I will annihilate you.
- Karl Marx's habitual refrain
The Communists are always on the simmer against "injustice to people" but so can they be against justice if the decision is not in their favour. This was vindicated recently in Kerala when the Thalassery Additional District and Sessions Court (Fast Track) awarded capital punishment to five CPM workers who had brutally hacked to death K T Jayakrishnan, State vice president of the Bharatiya Yuva Morcha, on December 1, 1999.
Thirty-five-year-old Jayakrishnan, a teacher by profession in Mokery East Upper Primary School, Panur (Kunnur district) in Kerala, was killed in a ghastly manner by a CPM squad of seven henchmen inside the school in front of his pupils.
The scared students of the sixth standard ran helter-skelter, while others were petrified by the fearful spectacle, many later developed psychosis. District Judge K K Chandrahas said that the accused committed a heinous crime and deserved no sympathy at all.
The police had to cordon off the entire district and sessions court complex sensing trouble from Marxists hoodlums. Though they could not dent the elaborate security arrangement, they shouted slogans and protested against the sentence.
The verdict made history since it was the first case of a political murder where the death penalty was given.
In Kerala alone, Marxist goons had killed more than 149 RSS activists between 1969 and 2000. Ironically, 59 of these killings came after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communism in east Europe.
In the corresponding period in the State, Islamic fundamentalists claimed the lives of 22 Sangh activists. Is it any surprise that in West Bengal where Communists have ruled the roost for the last 25 years, 50 Swayamsevaks have been killed by CPM goons between 1984 and 2001?
Out of the 429 martyred Swayamsevaks all over India, more than half of these deaths can be attributed to the Communists. Two hundred and five volunteers were killed by CPM activists alone, in addition to 42 by Naxalites, taking the tally to 249.
These martyrdoms have been documented in a book titled Martyrdom of Swayamsevaks by S V Sehagiri Rao released by Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani last year about which I have already written elsewhere.
Speaking of Kerala, attacks on Sangh activists had begun during E M S Namboodiripad's unsavoury regime in 1958, when Communists barged into a shakha and stabbed a Swayamsevak in the presence of a sub-inspector and a police party.
E M S Namboodiripad was a Brahmin by birth, atheist by training and closet-Islamist by faith. In 1940, he organised massive Marxists rallies in Kerala shouting insanely "Pakistan Zindabad."
But he knew very well that Pakistan has no place for a kafir. He gave a political lease of life to the Muslim League in Kerala and carved out a Muslim majority district Mallapuram. But the Communists had very little following amongst the Muslims in Kerala and the attacks on the Swayamsevaks were one way to ingratiate with them.
Large parts of India have had the experience of red terror dispensed through hydra-headed formations. Whether under the banner of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism or Maoism, they have not only unleashed an anarchic reign of terror on civil society but also endeavoured to balkanise India through intellectual and armed means.
It was precisely in line with this indoctrinated approach that K M Ashraf and Hiren Mukherji had wanted India to be a federation of States rather than one country. Nor was it out of place for them to fight alongside the Razakars in Hyderabad against the Indian Army in 1948.
And surely, they did not betray their creed when Naxalites under Charu Mazumdar had claimed, "China's chairman Mao is our chairman," letting loose a trail of macabre violence in West Bengal and playing football with the heads of the decapitated policemen. And dipping Telengana in Andhra Pradesh in gore for the last half-a-century appears to be purification by blood for them.
During 1967, in the United Front government Communists shared power with Ajoy Mukherji's Bengal Congress. The Home Department was under the inimitable Jyoti Basu, and the CPM used large-scale State sponsored violence in the countryside to take over excess land from landowners.
Such was their bullying tactics that the then Chief Minister Ajoy Mukherji, a Gandhian at heart, resorted to a fast against his own government. He must have been the only chief minister in the world to do so.
But the haunting question still remains: what makes the Marxists so violent? Why it is so markedly intolerant to not only its ideological competitors but also innocent human beings? It is because Marxism, in essence, is a philosophy of violence, protest and discontent against the civil society.
It treats human beings merely as economic units, without spiritual needs. It doesn't tolerate dissent and stands for uniformity. Marx himself addressing the Prussian government in 1849, threatened: "We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you.
