Red
Terror’ inside India
Source: By Sunanda k. dutta ray: The Free Press Journal
India is at war with itself. The carnage in Bastar was not unlike the insurgency that ravaged Malaya for 34 years, and which, ironically, started in what was still called Calcutta. Ranjit Gupta, Calcutta's police commissioner, who helped to suppress the first Naxalite rebellion in the late 1960s, claimed to have derived his strategy from the Malayan Emergency. He said that General Sir Gerald Templar, the British army commander, who broke the back of the rebels in Malaya, said that since the rebels claimed to be fish swimming in water, he poisoned the water. Gupta professed to follow a similar strategy in tackling Bengali Naxalites.
The Malayan Emergency began on June 16, 1948, when three European plantation managers were killed in Perak state. But the cataclysm that convulsed the Malayan peninsula for 12 years, and then for another 22, as the terrorists revived their campaign, began with the February 19- 23, 1948 Calcutta Conference of outh and Students of South- east Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence. It was held under the auspices of the World Federation of Democratic outh ( WFD) and the International Union of Students ( IUS), but the delegates in the rundown hutments that American troops had used as their wartime hospital were hardly youths or students. There were commissars from the Soviet Union, Australian ideologues, French trade unionists, battle- hardened Vietminh officers, ugoslav revolutionaries and Malayan Chinese guerrillas.
Radical Bengalis, who clung to the myth of Lenin predicting that the road to world revolution would run from Peking to Paris via Calcutta, welcomed the conference, which was preceded by four WFD members travelling through several Asian countries to survey colonial conditions and establish links with local youth movements.
Ashok Mitra, West Bengal's former Left Front finance minister, and Jolly Mohan Kaul, former Bengal general secretary of the undivided CPI, both participated in the conference, but don't seem to have realised that the Comintern orchestrated the event or that the Malayan Communist Party ( MCP) was ordered there to go on the offensive in accordance with the Soviet Union's global strategy.
The MCP's Lee Siong, " who had been chosen to attend because he spoke good English", went from Calcutta to Rangoon for a peasants' congress and thence by boat to Singapore ( then part of Malaya), arriving a day after the MCP's fourth plenary meeting ended. But Lawrence Sharkey, president of the Australian Communist Party, who had travelled direct to Singapore on March 9 and stayed there until March 20, attended the plenary where the decision to revolt was taken. Presumably, he conveyed to the Malayan ( Chinese) comrades the Calcutta conference's secret recommendation of armed struggle. Insurrections broke out almost simultaneously in India ( Telangana), Burma, Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines and of course Malaya.
There were additional local reasons for each uprising, but historians believe that the Calcutta gathering, egged on by Le Tam, leader of the Vietnamese delegation, and two militant ugoslavs, could have been the common ignition.
B. V. Keskar, India's deputy minister for external affairs, reported after touring South- east Asia, that far from being freedom- fighters, the Communists were outright bandits. The British called them terrorists.
Indians in Malaya played only a minor part in the revolt. Many of them were INA veterans. Shocked by Mahatma Gandhi's murder in January 1948, even those Indians who had drifted into the MCP repudiated violence. The main rebels were around 500,000 of the 3.12 million ethnic Chinese in Malaya. Being farmers living on the edge of the jungles, where the MCP's military arm, the Malayan National Liberation Army ( MLNA) operated, they supplied the guerrillas with food and new recruits. Ethnic Malays ( today's bumiputra) supported them in smaller numbers. A special Malay unit, known as the 10th Regiment, was established under the leadership of a Central Committee member, Abdullah C. D., who also established several " Masses Revolutionary Schools" ( Sekolah Revolusi Rakyat), to disseminate Maoist ideas.
Since the MCP was based in southern Thailand, most of its recruits were Thai Malays and people from the north- eastern Malayan state of Kelantan.
The Chinese supported the MNLA because they were denied citizenship and voting rights, had no land rights to speak of, and were usually very poor. The MNLA's supply organisation, " Min uen", enjoyed a network of contacts among the general population. Besides supplying food and other material, it was an important source of information.
The colonial government called the rebellion, whose first phase lasted from 1948 to 1960, the Malayan Emergency. The MNLA termed it the Anti- British National Liberation War. The British- owned rubber plantations and tin mining industries had pushed for the use of the term " emergency", since Lloyd's insurers in London did not cover losses suffered in war. Despite the Communists' defeat in 1960, the Communist leader, Chin Peng, renewed the insurgency in 1967 - when it was known as the Communist Insurgency War - and did not lay down arms until 1989. The Australian and British armed forces had fully withdrawn years earlier. Malaysia was independent, and the insurgents were fighting the virulently anti- Communist prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, and his indigenous government. But still they failed.
Unlike the Malayan rebellion, India's Red Terror is not directed from outside, even if it receives some material help from foreign sources. But as in Malaya, here too there is a long history of deprivation, discrimination and rankling resentment in which ethnic and economic grievances overlap. Bastar hasn't forgotten its 20th maharaja, Praveen Chandra Bhanj Deo, who was killed on March 25, 1966, by the then Congress government of Madhya Pradesh. He was the priest of the Danteshwari temple ( where the Chhattisgarh chief minister, Mr Raman Singh, recently began his Vikas atra) and represented Jagdalpur in the Vidhan Sabha.
The tribals adored him. The state authorities felt threatened by his immense popularity, the vigour with which he championed the cause of his erstwhile subjects, and his political campaigning against exploitation of the region's natural resources and corruption in land reforms.
Given the government's attitude, many believe the " police encounter" in which Praveen Chandra was shot dead, was premeditated murder. The dead maharaja's grandson, Kamal Chandra Bhanj Deo, is now taking an interest in the Chhattisgarh assembly elections scheduled for later this year.
The mix of feudal loyalty, religious passion, historical exploitation and ethnic injustice churned in the explosive bowl of ideology resulted in the massacre of 76 CRP jawans only three years ago. It will not be wished away by dismissing Chhattisgarh's BJP government and imposing President's Rule. Even full- fledged deployment of the army alone will not ensure peace.
Tragically, force cannot be avoided in a situation where a large area ( with a large number of people) is in open rebellion against the state and its institutions. But force has to be based on intelligence -- of which there is little trace now - and a situation must be created so that the rebels are totally isolated.
That was Templer's poisoningthe- water strategy that Gupta admired and emulated. I should imagine Mahendra Karma earned the undying hatred of the Chhattisgarh rebels because his Salwa Judum attempted something similar.
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