Naxals, Urban Naxals and Maoists- The history and the current situation of Left wing extremism in India
- In Politics
- 04:31 AM, Aug 31, 2018
- Shwetank Bhushan
The Maharashtra Police arrested one and detained four other suspects during simultaneous multi-city raids for their Maoist connection in the January 1 Bhima-Koregaon riot under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA for their Maoist links and supporting and providing a network for the Maoist terrorists.
All hell broke and in a rapid response, just like the Gauri Lankesh murder case, the 'Bourbon Naxals' were mobilized within hours across mainstream and social media, crying EMERGENCY.
Those crying foul over the arrest of these Maoist-sympathizers will never mention that most have been arrested earlier too for conspiracy, sedition, and terror. A few months back in a shocking expose, letters written by these suspected urban Maoists, revealed their links with the Kashmiri separatists.
Indian investigating agencies have launched a crack-down after the police went through 25,000 GB of data seized from five arrested persons in June this year. These folks were seeking foreign arms. Who uses 1000 M4 Carbine Rifles and 4 lakh rounds of ammunition? It is the same network that is suspected of planning to assassinate PM Narendra Modi in a Rajiv Gandhi assassination type incident.
What is more shocking is that the present Congress leadership is consistently in support of these anti-India forces.
Before we analyze on this changing reality of the Congress Party, a brief history of the Maoist insurgency is a must for the new generation readers.
The Maoist movement began in the late 1960s. The uprising occurred at a time when the communist organizations across the world were in a great turmoil following the Sino-Soviet split.
The communist's idea was to convert the country into a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The method of their stooges, mostly landlords, was to first forcibly take over farmlands belonging to rich landlords. But it required both, a fitting narrative and a devoted army.
Soon, phrases like “annihilation of class enemies” and a “revolution” were brought in and it was propagated that this uprising was due to prolonged failure of the Indian government to address the miserable lives of the tribals, who demanded autonomy with respect to natural resources on their lands.
The Naxalite movement of the 1960s had nothing to do with tribal autonomy. All they wanted was to establish Communism in India by Force. Maoists have an affinity and lust for land. Land grabbing is the central ideology as these people turned to crime and politics and gained massive wealth and influence.
The leader and ideologue of this uprising, Charu Mazumdar, born in a family of landowners, presumed that the time was ripe for launching an armed protracted People's War. Under his leadership, the armed peasant revolt started in 1967 in the Naxalbari block of Siliguri, West Bengal.
Encouraged by CPI (Marxist) radicals, the landless peasants in and around Naxalbari were instigated by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal for the forcible takeover that sparked clashes between the landlords and the peasants and set off a spiral of killings and counter-killings. A large number of enthusiastic youth from well-off families also joined the movement. But land and the lure of quick money have been key factors in this transformation. Initially led by local radical communist leaders of Bengal, it further developed into Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969.
Since 1967, violence has remained the central character of the movement with slogans like ‘Power comes from the barrel of the gun’, ‘area-wise seizure of power’, ‘rural areas surrounding the cities’, and ‘struggle not for land and for corps but for political power’.
Charu was a not just an ideologue, but his methods terrorized people in West Bengal. His supporters killed more than 100 landlords in Naxalbari. They were beheaded, beaten to death or hanged from trees. They executed about 1,800 policemen and government servants in West Bengal. Intellectual traitors from all walks of life - from Calcutta, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala started frequenting his house.
Charu was finally arrested and lodged in Lal Bazaar police lockup, Kolkata where he died of a heart attack in police custody on July 28, 1972. The movement collapsed. The CPI (Marxist-Leninist) was split into many factions.
One faction led by Dipankar Bhattacharya which is still functional is the CPI (M-L) Liberation. Kavita Krishnan is the member of the Politburo, and its student’s wing is All India Students Association (AISA).
Another faction also resurrected itself later in some other parts of the country and continues to this day under the banner of the CPI (Maoist). Their present annual revenue is estimated to be around 150-250 Crores through allegedly questionable methods.
