The Afterlife of a Maoist

FOR TWO DECADES, SAKETH RAJAN has remained a folk hero in the imagination of the most diehard Naxals such as still exist. A hardcore Naxalite chiselled in the 1970s Nax­albari mould, Rajan—alias ‘Comrade Prem’, ‘Master’, ‘Pandu’—was killed by a police squad on February 6, 2005 in the jungles of Chikmaga­lur. His death also wrote the premature obituary for trigger-happy Naxalism of which he was the progenitor in Karnataka. The Nax­al-Maoist annals still celebrate him as a fearless martyr and there is even a commemorative website in his honour.

But Saketh Rajan is also a warning and a symbol of every­thing wrong with Naxalism—from its ideological conception to its eventual extinction if Operation Kagar is any indication. His story is the archetype of a promising young lad who had the potential to become a productive citizen but went astray after being fed on a diet of communist literature and brainwashed by warmongering Naxalites who used him as cannon fodder.

The brainwashing was done in the 1980s by the Andhra-based Naxalite Cherukuri Rajkumar, a leader of the (former) People’s War Group (PWG). Rajan was studying at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Delhi. Rajkumar had a bounty of ₹10 Lakh on his head at the time. Recruitment quickly followed brainwashing. Rajan became a full-time Nax­alite terrorist tasked with expanding operations to Karnataka. In turn, he went on frequent tours to university campuses and hostels and enlisted fresh student talent.

Rajan’s recruitment at IIMC is symptomatic of a widespread and prolonged phenomenon which the smartphone and social-media generation is largely ignorant of—how our university campuses had acted as incubators of leftwing terror for more than half-a-century.

The immediate aftermath of Saketh Rajan’s death revealed the other side of this coin. Almost the whole of the humanities establishment, writers, and the Kannada media closed ranks and launched a tirade against Chief Minister Dharam Singh, not exactly known for his decisiveness. Bowing to pressure, he uttered some homilies in praise of Saketh Rajan on the floor of the Assembly. UR Ananthamurthy mourned Rajan. But the sharpest eulogy came from the pen of Gauri Lankesh who was Rajan’s senior at both Bangalore University and IIMC. Months before his death, she had conducted a sympathetic interview with him deep in the jungles of Malenadu and later wrote a long, glowing obituary in Tehelka.

Saketh Rajan’s death had rather far-reaching consequences.

It was the perfect opportunity to raise leftwing temperatures. An entity called Citizens Initiative for Peace (CIP) jumped into the fray and demanded that Dharam Singh hand over Rajan’s body to its custody. Unsurprisingly, CIP was populated by pow­erful leftist activists of all hues. Its members included, among others, Rajinder Sachar, Harsh Mander, Mahasweta Devi, Medha Patkar, Aruna Roy, Teesta Setalvad, Ramachandra Guha, Sandeep Pandey, Shabnam Hashmi, G Haragopal, Nandini Sundar and Binayak Sen. Some of them made their way into Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council (NAC).

Expectedly, CIP’s unsolicited intervention brought the Kar­nataka government almost down on its knees. At the time, Con­gress was in power in both Delhi and Bengaluru. To cite just one more example of the ramifications of Saketh Rajan’s death, the Columbia Journalism Review prominently mentions his name as a victim of the Indian state in a quasi case study related to Gauri Lankesh’s murder in 2017. This timeline is significant.

The 2004-14 decade was when Maoist terror peaked in the country in an unprecedented manner. A 2013 Ministry of Home Affairs affidavit tabled before the Supreme Court made chilling revelations: “The ‘frontal’ organisations of CPI (Maoist), operating under the garb of human rights NGOs, have kept the Maoist move­ment alive and are more dangerous than armed cadres. These ‘mass organisations’ (‘frontal’) are generally manned by ideologues, who include academicians and activists, fully committed to the party line. Such organisations ostensibly pursue human rights related issues and are also adept at using the legal processes of the Indian state to undermine and emasculate enforcement action by the security forces. They also attempt to malign the state institutions through propaganda and disinformation to further the cause of their ‘revolution’. The state governments are required to initiate legal action against the Maoist front organisations in towns and cities… However, initiating legal proceedings against them has often resulted in negative publicity for the enforcement agencies due to the effective propaganda machinery of the CPI (Maoist).’”

