:: Balbir Punj

History shows June is cruel to tyrannies

Balbir K. Punj

July.03 : June 2009 has ended with scenes of millions of people pouring into the Iranian capital protesting rigging of elections by a regime run by Islamic clerics. The Iranian demonstrations arrived on the global scene with reminders of many other Junes when the world seemed to change and dictatorships toppled, or at least seemed to topple, in the upwelling of people’s anger.

We had the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square students’ protest on June 5 which the Communist regime crushed in 1989 by using tanks against unarmed civilian. Thousands of miles away, in eastern Europe, the string of Communist regimes propped up by Soviet military force began to crumble. The first break came in Poland in June 1989 and ended five months later in November with East Germans hammering the Berlin Wall to pieces. Two years later the Soviet Union itself disappeared.

It was again in June, 34 years ago, that Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency and sought to perpetuate "one person, one party" rule, simultaneously hauling off all Opposition leaders to prison, suspending all Fundamental Rights and imposing censorship. One section of the Communists was her ally in this adventure, which proved to be a black spot on her regime. It was again a popular upwelling of anger that finally ended that brief interlude of dictatorship. Of course, she managed to come back to power riding on the infirmities of those who were put in charge after her overthrow. And her assassination as the culmination of her battle against extremism rehabilitated her image in the gallery of history as a martyr.

Now, with three decades between these events and the present, and an entire new generation never exposed to them in ascendance aspiring to be like Bill Gates and Narayana Murthy, much is forgotten, much more is forgiven. This June few remembered the Emergency in India as the post-election mood of a stale government eclipsed everything else. The Congress leaders must have been beaming. Significantly, most news reports from Beijing also reported that a new generation of the Chinese is in the aspirational class, overlooking the massacre of other young men and women at Tiananmen. In recession-hit Europe itself, where the Berlin Wall collapsed then signifying the end of the Communist era and capitalism triumphed in its competition with socialist planning, any remembrance of June 1989 was muted by the cries of the growing jobless.

June does seem to be a cruel month for the Communists. In West Bengal, where the Communists have been in power for over three decades without interruption, the Lalgarh events last month seemed to mark one more milestone in ending the "red regime". The Bengal Communists, who had turned over law and order to their cadre to keep a tight rein on the poor, were now being challenged by the same people whom they kept in control through terror.

When the Soviet regime collapsed, the picture of then Moscow mayor Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin baring his chest to Soviet tanks became a symbol for the change that was to come over Russia after 75 years of Communist rule. In the recent popular demonstrations in Tehran, in the picture taken by several cellphones and then put together (the Iran government censored electronic as well as other media), a young woman activist, Neda Agha-Sultan, 26, shot by the security forces, has become a world shaker. In our country this June we had pictures of people barging into a Communist leader’s palatial house in Midnapore and demolishing it with whatever tools they could gather, a reminder to the entire country of how angry the people are at the Marxists. That house, almost a mansion by village standards, was the only building of stone and concrete in the entire village and symbolised the Communist oppression of the poor farmers.

Challenged by armed Maoists, the West Bengal Communists have rushed to the Centre to get help to crush this revolt. The same Communists were earlier criticising the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Chhattisgarh for turning the organised resistance of the people against the armed Naxal movement. The CPI(M) boss, Mr Prakash Karat, under fire within his own party for his failed mission to build a non-Congress, non-BJP third alternative, was seeking to blame the Centre for the Naxal invasion of his political fortress. But those who watched TV footage of the event could see through that charade. No doubt the armed Maoists had mounted the assault and sought to set up a parallel administration. But at the core of this lay the people’s frustration at being suppressed for 30 years by Marxist cadres who enjoyed state protection. The local Marxist leaders were all enriching themselves, as the Communist leader’s house shown repeatedly on TV revealed. The popular anger had expressed itself in the Trinamul Congress victory in the April-May elections. Lalgarh was its side-effect, the sub-plot that exposed the angst of a generation that had suffered under the Marxist regime. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government should have insisted that the West Bengal government ask for a ban on Maoists in writing; by rushing in there — though the ban was necessary — New Delhi gave Kolkata an alibi for both opposing the ban and supporting it. Mamata Banerjee’s embarrassment is understandable. The Union government should have been smarter knowing the Left’s record of treachery.

Whether in East Berlin or Beijing, or in Moscow or Lalgarh, it is the same flesh and blood that first suffers and then explodes in anger, like a volcano. Dictatorships do succeed for some time in keeping a heavy lid on people’s anger, but not for long. 1977 in India, 1989 in East Europe and China, and 2009 in West Bengal and Islamic-cleric ruled Tehran: the dramatis personae may be different, but the stream is the same. Even the most dedicated clerics of religion or communism cannot mask failure for long. This is what this June has reminded us of. And there are great lessons from history to illustrate this — from the storming of the Bastille in 1779, by an angry mob, to the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the demolition of Communist leader Pranabesh Pradhan’s house in Haludbari in Midnapore.

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at punjbk@gmail.com