Commentary

Congratulations to Narendra Modi for the Action against these National Security Threats

Sandeep Balakrishna
Maoists and Naxals are national security threats. Discursive confusion arises at the precise moment one forgets this basic premise.

Look at what’s happening in the immediate aftermath of the well-deserved and long-pending arrests of the five Maoists: Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira. Look what the premise is in this case: these illustrious disgraces whose long careers are populated by scores of instances of waging a multi-pronged war against the Indian nation have been arrested for plotting the assassination of the Prime Minister of India.

But how has the discourse been spun ever since the news of the arrests broke? Leading the pack of course, is The Wire, with morbidly self-righteous headlines.

As with the case of that shrill uber-Naxal, the late Gauri Lankesh, the wolves have swiftly closed ranks to defend one of their own. You really need to hand it to our comrades. Barely hours after the news surfaced, our comrades of various hues have, as is their wont, launched a coordinated media blitzkrieg to defend their nation-wrecking compatriots. Another golden opportunity to launch a fresh trial-by-media of PM Narendra Modi. It’s supremely convenient especially when they have infiltrated the media on an industrial scale.

And so Naxal terrorists like Varavara Rao are airbrushed merely as “activists,” the term subconsciously conveying the message of noble behaviour. If media infiltration is on the one side, observe their stranglehold on the institutions that matter. Here’s some news from yet another newly-minted Far Left rag, The Print:

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) Wednesday issued a notice to Maharashtra’s chief secretary and director general of police after taking suo motu cognisance of the arrest of five human rights activists in connection with the Bhima-Koregaon violence…“Suo motu notices are a very important and forceful tool for us with which hold state governments responsible. In case they (Maharashtra police) don’t respond to the commission, we will summon with details and evidence,” added Sharma.

What this means simply is this: you may have the police but we have the courts in our thrall.

Even more importantly, let it not be forgotten that the ongoing hollering from our Leftist terrorists is simply the continuation of the same story since the summer of 2014: a declaration of war against PM Narendra Modi.

Consider the situation since 2014.

Think how, despite being in the throes of a paroxysmal death-spiral, the nakedness of the Congress-nurtured political and ideological system continues to manifest itself. It’s as if this Congress system can whip up violence and unrest at will. On any issue. In any city, town or village. At a time of its choosing. Whatever be the cost to the nation and the society.

Now think of the alternative scenario: of a UPA-3 recapturing power in 2019. Of the fate of a Narendra Modi who lost the future election. Think of these two aspects for a brief moment…in fact, think of these two aspects every single time before swallowing the multi-pronged, multi-directional propaganda that masquerades as news and opinion.

At a very high level, the contours of this manifestation is this: while an out-of-power Congress can unleash frequent disruptions across the nation, a Congress in power can give us RTE, Communal Violence Bill, communal headcount in the armed forces, unbridled Maoist violence, and manufacture the balloon of Hindu terrorism among numerous such evils.

The fact is that the Congress party today stands naked as a party of Maoists and has become a violence-enabling agent with a network and toxicity that’s perhaps unparalleled anywhere in the world.

From the Forest to the Corridors of Power

Let’s not forget the origins and history of Naxalism: that it was and will remain a violent war against the Indian state and nation to overthrow it.

Without delving into a detailed history of Naxalism, let’s examine the record of perhaps one of the deadliest Maoist terrorist to hit India: Varavara Rao. Since his rise to prominence in the mid-late 1960s up to his arrest now, he has been arrested several times under the most stringent laws. Almost every Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh since 1973 has considered him dangerous enough to either arrest him or put him under constant watch.

Now take a look at these quotes.

Accounting for 27 per cent of the total fatalities in India during 2006, Left Wing extremism constitutes the…”single biggest internal security challenge” confronting the country.”

Maoists were now planning to target important installations in major cities of India…”Like forests provide safe hideouts to Naxalites in tribal areas, the cities also provide them cover. Taking advantage of this, they plan to target major installations in cities.”

Maoists have also articulated a new strategy to target urban centres in their “Urban Perspective Document”, drawing up guidelines for “working in towns and cities”, and for the revival of a mobilization effort targeting students and the urban unemployed.