When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." A renowned British intellectual observes, "There is nothing in the Stalinist epoch which is not distantly prefigured in Marx's behaviour."
Marxists criticise Fascism and Nazism. But Communism is a close cousin of the two much abused creeds. Subhash Chandra Bose observed in his The Indian Struggle 1920-1934, "In spite of the antithesis between Communism and Fascism, there are certain traits common to both.
Both Communism and Fascism believe in the supremacy of the State over the individual. Both denounce parliamentary form of democracy. Both believe in party rule. Both believe in the dictatorship of the party and in the ruthless suppression of all dissenting minorities." (pp. 351-52)
Marxism showed little sympathy to nationalism and prophesied in an immensely quotable quote that the "State shall ultimately wither away." It split entire humanity horizontally according to economic status, seeking to liquidate it all.
But Marxism looks at nationalism from the European point of view, which transplanted on the Indian subcontinent would mean to be a conglomeration of 25-odd sovereign countries.
This proposition belies the Indian civilisational ethos but people who chose to name themselves the Communist Party of India (a chapter of Moscow-based Communist International till 1943), rather than the Indian Communist Party, so that its Indian identity plays a second fiddle to its Communist ideology, are scarcely expected to understand this.
But in practice, the USSR worked against its own prediction by fortifying the State instead of letting it wither away, so did Red China. Stalin struck a different line than Lenin by dissociating from pan-Communism and concentrating on "Socialism in one country."
He promoted Russi-fication of not only the existing Soviets of the Union but forcibly coalesced the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia into the USSR.
The Constitution of the USSR that said that any Soviet has the right to secede from the Union, became literally dead after the leadership of those countries were physically eliminated in the Stalinist cult of political murders.
Even in the economic sphere, the State became omnipotent in the Communist order. While Soviet Union collapsed, China has a flourishing capitalist system under a ruthless Communist dictatorship.
Communism has been overtly obtrusive on the rights of human beings denying them the right to freedom of expression. Any departure from its norm is treated as counter-revolutionary, reactionary or anti-State activity.
So it astonishes me to see how Marxists have got entrenched in human rights organisations and the media in India. They take pot-shots at the judiciary of the country, whereas in Soviet Union, their "only fatherland," no free legal system existed.
But why do these human rights organisations (an alternative source of employment for unemployable secularists) come forward only when the victims are Muslims? Why were the Indian Marxists concerned about the plight of 60,000 Muslim refugees spawned by the Gujarat riots (who were living in their own State) but not 3.5 lakh Kashmiri Hindus who were driven out of the Valley 10 years ago with no hope of return in view? Marxism in India is a front of Islamic fundamentalism.
While Marxists indulge in iconoclastic terror against civil society where not in power; they give their own shape to everything when in power through the party cadre, as in West Bengal.
A committed press, committed bureaucracy, committed police and committed judiciary comprise the mantra of Communism in power.
In the panchayat elections in West Bengal, last May, the CPM won 6,002 seats unopposed out of the 58,000, whereas the Opposition could win only five seats unopposed.
Whereas, in the same elections in 1988, a total of 709 Left Front candidates had won unopposed, while its opponents had managed 44 seats in that manner.
So, how could the CPM explain that its ready acceptance increased by nine folds even though election results would show a consistent decline in the panchayat elections of 1988, 1993 and 1998? The answer could be anybody's guess: to calibrate the degree of terror according to the diminishing mass base so as to get the correct outcome.
If Stalin outdid Hitler in the number of persecution victims, Mao outdid both of them put together. The killing fields of Pol Pot in Cambodia reiterated that Communism has no sympathy for human lives.
The true nature of Marxism was perhaps betrayed in a childhood poem by Karl Marx where he himself in the role of God says, "I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind."
His contemporary Anarchist leader, Bakunin's final judgement on Marx would perhaps serve the best commentary on Marxism as well: "Marx does not believe in God but he believes in himself and makes everyone serve himself. His heart is not full of love but of bitterness and he has very little sympathy for the human race."
(The writer, a Rajya Sabha MP, is
convener of the BJP's think-tank)