NANDIGRAM: BLOOD RED FLAG FLUTTERS AGAIN

Narendra Modi and Rajiv Gandhi carry the cross of the killings that consumed Gujarat and Delhi after the Godhra burning and the assassination of Indira Gandhi respectively. Those killings, however condemnable, were a result of almost instant emotional frenzy and madness which turned ordinary people into murderers.

In the killing fields of Nandigram, on the other hand, there was no mass upsurge, no emotive outpouring, no hurting of religious sentiments. The killings were another chilling reminder of the horrors of communism which has globally claimed more lives than all the wars of the world put together during the time it prevailed in some countries.

According to some estimates, the communists have murdered close to 110,000,000 people, several times more than the 38,000,000 killed in wars fought in the 20^th Century. The Soviet Union heads the list of communist mass murderers, apparently killing nearly 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself was responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 were due to forced labor in gulag. Communist China, which during Mao’s Cultural Revolution alone saw over 10,000,000 murdered, is the second on the list. By far, the most deadly of all has been the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia who killed some 2,000,000 people between April 1975 and December 1978, out of a population of just around 7,000,000.

Why did all these communist killings take place? The answer seems to lie in the explosive marriage of an uncompromising ideology with the absolute power of the ruling dictatorship. As a result, communism morphed into an almost fanatical religion, with a revealed text whose interpreters dictated the rigid path to be followed, without deviation, to reach the promised materialistic ‘heaven’. To achieve their objective, Communist ‘Talibanis’, as it were, destroyed or took control of all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. Non-believers were simply eliminated in cold blood.

Indian communists, fortunately, have been constrained by their subordination to the democratic process and the rule of law. But, that intolerant, uncompromising streak, the very foundation of communist behaviour, keeps surfacing regularly in West Bengal and Kerala, the two states where the communists enjoy the limited power that the Indian Constitution permits.

The latest killings in Nandigram by CPI(M) cadres brought from outside Nandigram is, perhaps, the worst case of cold-blooded genocide planned and executed in India by the state in a naked assertion of its political power.

The police, media and all others were simply not allowed to enter the area while the communists went about their task ruthlessly and systematically, murdering opponents and innocents wantonly. Finally, after all traces of the killings had been carefully eliminated, the Central Police was allowed to enter the cleaned-up killing fields.

The red flag has, at last, been planted in Nandigram again after 11 months. Like elsewhere in the world, this flag of blood has no respect and tolerance for those who oppose it. The uncompromising ideology of the communists manifestly remains as merciless as that of the Talibanis who also similarly kill for theirs.

But for the hypocritical protest by the ‘collaborator’ intellectuals of Kolkata, whose latent Bengali sub-nationalism probably led them to proudly support these communist killers for decades, there is going to be little outcry. The crooked commies have got the central government by their unmentionables. Immoral political expediency will once again triumph over the cries of the people.

Yet this country can heave a sigh of relief that it has remained firmly out of the clutch of these Red Raiders. One shudders to imagine what they would have done in thousands of Nandigrams had they been in absolute power over the whole country.