That was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former Home Minister Shivraj Patil speaking in Parliament sometime in 2006. That was the UPA-1 era where the Communist Parties gave outside support to the Congress party. That was also the era when Nepal ceased to remain as the only Hindu kingdom in the world and turned Communist. It was also the same era where, as the current NSA chief Ajit Doval notes in his excellent paper,

the area under Naxal influence has nearly doubled extending to nearly 203 districts in fourteen states. The strength of armed guerrillas has swelled from less than 7,000…to…13,500… Left extremists, today, have many more and much sophisticated weapons; (estimated to be nearly 14000 as against 5500 in 2004) and have upgraded their tactics, field craft and skills in handling weapons and explosives manifold. They raise funds nearly to the tune of Rs. 1,200 Crore a year, which in an impoverished area of their dominance is a huge amount to create instability and enables them to pay regular monthly salaries to their armed cadres.

It would take a logical leap of the orders of several magnitude to think that this explosive growth of armed Naxal power was merely coincidental with the fact that the Communists had politically supported the Congress-led UPA.

But with the exit of the Communists from the UPA in 2008 and the reemergence of UPA 2 in 2009, something else happened. Influential sections of Naxals had directly occupied the corridors of power — both overtly and covertly thanks to Sonia Gandhi’s unconstitutional body named the National Advisory Council (NAC), an innocuous moniker for a vast cabal of anti-national NGOs. One only needs to read the two-part biography of the late Outlook editor Vinod Mehta who nonchalantly mentions the nature of the “activism” by Naxals like Aruna Roy, Arundhati Roy, Arvind Kejriwal and Harsh Mander.

And so, Jungle Naxalism had systematically, but surely moved directly into the corridors of power. If the NAC was more powerful than the PMO in the period, it should tell you how far to the brink the Congress had pushed the country.

Another significant, official proof emerged in 2013 in the form of a report by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

In Nov, 2013 MHA filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court acknowledging that ‘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).’

Read that quoted paragraph again. Think how farsighted the Maoist terrorists have been in their investment. Compare that with the news of the NHRC guy taking “suo moto cognizance” of the “wrongful arrest” of these five Maoist Terrorists. It is this that has enabled them to confidently and repeatedly chock a snook at the Prime Minister, play the victim card, and get their comrades out of jail.

Another significant weapon in the Naxal arsenal is the so-called “surrender” of armed Naxal leaders. Of the five arrested Maoist terrorists, at least two are lawyers doing “legal activism” to ameliorate the condition of prisoners in jails. Translation: they use the legal system to ensure that their comrades get relatively lenient sentences and once they rejoin the mainstream society, they are rehabilitated by the party apparatus by creating jobs for them in the academia, media, think tanks, etc. The task remains the same: of spreading poisonous propaganda against the Indian state and society.

Concluding Remarks

It’s a mistake to think that this new — and ever multiplying avatars of Naxalism is a purely political problem that can be solved politically. It’s a multi-pronged, multidirectional and multifaceted war against the Indian state and the psyche of Indians.

Intrinsic to the Naxal-Maoist war against the Indian nation and state is their violent and open challenge against our laws. Because their ultimate goal is to create a nation and society of pervasive lawlessness after which point they can swoop down and effect a total takeover. Their inspiration is the bloody “revolution” of October 1917 in Russia and later, its counterpart in China. And remember, those “revolutions” were not spontaneous by any stretch of imagination. The violent Communists were successful because the political and law-enforcement power of those countries had been successfully weakened as a prerequisite and prior preparation.

Check what has happened in India so far. Someone as vicious and as patently anti-national as Teesta Setalvad is still roaming free. So are most of her cousins in various spheres. Enough said.

This is a war that has to be fought on its own turf. Or to quote Ajit Doval again:

One cannot win unless one fights and one cannot fight till one is able to define the enemy — boldly and bluntly. One major reason why we, as a state, have often gone wrong in our responses and not derived full value out of our efforts and sacrifices is our fear to face the hard realities…notwithstanding the compelling evidence.

This enemy is the selfsame invisible political and ideological class that more or less remains completely stable despite the current Government, which it viciously hates.

And so while congratulations are definitely in order to the Narendra Modi Government for arresting these Maoist terrorists, it is the follow up and iron-willed action that alone will ensure that these perpetual threats to national security are fully and finally eradicated.

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