Who alone but we Indians and Pakistanis can breed our own greatest domestic threats, and then complain about them being our greatest domestic threats. It’s usually said that butterflies flapping their wings can cause a tornado millions of years later. In our political scenarios, the time frame for that is very small in comparison. The actions may not be butterfly-wing-fluttery kinds, but generally a lot more sinister in nature, and the repercussions are usually felt after 3-4 decades.
Yes, we had communists at home and in China…Communism seemed to be travelling downwards from Russia ever since Stalin and Lenin. And getting progressively violent with the latitude. We had the happy-go-lucky extremist congress leaders who then took upon a clear demarcating name “Socialists” in a while. Bhagat Singh and his comrades made sure socialists stayed in the then contemporary society of India. And then they started getting pissed off at being constantly sidelined by big brother Congress, who always “knew better and was working for what’s best and it’s all gonna shape up in the long run and we know what we’re doing”. Soon, we were free and had a partition that had placed the same country in the east and the west. Huh? you say, sadly no one..nothing of the sort even remotely occurred to any of the smart guys then. Bangladesh (back then East Pakistan) in direct quotes from a lot of them, was a country designed to fail.
The communists who had now taken on the name by now, were seething. There were privy purses and governments running behind the princes and kings, and people were still poor and the zamindars still were feudal lords, and all in all Das Kapital wasn’t the most happiest of literature, if literature had feelings that is.
To cap it all, communists were soon stamped out as “terrorist” in the country, and now feelings positively flared up. When all the anti-communism had died down, and they won elections in the states they were previously booted out of, there were those who happily formed the government. There were the others who still sought blood. They looked around, oh the farmers are getting fucked and the students are still reeling from the post-independence I’m-all-charged-up-crap!-we-already-got-independence spirit. The recipe was perfect. The jungle around Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Bengal was just waiting to shelter Guerilla fighters. But wait…Karl Marx said nothing about fighting and murdering and revolution really. Hey, I think the Chinese guy had some pretty fucked up communism…whazzhisname?? Mao. Right, we’ll be the Maoists now on. En gard!
One police firing in a small village of Naxalbari, with the Mao literature around and some starkly visible social differences in a communist society…were born the Naxalites. The government did what it did best, ever since Gandhi died and took Non-violence to his grave, send in troops and use a iron hand, because again, big bro Congress knows best.
They went into hiding, they have ideologies that are more or less at polars from the Politburo, the Das Kapital both these based themselves on, completely forgotten. The chances we had of including them into an active role into a better society are lost, the race has gone ahead far too long…the Maoists can’t be absorbed into the CPI-M anymore, they’ve murdered one too many policemen. This is a war that has already begun, and the one way or another it will end. The question is, how many lives before we see peace.
