The communists’ dubious role during the country’s freedom-struggle is well-known. The comrades had gone overboard in pleasing the British and running down freedom-fighters, including those in the Congress. Not surprisingly, the Leftists side with anti-nationals today

A certain officer in the then colonial Government in India had once pithily observed that the communists are the sort of the people who must always be “anti” something rather than “pro” anything (except, perhaps, themselves and a shadowy entity called ‘the people’. Ironically, it is in the name of this very entity called ‘the people’ that communists have carried out some of the greatest genocidal acts in history and continue to indulge in the politics of violence and hate.

It was the early days of the Quit India movement that the top leadership of the Communist Party of India had begun its hyper-active phase in trying to prove its loyalty to the British by offering its services to His Majesty’s Government in India in support of its effort to try and quell the reactionaries (read the Congress) forces who were being misled by Mahamta Gandhi’s coterie. Those were the days when the comrades referred to the “Congress fifth-column”, as “treacherous agents of Fascist imperialists”.

Throughout the Quit India drive, the comrades assiduously worked to wean away the people’ from the influence of the ‘fifth-columnists’. Therefore, the propaganda-laden editorials that continue to appear in the some of the communists mouthpieces today and which keep harping on the falsehood that the RSS had no role to play in the freedom movement, is actually a diversionary tactic adopted by the Indian communists to blanket their own collaborationist past, when the likes of PC Joshi and others were forever willing to oblige their White masters by running up to them, kowtowing and writing copious notes in trying to explain how the cadres had sincerely toiled — not to liberate the masses but to serve their imperialist masters in strengthening their stranglehold on the Indian people.

Stacks of files and heaps of reports still remain confined within archives all over India that could shed light on the dark collaborationist past of Indian communists. Their collaboration in the past was with the subjugate-and-enslave India forces, while their collaboration in the present is mainly with the break-India forces. The events of the past month have reinforced this shameless trajectory. Such a duplicitous, forked-tongued approach has always defined communists the world over. The Indian communists were simply following in the rut designed by their illustrious international predecessors. Blood, gore, violence and genocide has defined the world history of communism.

No relationship, no filial tie, no societal bonding, remained sacrosanct under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Joseph Stalin’s NKVD, for example, employed around 3,66,000 people to constantly look for and liquidate the “enemies” of the people like “noxious insects”, while the communist party made ‘denunciation’ an everyday practice, not so much for ideology as for personal advancement. This greed for denunciation and self-advancement destroyed relationships, tore apart families and smothered human connections in countries under a prolonged dominance of the communist system.

It was under the communist system that the state became an entity or a formation which acted against its own people. Stalin’s gulags, Pol Pot’s killing fields of Cambodia, Mao’s Great Leap and his cultural revolution, and, in our time, the Nandigram killings, all fall in the same pattern and framework of a state operating against its own people.

The liquidation of political and intellectual opponents by dubbing them as class enemies who need to be crushed like “noxious insects” as the ‘liberator’ Lenin had once observed, again in the name of the people, introduced the dimension of, as one observer noted, “animalisation” within the political narrative. It was this ‘animalisation’ of the opponent or of ordinary people who had no particular inclination to or attachment with the ideals of communism, that led to the institutionalisation of violence. The communists killed you not because of what you did, but simply because of who you were or because of what you believed in. It is said that while Tsarist Russia carried out 6,321 political executions between 1825 and 1917, the liberated Russia under the comrades, while taking on the ‘compradors’, had in just over two months in 1918, eliminated 15,000 people. The approach continued and was further refined and widened. For example, the collectivisation famine during 1932-33 saw six million people die; the Great Purge saw 7,20,000 executed; seven million were consigned to the Gulags between 1934-41; while the Great Leap saw 20 million die from a politically-engineered famine.

Within this praxis, the political opponent or the opposing intellectual had to be crushed, most often through physical violence. Physical liquidation was a legitimate aspiration for clearing the roadblocks towards the proposed paradise of the proletariat. Competition to liquidate the ‘enemy of the people’ was also accepted within this smoke-world of communism where each liberator tried to outdo the other by proving their allegiance to the ‘revolution’. The Paris-educated member of the French Communist Party, Pol Pot, tried to outdo the ‘legends’ of Mao and Stalin in his killing fields of Cambodia. Yet in the late sixties and early seventies, when a large number of communist and Left intellectuals were busy supporting the students’ agitation against Charles de Gaulle, no mention was made of the genocides that were inspired by “peoples’ struggle” in communist countries, and no mention was made, of course, of Pol Pot, who was assiduously putting together his world of freedom — orazadi, as some would say in India today.

Communists have always excelled at using extreme violence as a means for extending political hegemony and control. In the West Bengal of the 1970s and up until much later — till about 2007 and 2010 — the comrades used political violence to silence and liquidate opponents. Cadres were taught that it was necessary and mandatory to kill political opponents. The call for freedom of expression, dialogue and debate were to be confined within the walls of Parliament and the protest areas of Delhi. The more gruesome the murder, the more complete the expression of your allegiance to the ‘proletarian revolution’. This explains why Sujith was hacked to pieces in front of his infirm parents and why Master Jayakrishnan had to be  butchered in front of his students.

Intolerance towards dissent, towards legitimate demand, is a very communist trait. In West Bengal, it was put into operation the moment the comrades came to power. Five workers at Kidderpore Dock in Kolkata, for example, were gunned down on October 30, 1979, just because they were demanding better wages. In Nandigram, as early as 1982, when the communist messiah in India, Jyoti Basu, ruled, eight villagers were shot because they were agitating for greater development in the surrounding neighbourhood. One of them was an eight-year old boy who had joined the demonstration.

Three decades of false proletarianism in Bengal is replete with such heart rending stories of blood and death. It is time to consign such an ideology and its false practitioners, as Trotsky would say, into the “ash heap of history”. Thereby lies trueazadi.