not the UPA’s business to see that constitutional proprieties are honoured. It is pure and simple cowardice. If a state government takes recourse to non-governmental forces to maintain ‘law and order’ and is not condemned, it may prove to be the beginning of the collapse of the nation as a whole. This should be made into an election issue. The matter is too serious to be ignored. We cannot afford to have a chalet hai government at the Centre.

What happened in Nandigram can happen in other states as well, especially in states like Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand. Private armes will inevitably come into existence and the nation will slip into the pre-1857 era with the country breaking into pieces. The time to take action is now. And the BJP must make this into a major election issue just as Bofors once become a major issue leading to the collapse of the Congress. A collapse of a party is not of any major importance. The collapse of the country is, a matter that must be sharply brought to the attention of Sonia Gandhi and company. With a non-politician and inoffensive bureaucrat as Prime Minister, the nation can expect nothing. And that is a major trady in itself.

The CPM follows a fossilised ideology, fascist in every way (see Mainstream, December 22, 2007) which is leading India to disaster. The party has to be banned as inimical to the interests of the nation. If that is not done, the Congress must be shown the door without the slightest hesitation. The only thing relevant is the unity and empowerment of the nation, not of its constituent elements anywhere whether in West Bengal or Kerala. What that means is that the significance of Nandigram must be brought to the full attention of the voter so that a party, or even a coalition of respectable parties is restored to power, as once the NDA was, which will put the CPM in its place, which is the dustbin of history. The nation had enough of socialist and communist tomfoolery.

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