Get on with the job, PC

The murder of over 20 jawans by Maoists in West Bengal’s Midnapore district should serve as a wake-up call to government and civil society. Dithering is not an option any longer. The Maoists are clear they are waging a war against the state, but the state has been fighting shy of joining battle. It is held back by one fear: what will the civil rights activists think?

The activists have managed to confuse us all. It is one thing to talk about the failure of the state to bring development to the tribal areas and the poor heartland of the country; it is quite another to stymie action against political killers on the plea that human rights may be violated if the state moves against the Maoists.

All liberal societies face this classic dilemma: to remain liberal,
you have to respect civil liberties and human rights;  but to save liberalism from future dictators, you have to focus on the end as much as the means. No society to date has achieved anything by paralysing the state from acting in the broader interests of a democratic society.

Hitler, a national socialist, came to power through the democratic process. How much better it would have been for the world if he had been undemocratically nipped in the bud. The Americans fought an undemocratic civil war to abolish slavery. They refused to give the southern confederacy the “basic right” to self-determination. We are doing the same in Kashmir because we don’t want a bigoted form of Islamism to take root in this state. The Indian army, despite occasional lapses on human rights, is fighting for this larger cause of secularism. The last thing it needs is rights activists demoralising them.

Organisations like Amnesty International are unbalanced in their approach to rights as they assume that state violations are somehow more culpable than the terror unleashed by non-state killers. Proof of this came last week when Amnesty sacked Gita Sahgal for protesting against her organisation’s close association with an Islamist sympathiser, Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo prisoner. Said Sahgal: “The tragedy here is that the necessary defence of the (anti-) torture standard has been inexcusably allied to the political legitimisation of individuals and organisations belonging to the Islamic Right.”

In our case, human rights crusaders are sanitising the murders of the Maoist Left by focusing exclusively on state violations.
In a sense, Amnesty’s reticence in condemning private terror groups is a form of self-preservation: if they speak out, they themselves can be silenced and the blame will be apportioned to the state. As liberals, we have manoeuvred ourselves into a corner: we are always willing to believe in the culpability of the state, but not private actors. Instead, we try and rationalise their killings by talking about the state’s failures.

In the last 10 years, private groups claiming to act on behalf of the poor or various ethnic groups have been as responsible for murder and mayhem as state actors. The two need to be put on a par. Whether it is Kashmir or Gujarat or Kandhamal, private groups have provoked violence against other people and state agencies, but human rights activists see no reason to balance their accusations. The Naxals, for example, were responsible for triggering the horrific Kandhamal events when they claimed responsibility for the murder of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati. The revenge for this foolish act was exacted from a hapless Christian community.

The Maoists, inheritors of the Naxal tradition of class war, are no friends of the poor. They are using the poor to grab power and kill democracy in the only south Asian country where it has taken root. This is not to say that the state is blameless. Almost all central and state governments have failed to eradicate acute poverty and exploitation by the rich. But this is changing — as the Congress focus on NREGA and other social sector schemes suggests. Even the BJP — where it is in power — has got the message. In Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh is fighting two battles: one against Maoists and another against poverty. Nitish Kumar in Bihar has brought some semblance of respect for the law, and the results are showing: Bihar now rivals Gujarat as a miracle economy.
As real development becomes the language of politics, Maoism will have to retreat. This is why the Maoists are trying hard to up the ante and defeat democratic development. They can gain power only if development fails — and it isn’t yet failing.

Home minister P Chidambaram’s mandate is clear: he must take the Maoists head-on. The human rights brigade will raise a war cry if the Maoists look like losing, but it is best to ignore them. They need to know one thing: if the Maoists ever come to power, they will be completely out of business. They are no respecters of human rights.

After massacring policemen in Midnapore, Maoist leader Kishanji is supposed to have offered hypocritical condolences to their families. The human rightswallahs haven’t even done that.