|
It was Dec.1st 1999. Naidu’s police
picked up three of the top-most leaders of the CPI(ML)(PW) from a house in
Bangalore. Shyam, Mahesh and Murali were brutally tortured through the night and
the next morning their bodies were thrown in the Koyyur forests of North
Telengana. Not even the worst fascist dictators of Latin America have treated
the capture of top Maoists in such fashion. There is normally some bourgeois
ethics in dealing with political opponents; and even in wars, there are norms
set for dealing with prisoners of war. But, in Naidu’s AP no such bourgeois
decency is known.
A couple of years later the young 25-year
old Mahila singer, Belli Lalita, was brutally cut into 17 pieces by Naidus’ s
storm troopers.
Over a year back senior civil liberties
lawyers, Purshottam and Azim Ali, were hacked to death before their own house in
broad day-light by Naidu’s goonda force.
In Warangal city over two hundred
intellectuals — teachers, doctors, artists, writers, lawyers — have been
arrested and heinously tortured by Naidu’s police force; some have been killed
in fake encounters.
Only recently a top State Committee
member of the APSC, who was ill, was arrested and shot dead in a fake encounter.
When writers, civil liberties activists and relatives went to claim his body
they were brutally beaten up by Naidu’s police force.
During Naidu’s rule roughly 1,400
revolutionaries and their sympathizers have been killed.
The rule of law is non-existent in AP
(and for that matter in most parts of the country). And under the BJP/RSS
fascist dispensation state terror is the norm, bourgeois legality the exception.
The perpetrators of violence cannot be
treated on par with the victims of violence. Whether it is the conflict between
the landlord and the peasant, the capitalist and the worker, the dalit and the
upper-caste oppressor, or the ruler and the ruled. One fights for justice,
sometimes through violence; the other perpetrates injustice, primarily through
violence. It is a misnomer to say that violence begets violence and to equate
that of the oppressed and the oppressor. The Rakshas who devour the poor and the
helpless have no humanity, and never listen to reason; their violence is endemic
to this very system. It is not any reaction to the revolt of the poor. So, those
who claim that violence begets violence are either naïve or outright dishonest.
It is infact the very opposite — these atrocities of the ruling clan can only be
stopped when met by a force strong enough to pay them back in their own coin.
Naidu was a victim of his own policies.
So also the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon is the result of years of
atrocities of the US imperialists. Do the people of Iraq have any other option
but to pick up the gun against Bush’s bombs and missiles? Neither the people of
a country (or the world) nor history will ever forgive the deeds of these
tyrants. Justice demands that they pay for their crimes against humanity.
In fact it is the very unjust
exploitative system that breeds violence. And AP is today the breeding ground
for the worst forms of injustice. Naidu’s (IMF-dictated) policies are generating
a super-rich class of technocrats and bureaucrats on the one hand; while on the
other, it is resulting in massive impoverisation of the people — on a scale
never seen before. And with each passing day the extremes are getting magnified
hundredfold, with thousands dying like flies in the countryside and the urban
slums. Formula 1 racing, hi-tech cities, Microsoft Hqs., Asian games, et al
exist side-by-side with the thousands dying — sometimes it is drought, another
time it is a heat wave, another time it is a ‘strange’ disease and at other
times it is a veritable epidemic of suicides; not to talk of the millions who
live on the brink of starvation. All these afflict AP more than any other State
of the country, as Naidu, one of the most faithful puppets of the imperialists,
is selling the State and its people to the US and other foreign powers for a few
dollars in commissions. He is a traitor to the country selling the natural
wealth and resources of AP to the TNCs, IMF, etc for a song. The death of a poor
dalit of starvation or disease, due to such policies, is no less tragic than
that of any of the Naidu’s of the earth. Acute poverty is a daily and agonizing
violence for those who have to face it; notwithstanding the fact that many a
liberal may be insensitive to it, getting disturbed only when it affects their
class.
The roots of violence lie neither with
the naxalites nor the so-called terrorists, but in the very system itself. And,
as this system goes deeper into crisis, violence (of a fascist kind) gets
magnified ten-fold — as we saw a year back in Gujarat. In such a situation to
repeat the mantra that "violence begets violence" acts only to tie the
hands of the oppressed masses against their tormentors. Yet bodies like the WSF
(now being organized in Mumbai), which claim to be for justice, have in their
very Charter a clause debarring organizations that don’t openly abjure violence.
It is, in fact, the imperialists and the reactionaries who, while perpetuating
the worst kinds of violence, go hysteric about the counter-violence by the
people. That is why the skepticism of progressive people against the WSF, NGOs
and a host of other such outfits, grows by the day. The question being asked is
how can ‘dissent’ be so refined, so sophisticated, be merely an enjoyable Mela.
And why do they sing the same tune of "non-violence" as the imperialists?
The issue before the oppressed masses and
all progressives is not violence vs non-violence; but justice vs injustice. And
the methods necessary to achieve justice depends on the situation. No naxlite,
who desire a just and equitable order, would want to take the life of even a
single person. But, when such persons are the cause for the death of thousands —
nay lakhs — one has to decide on which side one stands.
Oct. 10, 2003
|
