As the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government embarks
on its ‘Operation Green Hunt’ against the Maoists, maybe what it should
really be carrying out is an ‘Operation Saffron Hunt’ – against Hindu
extremists who pose a far greater threat to the internal security of
India.
Truth is, despite all the official and media hype about
the spread of Maoists and their dramatic attacks against state forces in
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and parts of West Bengal, they are simply no match
for what the shadowy network Hindu fundamentalists have been doing or are
capable of doing.
Let us compare the overall threat to the Indian nation
from these two movements, one fighting for a ‘New Democratic Revolution’
and the other for a ‘Hindu Rashtra’:
a) The claim is that Maoists are spreading rapidly in
different parts of the country and operating in 180 districts of India.
They are further said to be building a Red corridor through the forested
tracts of Central India from Telangana all the way to the Indian border
with Nepal. Once they establish their bases here, it is feared they will
launch an armed assault to take over power in the country.
First of all, the Maoists are not really as strong as they
are made out to be by both state as well as Maoist propaganda. Even if
they capture the entire forest belt of Central India, this is not going to
help them come to power in the rest of the country, as they have no
presence anywhere else at all. They are not to be found among the
peasantry, unorganised or organised workers, the urban poor or even among
students who used to be their ardent supporters once upon a time. Taking
over a country as large and diverse as India with a powerful state
machinery in command is simply not on the cards.
In contrast, Hindutva extremists are there everywhere
around the country and their political front, the Bharatiya Janata Party,
has already been in power at the national level and still controls several
state governments around the country. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
the fountainhead of Hindutva, has a presence in all districts of India and
runs dozens of front organisations and institutions. The Vishwa Hindu
Parishad and various other extremist Hindu outfits even more to the right
of the RSS also have a presence in most parts of the country and carry out
attacks on religious minorities, others who oppose them and on all
democratic institutions with impunity.
Even more disturbingly, extreme Hindutva elements have
penetrated the Indian army as the case of Lt Col Purohit, arrested by the
Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) for his role in the Malegaon blast
case, showed. There is no doubt that they are also well entrenched within
the bureaucracy all over the country and have a presence even within
sections of the judiciary.
The simple fact is that while the Maoists are still
struggling to build their Red corridor, the Hindu extremists have already
completed construction of the Saffron scaffold all over the nation for
takeover of power any time they want.
b) Yes, the Maoists don’t believe in the Indian
Constitution, call for a boycott of elections and are waging an armed
struggle to overthrow the Indian state. In recent years they have also
acquired modern weaponry and collect substantial funds through taxes on
businesses, contractors and companies operating in the areas under their
control.
Hindutva extremists are more dangerous, as they are
sophisticatedly using both constitutional as well as extra-constitutional
means to establish a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. So they put up candidates to fight
elections wherever possible and even if they lose, continue to subvert
Indian democracy by setting up a parallel state within the country.
What’s more, the Hindutva fanatics are far better armed
than the Maoists, with military training schools of their own, bomb and
gun-making factories, and have been carrying out terrorist attacks in
different parts of the country for at least the past two decades. They are
also better funded than any non-governmental force in India, with money
pouring in from both within and outside India.
c) It is claimed that if the Maoists ever come to power,
they will establish a brutal dictatorship. That could well be true, as
there is little indication that the Maoists believe in democratic
processes of any kind, in dealing with even dissidents within their fold,
let alone their opponents. If they do come to power at all, there is bound
to be a frightening arbitrariness to their rule.
However, if the Hindu extremists come to power, there will
be nothing short of a fascist dictatorship along with genocide of
religious minorities and the end of every democratic institution in the
country. Members of the Abhinav Bharat, as mentioned in the charge sheet
filed against them by the Maharashtra ATS, had already drawn up a new
Constitution that would make all religious minorities into second-class
citizens. It would be truly back to the dark ages as far as Indian
democracy is concerned.
What all the sensational media and state focus on Maoist
activities is really obscuring is the fact that all around South Asia the
biggest internal security threat to each country in the region comes from
religious fundamentalist movements from within the majority communities.
This is only too obvious in Pakistan right now where the
same military establishment that encouraged and used Islamic
fundamentalists for various purposes over the decades is engaged in a
life-and-death struggle against them. In Bangladesh, the rising tide of
religious fundamentalism has been barely stemmed by the military there
through a coup and at the cost of the country’s nascent democratic
institutions.
In Sri Lanka, the Buddhist fundamentalists have actually
won power by annihilating the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
along with some 20,000 Tamil civilians while another 3,00,000 Tamils are
interned in concentration camps reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The Mahinda
Rajapaksa regime in Colombo is a glimpse of what would happen in other
South Asian countries if the religious fundamentalists come to power.
In India too, it is Hindu extremists who really pose the
biggest threat to the Indian republic, its secular and democratic
Constitution. Turning a blind eye to their subversive activities and even
worse, pampering them as successive governments and state agencies have
done, could well result in their becoming for India what the home-grown
Taliban have become for Pakistan.
The main reason why the Maoists are being targeted by both
the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P. Chidambaram
is because their presence in the forested tracts of Central India is an
obstacle to domestic and foreign corporations trying to grab land and
resources in these areas. Nobody was really interested in what the Maoists
were doing in these forests through the 1980s and 1990s but when global
and domestic corporations started signing memorandums of understanding (MoUs)
for mining operations, the Indian ruling class has woken up to the ‘Maoist
Menace’!
In fact, a better name for the planned mobilisation of
army and paramilitary troops against them by the Indian government would
be ‘Operation Mineral Hunt’. A hunt that will only result in a horrific
bloodbath of innocent tribal people, doing further injustice to the
indigenous people of the country who have been pushed around for centuries
and treated like dirt by ‘Aryan’ India.
