Nandigram home-truths?

The CPM’s fightback on Nandigram is not merely about trying to defuse the situation — which was what party General Secretary Prakash Karat and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee attempted to do with their assurances and press statements.

The CPM’s fightback on Nandigram is not merely about trying to defuse the situation — which was what party General Secretary Prakash Karat and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee attempted to do with their assurances and press statements. It is also about exposing the enemy — that is, the Trinamul Congress, Naxalites, Congress, BJP, SUCI and Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind. The latest edition of People’s Democracy does that in more than half a dozen reports and articles across the weekly. One report says that the trouble in Nandigram began with attacks on panchayat members, administrative officials and the police on January 3 by activists of the Trinamul Congress. And over the next two days they “virtually destroyed” all link roads and bridges leading to Nandigram and Khejuri. CPM cadres and sympathisers were attacked and thrown out of their homes. In one case, the miscreants attacked CPM panchayat member Sankar Samanta and then “burnt him alive in a haystack”. The reports give specifics of rape of women, even gives names of Trinamul Congress activists responsible for the incident, some in apparent acts of revenge because they had refused to join the Bhumi Rakkha Samiti set up to oppose land acquisition. “Their chief aim now is to occupy Nandigram and the surrounding area for the Trinamul Congress ahead of the 2008 panchayat elections,” says one report.

Unipolarisation

A front page editorial takes stock of ‘Four years of US imperialism’s aggression on Iraq’. The assumption is that US imperialism is feeding on the growing influence of the Talilban as reason for its continuing presence in the country. “The war that was launched ostensibly to eliminate the Taliban, we are told now that it had, in fact, consolidated the presence of the Taliban in Iraq,” says the editorial. It goes on to list the “modern crimes” committed by the US in its efforts to turn the world into a unipolar one. One of them was hanging former vice president Ramadan earlier this month after the “unjust hanging” of Saddam Hussein. The party believes the principles of governing trials had been violated in Iraq as the accused had not been tried according to Iraqi law but that of the occupation force. While US imperialism “unscrupulously violated” internal laws and norms, the editorial repeats an earlier CPM accusation against the US: That the military occupation was aimed at seizing control of Iraq’s oil. As a result, the Iraqi people are being looted of their only resource that could have contributed to improving their lives and future, says the editorial.

‘Dharmayudh’

Continuing with the series on the 1857 revolt, Left intellectual Nalini Taneja writes on ‘The myth of early Savarkar’, and demolishes the view that the early Savarkar was a secular and nationalist revolutionary who turned later to become a Hindutva theoretician. She analyses Savarkar’s War of Independence, 1857 and concludes that there are “clear continuities in his communalist, parochial and elitist stance” that was evident in his later writings on Hindutva. She believes he had little choice but to accept Hindu-Muslim unity in 1857 since it was impossible to write about the revolt without recognising the role of the Muslims. “He recognises that Hindus and Muslims had to unite in 1857 if they had to present an effective challenge to the British,” she writes. According to her, Savarkar harboured an “adolescent animosity” towards Muslims, reflected in an incident —- Taneja refers to the ‘Savarkar Samagra’ —- where as a 12-year-old he attacked a mosque along with his school friends. The conclusion, therefore, is that for Savarkar the inspiration came not from Hindu-Muslim unity as in 1857, but from the Hindu past and the “invented struggles of Hindus against Muslims”. In short, she says Savarkar’s point is that 1857, a war for independence is actually a ‘dharmayudh’ (holy war) which Hindus and Muslims fight together, but for their own religions.

Compiled by Ananda Majumdar