The same affidavit also tells us that “Naxal influence” had doubled in areas under its control: 203 districts spread across 14 states. Its troop strength had swelled from 7,000 to 13,500. Its armoury boasted of state-of-the-art killing machines supplied through illicit arms trade. It freely extorted money to the tune of ₹1,200 crore per annum and paid monthly salaries to its cadre. This is how the affidavit concludes, unambiguously: “Left Wing extremism is pure and simple terrorism… they are prepared to make a common cause with all those who… give expression to their dissent through violence. They support everything that negates Indian nationhood… They stand against India’s sover­eignty, unity, democratic polity and civilisational values….”

The reason behind this frightening explosion of Maoist terror is rather straightforward: the first term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government depended for its survival on the 60 Lok Sabha seats netted by the communist parties. Likewise, the slew of dangerous legislation enacted during both tenures of the UPA had ‘Marx’ written all over them. These merit a thorough study by a team of constitutional and legal scholars. The aborted Communal Violence Bill is a case in point—its authors were part of the same Left-NGO ecosystem.

It is also no coincidence that Nepal—the only Hindu country in the world—was de-Hinduised during the same pe­riod in a violent communist coup. The new prime minister, Baburam Bhattarai, a committed Maoist, had been indoctrinat­ed at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He had also been the avowed leader of Nepal’s decade-long Maoist insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government.

UNION HOME MINISTER Amit Shah’s vow to wipe out Maoist terror exudes clarity against this canvas. At least three generations of countless Saketh Rajans across India became the unwitting victims of a nihilist ideology cloaked in the language of justice, emancipation, equality, and utopia.

When subjected to philosophical inquiry, there is no funda­mental distinction separating socialism, communism, Marx­ism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and Naxalism. It is a mil­lenarian godless religion armed with a holy book. It stands to reason that the communist organisational alphabet soup—CPI, CPM, CPI(ML), CPI(M-L) Naxalbari, PWG, Forward Bloc, CPIML Liberation—merely differs on the finer points and methods propounded by a well-established ideology that has an unam­biguous theology, which its adherents regard as infallible.

Zhou Enlai affirmed this truth in an interview with an Ameri­can journalist in 1945. The reporter asked whether it was true that Western journalists had painted a false portrait of Chinese com­munists by likening them to their Soviet counterparts while the reality was that they were actually “radical agrarian reformers”. Zhou’s reply: “[W]e do not mind what the sons of bitches believe about us so long as the belief helps our revolution.”

The same playbook has been at work since the Soviet Union’s injection of communism into India. All communist organisa­tions converge on the goal of overthrowing democracy in India. Both its theory and practice hinge on an ideological core: the sovereign nation of India is an illegitimate state. This, in turn, is a derivative of sorts of another dogma: India’s freedom from British rule was a betrayal of “revolution”. There are volumi­nous records that reveal communist complicity in sabotaging the Indian freedom struggle at every stage as well as Gangadhar Adhikari’s ‘thesis’ justifying the creation of Pakistan. The Com­munist Party of India (CPI) was the Muslim League’s best friend.

The aforementioned dogma was the trigger for Charu Majumdar to break away from his mothership, the Com­munist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, and to embark on Naxal terrorism in 1967.

The superstition that an armed revolution that slaughters millions of your own innocent countrymen would usher in uto­pia caused the most number of genocides in a single century. History is the best proof that totalitarianism, not utopia, has been the consequence of this superstition in action. The Black Book of Communism (1997), which documents this horror, is a litany of communist genocide in the 20th century. The genocide and mayhem perpetrated by communists is the most closely guarded open secret of leftwing terror in India. This includes mass murders committed using official machinery in states ruled by communist governments—the most infamous being the Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979.

Naxalite or Maoist terror is evidently the bloodiest and most sustained saga of leftwing terrorism. Yet it has received negli­gible coverage, commentary and opprobrium. No body of seri­ous academic research from the non-Left has been forthcoming barring stray but brilliant critiques from patriotic Indians, such as Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, NS Rajaram, Koenraad Elst and others. The Rashtriya Swayam­sevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliate entities, as a matter of fact, waged their most protracted and pitched battles against the communist realm than against any other ideological group.

