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On 26 February 2006,
a police jeep was blown to smithereens in a landmine blast that killed five
policemen at Belpahari in the West Medinipur district of West Bengal. This armed
action carried out by the Maoist guerrillas was aimed at avenging the "inhuman
torture" of their suspected sympathizers and cadres by the police. After their
death, all the leading dailies, for the next few days, carried pictures of those
who fell, the wailing relatives of the deceased, the wreckage of the police
truck as also the guard of honour paid to them by the police force. How could
the Maoists be so cruel and inhuman as to torment the lives of the family
members of the dead? The state seems busy to drive home this point.
There is no doubt
that deaths such as these might be unfortunate, more particu-larly because most
of them hail from the lower middle-class or peasant background. In fact, the
Indian armed forces or para-military forces come overwhelmingly from peasant
background. But the fact is that as they become part of the state machinery—the
main instruments of state oppression and control—they get isolated from the
people and act as tools for suppressing people’s resistance and revolutionary
movements. "Where there is oppression there is resistance". The people take up
arms not out of their sweet will, but because this oppressive man-eating system
compels them to take up arms. No revolution can succeed without wiping out or
neutralizing such counter-revolutionary forces. But the revolutionaries of all
countries know from their own experience that as the revolution-ary movement
progresses, as the enemies face defeat in one battlefield after another,
dissension is caused in the enemy ranks, and they turn their weapons against the
exploiters and side with the revolutionary forces. Our country will also be
witness to such developments in the days to come.
However, the Maoist
revolutionaries of India, as has been evident on a number of occasions, try to
avoid unnecessary deaths and tender apologies when innocent people are killed by
mistake. Even when they take hostages, be they policemen or government
officials, they behave well with them. They even treat wounded policemen first
even before treating their own wounds, and always keep in mind Mao’s dictum "Do
not misbehave with the prisoners". Very recently, the officer-in-charge of
R.Udaygiri town and superintendent of the local sub-jail who were taken hostage,
were released for humanitarian reasons. After their release, both said their
captors treated them well and took care of their needs. The mother of the police
officer admitted that "The rebels are not terrorists as they are perceived to
be"(The Telegraph, 5 April 2006). The most oppressive and hated of
the landlords, of course, are tried in people’s courts and in many cases put to
death. But many others were actually released after warning. On the contrary,
the police and paramilitary forces treat the revolutionary prisoners in the most
brutal way, seldom take them prisoners, torture them, cut their limbs into
pieces and distribute the money they could lay their hands on even when the
revolutionaries are alive and bleeding. In the Chhathisgarh region, thousands of
villagers, sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, are forcibly evicted from
their village homes and herded into concentration camps—reminiscent of the US
imperialist policy in South Vietnam during the period of the war of national
resistance waged by the heroic Vietnamese people. In the name of Salwa Judum,
the state with the full backing of the central government has been pursuing a
policy of untold persecution of people—murder, rape followed by murder, cutting
of limbs, torture. It has been a story of cruelty at its worst that beggars
description.
Let us now get back
to where we started. When the paramilitary or combat forces die, condolence
meetings are held, their pictures are shown on the TV, newspapers come out with
pictures of the bereaved members of the families. But do they do the same when
revolutionaries fell to police bullets in numerous staged encounters, when they
are tortured most cruelly and driven to their end, do the wails of their
parents, brothers and sisters find any place in the leading print media or the
TV? Do the state officials express any genuine regret for the sufferings caused
to them? Never. Thousands of revolutionaries, progressive people, peasants,
workers and other toiling people have fallen victims to state repression in the
recent years in the most brutal manner, but the sufferings caused to them, the
trauma caused to their near and dear ones were seldom highlighted in the press
or the TV. Who would mourn their sufferings and pay homage to those who
valiantly laid down their lives?
It will be pertinent
to refer to a statement made by Karl Marx during 1848—the ‘year of revolutions’
in a somewhat similar situation. "We may be asked, do we not find a tear, a
sigh, a word for the victims of the people’s wrath, for the National Guard, the
mobile guard, the republican guard and the line? The state will care for their
widows and orphans, decrees extolling them will be issued, their remains will be
carried to the grave in solemn procession, the official press will declare them
immortal, the European reaction in the East and the West will pay homage to
them. But the plebeians are tormented by hunger, abused by the press, forsaken
by the physicians, called thieves, incendiaries and galley-slaves by the
respectabilities; their wives and children are plunged into still greater misery
and the best of those who have survived are sent overseas. It is the right and
privilege of the democratic press to place laurels on their gloomy threatening
brow" (Neue Reinische Zeitung, 29 June 1848).
It is the indeed the
right and privilege of the democratic press like the People’s March to
pay homage to the martyrs and place laurels on those who are the victims of
state persecution, for it is on the victory of the armed struggle they have been
waging that the future of our country depends.
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