CPM’s comeuppance -Organiser Editorial

THE CPI(M) may not have anticipated that it was time to reap the whirlwind. The mayhem and anarchy that engulfed the city of joy on November 21, was the most brazen display of Muslim frenzy against a CPM government in many decades.

The CPM has always treated the community as its political jagir. By pandering to all the obnoxious claims and demands of the most fanatic segment of the community the CPM has always tried to pretend as the sole votary of Muslim interest in the country. By systematically promoting a sense of alienation and victimhood, the CPM tried to keep the Muslims at least in West Bengal and Kerala its captive vote bank. In the process they made them believe that they are above the law of the land and that they can always take a religious stand running counter to the emergence of an enlightened common nationality in modern India. Even the freedom of expression of progressive, educated leaders of the community was stifled in this and such innocuous apex court suggestions as officially registering all marriages in the country were challenged with impunity in the name of religious freedom. In all this the comrades found common cause with the clergy.

In the violence on Wednesday, the CPM has at last met its comeuppance with the Muslims returning a dose of the red hooliganism to their own mentors.

The Kolkata violence, which was unleashed by the All India Minorities Forum, a Muslim outfit, really stunned the authorities and the police proved totally ineffective. The state government called in the army in panic fearing communal riots. The victims of the Muslim protest were innocent bystanders and the police. The attack on people, public property, including a school bus was totally unjustified. The reasons given were atrocities on Muslims in Nandigram and allowing the stay of Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen. It is not clear how the two are related.

Muslim leaders allege that in Nandigram over 30,000 Muslim families were rendered homeless. Many of the people killed, wounded and women gang-raped by CPM hoodlums belonged to that community. These leaders also accuse the thirty-year-rule of the Left Front as exploitative, tyrannical and abysmally callous to Muslim interests. That on providing employment and education and ensuring better living conditions to the minority community the CPM record is unpardonably poor. The state lags behind all the states considered the most backward in all these parametres. But unabashedly the CPM clamours for more for the Muslims at the national level, accusing even the UPA of insincerity in implementing various communal awards. It is the Left Front that provided land, shelter and fake ration cards to millions of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators to keep them as readymade permanent vote bank to perpetuate its regime in West Bengal. It is the same party that allowed mushrooming of madrasas along the border though they have proved hatcheries of terrorist and communal virus.

When Muslim fanatics launched a murderous attack on Taslima in Hyderabad two months ago the Left justified it. Similarly, it justified the bloody Muslim protests over the Danish cartoons and it organised Muslim demonstrations against Saddam hanging, Bush’s India visit and the US invasion of Iraq.

The CPM has a long history of treacherously supporting Muslim communalism and betraying the national cause. It supported the two-nation theory and creation of Pakistan. On Kashmir, Siachin and Sir Creek, it toes the Pak line. In Kerala it created a separate Muslim-majority district, followed by four such districts in West Bengal. In Kerala it won the last assembly poll canvassing support in the name of banned SIMI, NDF and Madhani jailed in the Coimbatore blast case. When Madhani was finally released, the CPM, including its chief minister and home minister went to receive and befriend him. The list of the CPM sins in encouraging and inciting Muslim separatism is long and unpardonable. That is why it is music and poetic justice when the fanatic lot turns against the party and its government. This may not mean the end of the CPM villainy in the company of crass communal elements. Nor that the Muslims have finally seen through the cynical power game the comrades are playing with the dead bodies and broken dreams of the hapless herd. But this definitely is a turning point, an amusing moment of truth for the Marxist mandarins. And hopefully a lesson to learn.

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