Two reasons explain this imbalance. The first was the stran­glehold of the communist-Marxist ecosystem over all avenues of public discourse. There used to be a time when any number of newspaper editors publicly addressed each other as “Comrade”. Academics regularly invited Naxalites to their campuses for indoctrination and recruitment drives in their war against the Indian state. The fortunate few new recruits were shipped to the Soviet Union or China for advanced courses.

The second was the elaborate mythology woven around Naxal­ism. School textbooks portrayed Naxals as selfless, self-sacrificing and courageous warriors against oppression and feudalism. Even today Wikipedia, for example, peddles a sanitised version of the his­tory of Naxalism. The consequence of this deliberate myth-making gave Naxalism a halo of heroic romanticism. Naxalism became aspirational. Impressionable youth wanted to become saviours and liberators. Grenades, guns and landmines would transport them to the Promised Land. The Telugu cinema industry, especially, carved out a sub-genre colloquially known as “Red films”, which had a dedicated audience. These movies also supplied a term of endear­ment for addressing Naxalites: Annalu or brothers. Little wonder that almost from the beginning, (undivided) Andhra Pradesh sup­plied generations of Naxalites and Maoist/Marxist ‘intellectuals’. Varavara Rao, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, Gaddar, Ganapathy, Sitaram Yechury—and now Nambala Keshava Rao, killed in Opera­tion Kagar, who also hailed from Srikakulam.

CONGRESS HAS ALSO been one of the key enablers of communism in all its manifestations. More specifically, the use-and-throw policy of successive Congress governments in states and at the Centre has been a significant contributor. Indira Gandhi was the most avid practitioner of this cynical tactic. How she surrendered to communist demands in exchange for support is well known. Among other things, it gave India the ‘independent Marxist republic’ of JNU. This applies in equal measure to the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy who executed a similar feat in his quest for chief ministership. But both leaders turned against the commu­nists once they had captured power—Indira Gandhi launched a dogged war against them around 1981-82 and Reddy declared a Maoist manhunt in 2005.

However, the damage had already been done. The Left ecosys­tem had proved how incredibly adept it was in strengthening itself by exploiting every concession made by Congress. In Congress’ thirst for permanent power, it had forgotten a simple law of nature: consequences always outlive and outlast ambition.

Fast forward again to the UPA era. It was now the Left- NGO-missionary nexus that dictated terms to a hopelessly weakened Congress.

Fast forward again to 2018 when the nation was treated to the spectacle of Rahul Gandhi breaking bread with the veteran Nax­alite militant, Gaddar. The proverbial tail was now wagging the dog. Thus, even when then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had openly declared that Maoist terror was the greatest scourge eating India away, there was little he could do about it. This squares with the MHA affidavit in which enforcement agencies expressed their helplessness against dealing with Maoist violence. It appeared that Maoists had nearly perfected the art of using the state’s apparatus to usurp the state.

India has become almost unrecognisable a decade after UPA’s exit.

The reason Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have succeeded in smashing Maoist terror is evident. They have dumped the weak-kneed charade of ‘peace talks’ and ‘reform of Naxals’ that had been the norm, reminding us of Andrew Marvell’s memorable phrase “inglorious arts of peace”.

Amit Shah’s take-no-prisoners approach has yielded rather spectacular outcomes. In a sense, he is resuming the work of Sardar Patel whose combat against communist terror deserves an independent volume. Among other things, he had kept a tight watch over CPI and had published an official dossier (Commu­nist Violence in India) in 1949 documenting communist atrocities throughout the country. The work has stood the test of time. Patel had also, on the side, encouraged public-spirited bodies like the So­ciety for the Defence of Freedom in Asia in their ideological fight against communism.

The Modi government’s offensive against Maoism is not limited to field warfare. Over the last 11 years, institutions that had once enjoyed leftist ideological monopoly have been systematically de­fanged. Like India, JNU too, has largely become unrecognisable. But more needs to be done in this realm—weeding out half-a-century of subversion takes more than one generation.

Operation Kagar, which closely followed Operation Sindoor, will eventually go down as historic. By any measure, it is one of the most brilliant, if underrated, successes in combating internal terrorism and deserves to be made a case study for the intelligence and anti-terror community. Most importantly, Operation Kagar marks a deci­sive triumph against the deadliest enemy of all: the enemy within.

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