Left in the Lurch: Bitter Backlash Against India Marxists

Times of India ^ | NOVEMBER 21, 2003 | BALBIR K PUNJ

[Tailgunner Joe]

From the landmines near Tirupati which Naxalites used to try and assassinate Andhra chief minister Chandrababu Naidu to the Dalgaon tea estate in North Bengal where tea garden workers trained under the Marxists turned against their own leader, the Left’s perpetrators of violence are facing a backlash.

The 14 lives lost in the Best Bakery case became a campaign issue for months, whereas the 19 lives lost at Dalgaon have been dismissed as mere statistics? The most glaring case of Marxist violence took place way back on April 30, 1982, when 17 monks of the Ananda Marg sect were lynched in public in three different places over an area of one kilometre in West Bengal. No one has been convicted till date and there has been no follow-up on that incident.

India is still occasionally rocked by sectarian violence. But West Bengal presents an exceptional paradigm where whole villages, not just individuals, clash with each other because of political affiliations. This is the result of inten- sive ideological indoctrination of people that could be termed as a political jehad.

The 19 people who were burnt alive by a crowd of 600 inside a villa in Dalgaon (Jalpaiguri) were, according to the police, anti-social elements who were convened by Tarkeshwar Lohar, the uncrowned king of the CITU-pampered tea garden workers’ union. The carnage took place inside his house even though he escaped the assault before surrendering to the police. Often dubbed the ‘Don of Dalgaon’ his writ is unchallenged in the tea gardens. Significantly, he is able to afford a villa fronted by a fountain, a mobile phone and a Maruti car on a meagre salary of Rs 2,000.

Whether it was the allocation of tenders or new recruitments, Lohar was the de facto authority and not the owners or management of the estate. Over the decades, the CPM (through dons like Lohar) no longer runs trade unions but has made a trade of the unions. But this scenario is not confined to the Dalgaon tea estate only. Across West Bengal, the 25 years of Marxist rule has created a cadre that has no ostensible means of livelihood except to live off the land and people. But now, the CPM is itself divided over the ‘‘spoils of business’’. On November 12, such a clash between two sections of the party over the control of the local fishery business at Kanchrapara in 24 Parganas led to the death of a party activist, Niranjan Sarkar, and the torching of five houses in the locality.

The CPM is not willing to shun violence, as that is its main weapon against both opponents and allies. The communist movement is based on violence as the history of the communist seizure of power in Russia, China and elsewhere testifies. And every time, this violence leads to the so-called proletarian dictatorship becoming the fascist rule of one person whether it was Stalin or Brezhnev in the Soviet Union or Mao in China.

With no nationalist moorings, the Indian communists were unprepared when Independence came. The Ranadive line was to sabotage the newly-independent government. Their armed revolt against civil society was crushed. Then they changed tactics and undertook a two-pronged strategy — violence on one side and entering Parliament on the other. ‘‘To talk of peaceful path in our country more or less as a fact of reality, as an inevitable path, is nothing but self-deception and deception of others’’, wrote the communist leaders of the day, P Sundarayya, A K Gopalan, H S Surjeet and others in 1964.

The 1964 document extolling Mao’s path of violent revolution was the basis of the final emergence of the Marxist faction, the CPI. ‘‘The government cannot be removed by parliamentary methods...it can only be ousted through revolution’’, wrote the Left communist paper Sengodi (red flag) in its issue of May 24, 1964. Since then, the Marxist faction has proved through its activities, even while gaining power through elections, that it was preparing to take over the state apparatus through organised violence.

The original CPI had brought out a tract accusing its former colleagues in the party of using terror as a means of consolidating their position in West Bengal. This tract was written by the three top leaders of the CPI in 1970: Bhupesh Gupta, Ranen Sen and Prabhat Das Gupta.

Pointing out that during the early United Front experiment in West Bengal in the seventies, the CPM used physical violence against its own front partners, these leaders said, ‘‘The CPM has become so desperate that now that party has launched what looks like a campaign of political murders, physical attacks, arson and similar other terroristic activities directed against the Left and democratic parties.’’ This is the classic communist method of joining with the nationalist elements and then destroying them from within, practised so well at that time in Eastern Europe. The widespread use of physical violence as a means of gaining political power, or retaining it, is the Marxists’ preferred method, as they have no faith in civil society. Lacking an understanding of the national ethos steeped in pluralistic traditions, the Marxists are resorting to violence. The tea garden incident is perhaps a warning to them that this mindless violence has come home to roost.