THE gruesome killings of 13 innocent citizens in terror strike in Pune, Maharashtra, is overshadowed by the macabre murder of 25 jawans of Eastern Frontier Rifles and State Armed Forces of West Bengal, at Silda and 11 villagers at Jamuri in Bihar by Maoist terrorists. From Pune to Midnapore in a span of four days forty-nine valuable lives have been doused prematurely, nearly a hundred others have been seriously maimed leaving a trail of agony, hopelessness and shattered dreams to as many families as were affected in these incidents.
In all the cases, the culprits of the crime go scot-free as in the cases of hundreds of similar crimes, while the handlers or the backers of the sinister game plan succeed, at least partially in arresting India’s emergence as an economic superpower and a place of harmony and peace for enlightened human activity. Meanwhile, the terror shenanigans find broader echo and reception and become pulp and material for cynical soap opera in the media. Fictionalised crime reportage romanticises-like the cobra-eyed lady-the spine-chilling cruelties of these brigands. The Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has repeatedly said, Maoists are the biggest threat to internal security. The Union Home Minister P Chidambaram after taking charge of the portfolio reiterated often the resolve of the State to crush the Maoist thugs by a concerted and co-ordinated strategy. He promised more superior and sophisticated approach to internal security.
The simple fact however is that the State is being repeatedly challenged by the Islamic terrorists and the Maoist bandits with impunity. That the state has miserably failed in its primary duty of providing security to life and property of the common man, that the state has not been able to assert its sovereign authority in the face of such open challenge in as much as one-third of the geographic boundary of India is a more tragic comment on the inept UPA regime.
Maoist violence, like the Islamic terror strikes have increased in geometric proportion under the confused, waxing and wavering Manmohan Singh regime. Its cost to the nation in emotional, economic and human terms will never be tabulated. The Maoists, like the Islamic savages of terror are a bunch of trained, motivated, dehumanised, trigger-happy butchers. Let’s not bestow on them the veil of ideology. The Islamists wage a proxy war on the state and our civilization, the Maoists pose a declared guerilla war against what they call the bourgeois capitalist Indian State. Both have a political goal. Intelligence agencies have confirmed that in many areas they co-ordinate and work together and that often they have a common command. They want power through undemocratic means. And in this power game the innocent citizens and unsuspecting hapless Vanvasis become the collateral victims. It is a nasty narrative of the insensitive, boorish, self-serving political masters of our times that they roam around in an impenetrable security ring at the tax-payers’ mercy even as they leave the tax-paying public porous, unprotected and unsafe. The present-day communists in the early days of independence tried to overthrow the democratic State through violent means. The State then was more prepared and determined, struck back with equal ferocity and forced the communists to surrender and come out in the open and fight through the ballot.
Their untamed, more fanatic and fringe comrades remained on the margins, went underground but continued to nurse the umbilical chord, taking advantage of the former colleagues wherever they assumed power. This perhaps is the reason for the Marxist government in West Bengal soft-pedalling on the Maoist threat. The centre if it is true to what it says cannot any longer let the Maoists dictate the lives and destinies of the people living in the large swathes of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Andhra and Maharashtra-what is now often referred to as the red corridor. These boors, whether they belong to the Islamist or Maoist genre, deserve no mercy and the State has to assert itself if it is not to abandon its primary responsibility of protecting the integrity of the country and safety of its people-identify and retaliate with force to force them to realise the futility of taking up arms against the State.
