:: Balbir Punj

Silence of the guilty

By Balbir K. Punj

West Bengal’s Marxist cadres have kept the media out of Nandigram with a ferocity that clearly betrays the nature of their activities in that troubled land. Yet we do not find anguished journalists and their organisations protesting this interference with the freedom of the press. In December 2002, when the Babri agitation peaked and several journalists were manhandled by the agitators, these same organisations walked down the streets of Lutyens’ Delhi demanding the public hanging of the BJP leaders. The leftist intellectual bastion, Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), was aflame with posters condemning the BJP. Why are they silent now?

The others with a selective memory are the human rights activists of the Left variety. Reports about the violation of women’s bodies, killing of minorities and the driving out of hapless people from their homes are pouring in from Nandigram. So much so, that even a mild mannered West Bengal governor, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, was compelled to issue a protest in public. The NHRC has also condemned these events and called for reports from the state government. But the human rights propagandists from the Left are not protesting. We do not see, for instance, the well-known activists who knocked on the doors of the Supreme Court over the riots in Gujarat, anywhere near the AKG Bhavan in New Delhi, protesting the months-long oppression in Nandigram.

Left intellectuals and activists have always displayed their anger selectively. In the past, they went silent when Soviet troops marched into the Czech capital, and ground to dust what is known to history as the Prague Spring, or when the Soviet tanks silenced the protesters in Warsaw. They did not even wince when red China’s tanks rolled over the protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago.

Stalin’s ruthless physical elimination of his Communist rivals, his mass destruction of the Soviet minority communities and prevalence of mass starvation did not stir them. Nor did the killing fields of either Mao Zedong or Pol Pot.

The Marxist logic is weird: the Communist state, whether in Moscow or in Beijing or in Kolkata, is justified in using the state machinery to crush all protests, and every dissident sent to Siberia, or simply shot dead, is a gain for the "revolution." But dissidence anywhere else is sacred. Orwell must have picked up from here.

The danger lies in the Marxist parties and the self-styled "progressives" spreading the myth that the state and the party are one, a cut above all other political parties, and are not accountable to any law of human rights; but deviations by others are to be condemned with all the shrillness they can command. Look at the way the Marxist chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, is justifying the use of terror in Nandigram by his party men. He says that his Marxist cadres have paid back the opposition in their own coin. He should have added — as reports trickling in from Nandigram despite the Marxist censorship on the media suggest — the famous quote attributed to French king Louis XIV: "The State? It is I." The Marxist version of it would be: "The State? It is the Party." In all Communist countries, the party is the state. So by this logic, no other party can exist.

Despite all their parliamentary trappings, the Marxists in India are no different. Nandigram has damaged their reputation, but they are nonchalant. They have been able to demonstrate that the state indeed is the party.

When the Marxist chief minister claims that he has taken care of the Prime Minister’s concerns, he means that the "normalcy" that he has restored is actually a recapturing of the area by the Marxist cadres. The state forces of course facilitated the whole process. When the Centre sent the CRPF to take charge of law and order in Nandigram, Bhattacharjee asked the Central force to move out of its camp and let the local police take charge!

The Marxists are now targeting the judicial system as well. After the Calcutta high court expressed its anguish over Nandigram, West Bengal’s Marxist leaders started abusing the judiciary. Recently, some court decisions against the state in a red ruled Kerala saw the Marxists abusing the judiciary right and left. One of these decisions was on the Left government’s refusal of a probe into a power house redevelopment contract given to a Canadian firm when the Marxists were in power earlier. The Kerala high court has taken to task the state government on several issues. And now after the Kolkata high court has called for a CBI probe into Nandigram, it is the turn of the Kolkata court to be pilloried at every Left rally.

It is ironic that the Marxists who have been organising the Muslim masses to protest President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and elsewhere, are now busy killing Muslims in Nandigram. News reports have brought out how rape and murder went on unchecked. Officials have been quoted as having admitted that Muslims have suffered the worst in the event. In relief camps the biggest contingent is that of Muslims. So the Marxist sympathy for the so called Muslim cause is no deeper than the skin.

The people of Nandigram have paid a terrible price for asserting their right of choice against Marxist oppression. But these hapless people have done one great good for the country. The Marxist party’s tactics of capturing and retaining power through sheer bullying, disregarding all canons of democracy, stand exposed.

But what else is Marxism but an authoritarian creed that is all set to use democracy to demolish democracy itself?

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