Its documented motive is:
"To overthrow the Government of Republic of India and establishment of a Maoist regime in India by destroying the state machinery and establish the Indian People's Democratic Federal Republic."
Today the Maoist or Red Corridor stretches from India's northeast through the states of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra in the west.
In the last two decades, more than 14,000 (reported) people have been killed in Naxal violence alone. It is undoubtedly the biggest and most grievous terror network that is operating in India.
Since 2004, the Indian government has described the country's Maoist insurgency as a grave threat to domestic security. A study of the sustaining dynamics behind Maoist violence suggests that the rebels are growing operationally stronger due to profits derived from organized crime. Having built up a parasitic economy that operates within the boundaries of nominal state control, the Maoists have assumed the characteristics of a Mafia group.
On 22 June 2009, the Government of India led by PM Manmohan Singh banned the CPI (Maoist) branding it a terrorist organization. The UPA Government invoked Section 41 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act [UAPA] against it.
All formations and fronts of the PWG, the MCC and the CPI (ML) came under the purview of the ban. The ban came two days after West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee of CPI (Marxist) met Home Minister P. Chidambaram in the backdrop of major violent incidents in Lalgarh.
"Hope West Bengal government will also do so," said Home Minister P. Chidambaram to which the West Bengal CM agreed to give a “serious thought.”
The many States, governed under different political parties, including Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu had declared the CPI (Maoist) an unlawful association under the UAPA.
Around November 2009, started 'Operation Green Hunt' by the UPA-2 Government. It was an "all-out offensive" along five states in the red corridor. The Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) took the lead in the operations against Maoist insurgents.
On 26th May 2013, around 250 Naxals in civilian clothes struck a convoy of Congress leaders during the party's Parivartan Rally in Chhattisgarh's Bastar region, killing at least 25 people, including state Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel, and senior party leaders Mahendra Karma and Vidya Charan Shukla.
"The government will pursue perpetrators of this crime with urgency, and the Govt is committed to bringing them to justice," PM Manmohan Singh said standing next to Sonia Gandhi in the Raipur Hospital. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi was also camping in Raipur since the news of the attack came in.
“It is not an attack on Congress. It is an attack on democracy. But, we’ll not fear from such an attack and continue to move forward with enthusiasm,” Rahul Gandhi said.
In his analysis in March 2014, the same Gautam Navlakha who is arrested now cried that 286,200 CRPF personnel along with 100,000 personnel from other central paramilitary forces and the SAPF are now engaged in the offensive against the CPI (Maoist) in 10 states of India by the Central Government led by Congress Party.
Naxals have slaughtered countless Congressmen, including those who were very close associates of Rahul's father and grandmother. It is astonishing that today all have forgotten for some narrative building. We all remember how he rushed to give cover to the "Tukde-Tukde-Gang" in JNU. He is now standing in solidarity with convicted Maoists and is calling them NGO activists.
What a shame!
The problem with the Congress Party is that it has tied itself in many knots with its utterly shameless leftist ecosystem that works 24x7 to push the agenda of their political masters. This ecosystem, which the Congress Party thinks will help them bring back to power, is a bunch of Urban Naxals. The irony is, that the absence of power has blinded Congress and they are in no mood to realize, that this lobby has pushed it to the left of the left parties.
But this entirely remains Congress's problem, and we must focus on the real problem that India is facing.
The ideological and logistic support to the Maoist Terrorists comes from these Urban Naxals. Maoists may have pulled the trigger, but it is these Maoist-sympathizers who provide them the firepower by writing articles, shouting on TV debates and calling them 'Gandhians with Guns.'
An Anti-National lobby of Urban Naxals has been tolerated in India for a very long time. The time has come that these Naxal sympathizers should be questioned if they are found guilty. They should br identified, investigated, booked and tried, if guilty, ignoring seditious victimhood narrative.
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