Is it surprising to hear senior members of the Mumbai police talk about how sad they are that the laws of the land do not allow them to take any action against Naxal sympathisers?
This police force, once seen as the best in the country, is perhaps the most discredited public institution in the city today especially in the light of revelations made over an apparently concocted case against one builder-developer at the behest of another.
Gone are the days when the Mumbai police was seen as an efficient, hard-working and result-oriented body. The first major blow to that image came during the post-Babri Masjid riots, when the partisan nature of the police was exposed. Why blame only the Gujarat police for 2002? Surely, they were only following their illustrious neighbour’s fine example?
The connections between the underworld and the police are very well-known, of course, but will have to be ignored because the Mumbai police had once managed to be both efficient and deal with the underworld.
Now, their bugbear is not the underworld but terrorists (running rife all over the nation plotting and planning and occasionally executing) and Naxalites. When it comes to terrorists, we are usually told that they are from Pakistan, Kashmir (theirs not ours) or Bangladesh.
Therefore we can with impunity kill them, throw them in jail, send them to Gauntanamo Bay.
But these pesky Naxalites pose another kind of a problem. They are not outsiders. They are us. So that damn Constitution comes into play. You know the one. It promises fundamental rights, equality and all that other tosh, it ensures fair play and justice for all. If one branch of government transgresses, the other one kicks in. It’s all very
inconvenient and time-consuming.
When the Mumbai police arrested two Naxalite ‘sympathisers’ last year, one of the allegations made against them was that they had ‘Naxalite’ literature and books about Stalin. Since when are either a crime? Are books about Stalin banned? Should they be banned?
Adolf Hilter’s Mein Kampf is permanently on best-seller lists in India. Should that be banned? But there’s that Constitution again, assuring freedom of expression and other such subversive stuff.
The Naxalite movement started in Bengal as an expression of anger against oppression of the landless and poor peasants. The movement in Bengal turned extremely violent, was killed by violent means and some small attempts at reparation were made.
Years later, a movement by angry peasants and landless rural labourers erupted all over parts of middle India — a neglected, and largely poor swathe of India, running through what is now Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.
Successive governments had either continued to neglect those areas or answered violence with more violence till we reached this miserable pass where we stand today.
So, what do we do with this Constitution that all of us are bound by and that government servants — like the police —have sworn to uphold? Should all NGOs who work in rural areas be banned, in case they are ‘sympathisers’?
Should all ‘sympathisers’ of Naxals — who are not Naxals, by the way — be put behind bars? Will these acts of banning really solve the Naxalite problem or would it be more useful if some state government actually bothered to stop worshipping big money and start dealing with the ground-level issues so we can see less anger and violence?
Newspapers a short while ago carried photographs of former deputy prime minister LK Advani sharing a stage with Gadar, the well-known Naxalite sympathiser, whose searing poems reflect the pain and anger of the downtrodden.
Why not just allow the police to kill all the downtrodden and inconvenient and end this pretence with the Constitution, with laws, with presumption of innocence?
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