When one human being gives up his life for a cause, it’s called a sacrifice. And a martyr is born. When a person takes someone’s life in the name of an ideology or a cause, it’s murder. And a victim is created. The bloody calendar of communism in India started with sacrifice. However, it is now a manifesto of carnage, scrawled with the blood of thousands of victims.
On June 13, 1959, seven communists were killed in police firing in Angamaly, a small town in central Kerala. At the crossroads stands a memorial that salutes their martyrdom. They died in the Vimochana Samaram—liberation struggle—led by a coalition of the church, Muslim league, communal leaders and Congress party against the first elected communist government in the world, headed by EMS Naboodiripad. Jawaharlal Nehru recommended the government’s sacking, thereby making the CPI a political martyr. On the night of May 4, 2012, T P Chandrasekahran, a communist leader who had left the party, was hacked to death in a hamlet named Vallikad. The internecine warfare within the CPM had claimed its latest victim, who is now speaking beyond the grave.
It is a voice trying to be heard in the unforgiving ideological wilderness of Indian communism, where annihilation of anyone who holds a different opinion or has left the party, is justified by a macabre Stalinist mindset. History mothballed the butcher of Soviet Russia and his macabre legacy decades ago. But the streets and villages of Kerala, West Bengal and Andhra are awash with the blood of political victims. Mao’s children, too, continue to thrive in India’s forests. Sociologists point out that poverty, deprivation and exploitation have led tribals and villagers to become Naxalites. The inherent fault in communist ideology—that murder justifies itself as class war—has turned them into extortionists and kidnappers. The difference between a murderer and an ideologue is a thin red line. Crossing it to hire serial killers from Mumbai who are paid from party coffers to eliminate hated opponents, is today’s communist gestalt.
More and more deaths are coming to light; last week, two Marxist leaders were arrested for another murder. More will be. The gruesome catalogue of political liquidation has more pages. The highest number of political homicides in the country occurred in Left-ruled West Bengal. According to Pranab Mukherjee, between 1977 and 2000, communists killed 593 people in Murshidabad alone. Home Minister P Chidambaram noted that hired killers—harmads—were used in murders like these. State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) data shows there are 118 registered murder cases in West Bengal between January 1 and December 31, 2010. As a tragic example of blood begetting blood, hundreds of CPM cadres have been massacred; many by Naxalites. Since 1968, more than 200 people have fallen to sword and bomb in the killing fields of Cannanore in Kerala.
As in Russia, Cambodia and Latin America, the murderous atavism in Indian communism is a direct result of the lumpenisation of the party. Its original leaders were either intellectuals of Brahminical calibre who bore the reformer’s hatred of caste; or were folk heroes like A K Gopalan—a Robin Hood-like cult figure loved by the poor and upperclass communists alike. Ironically, the atheistic communist startup was schooled in refined Hindu traditions of scholarship, sensibility and the class advantages of an English education. Today, urbane leaders like Karat, however Stalinist they may be, are prisoners in the ideological archipelago of the lumpen weltanschauung.
However humane the heart of communism once used to be, it now needs a literate, cultured and sophisticated mind. Otherwise, bleeding hearts will litter the ideological morgue in its twilight hour.
Ravi@newindianexpress.com