Comrade Karat, your ‘model’ is history!
Prakash Karat and his ideologically fatigued comrades-in-arms have decided to walk the length and breadth of the country with the aim of trying to revive their flagging politic fortune and shrinking party. Their ‘Sangharsh Jatha’ may serve to fool and galvanise the straggling cadres into believing that it will again propel the party to the national political centre stage but comrade Karat and his close confidantes know for certain that they will need, like always, the timely magnanimity of the Congress and its presiding ‘Lady’ to bail them out politically. But I shall not, for the moment, dissect the dialectics of Left-Congress political opportunism; I have a more fundamental task at hand. I have a question for comrade Karat.
While addressing a public rally in Patna on March 10 in connection with the Jatha, comrade Karat, giving the ideological direction to the pointless jamboree, had said that the “Gujarat model can never become a national model for development.” Comrade Karat also observed that everybody knew the truth about the model which “has given high priority to big industrial houses at the cost of common man, dalits and tribals.” It’s confusing, was comrade Karat perchance referring to the Left-Fronts 34 years’ record in West Bengal or was he seriously referring to Gujarat? All the ills that he attributes to Gujarat and its model of development can very well apply to beleaguered West Bengal where comrade Karat’s ideological co-partners ran a peoples’ Government.
But the larger question is what kind of model does comrade Karat want for India. Does he want the West Bengal model? A model which saw in 1979 the communist peoples’ Government invite and then chase out, fire, starve and throw to sharks around 4000 dalit Hindu refugees from Bangladesh who had settled down in Marichjhapi in the Sunderbans?
Which model does he prescribe, the godless one which presided over the daylight attack and burning of 16 Ananda Margi monks and a nun in south Kolkata on 30th April 1982. Which model would he prefer, the one his comrades perfected and which saw the encircling and gruesome killing in March 1984 in Kolkata of the valiant young police officer D.C.-Port Vinod Mehta who had exposed the nexus between Karat’s comrades and criminals. A minister of the peoples’ Government, whose stronghold Mehta had raided, was said to be involved in the murder and yet comrade Karat’s government continued with lumpen in the cabinet.
Which model can we then recommend, the one which gave comrade Karat’s political brothers the liberty to politicise and destroy the state education system, to hack away and bleed the state health care infrastructure, to unionise and starve industry and jobs? Perhaps comrade Karat thinks that the model which nonchalantly presided over the Amlasole starving deaths in 2004, which allowed the rape and burning of protestors who resisted the Government’s move to acquire their land in favour of ‘big industrial houses’ and the one which willingly fired and killed poor peasants in Nandigram who were unwilling to let go of their land, is the one best fitted for India.
It is only such a model that he perhaps sees as fitting into his larger ideological framework. In fact haven’t all of comrade Karat’s idols run such model Governments in the past — recall the perfect proletarian models which threw up Stalin’s Gulags, ushered in Mao’s ‘great leap forward’ and the ‘cultural revolution’, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and North Korea’s ‘re-education camps.’ Had it been left to them, comrade Karat and his ilk would have ensured with zeal the implementations of such models in India. It is really no fault of theirs that they cannot imagine a model which does not champion ‘class genocide’, the ones they fawn over, have, in the course of history, exterminated 85 to 100 million people and perpetrated the ‘most colossal case of political carnage in history.’
Comrade Karat would do well to desist from discussing models for India, the future of India is not in his hands and shall not be of his making, it lies elsewhere and in other hands, it lies in aspirations which his weakening ideological radar fails to grasp. Let him instead articulate how he proposes to rescue his party and his comrades from the ‘ash heap of history’.
While addressing a public rally in Patna on March 10 in connection with the Jatha, comrade Karat, giving the ideological direction to the pointless jamboree, had said that the “Gujarat model can never become a national model for development.” Comrade Karat also observed that everybody knew the truth about the model which “has given high priority to big industrial houses at the cost of common man, dalits and tribals.” It’s confusing, was comrade Karat perchance referring to the Left-Fronts 34 years’ record in West Bengal or was he seriously referring to Gujarat? All the ills that he attributes to Gujarat and its model of development can very well apply to beleaguered West Bengal where comrade Karat’s ideological co-partners ran a peoples’ Government.
But the larger question is what kind of model does comrade Karat want for India. Does he want the West Bengal model? A model which saw in 1979 the communist peoples’ Government invite and then chase out, fire, starve and throw to sharks around 4000 dalit Hindu refugees from Bangladesh who had settled down in Marichjhapi in the Sunderbans?
Which model does he prescribe, the godless one which presided over the daylight attack and burning of 16 Ananda Margi monks and a nun in south Kolkata on 30th April 1982. Which model would he prefer, the one his comrades perfected and which saw the encircling and gruesome killing in March 1984 in Kolkata of the valiant young police officer D.C.-Port Vinod Mehta who had exposed the nexus between Karat’s comrades and criminals. A minister of the peoples’ Government, whose stronghold Mehta had raided, was said to be involved in the murder and yet comrade Karat’s government continued with lumpen in the cabinet.
Which model can we then recommend, the one which gave comrade Karat’s political brothers the liberty to politicise and destroy the state education system, to hack away and bleed the state health care infrastructure, to unionise and starve industry and jobs? Perhaps comrade Karat thinks that the model which nonchalantly presided over the Amlasole starving deaths in 2004, which allowed the rape and burning of protestors who resisted the Government’s move to acquire their land in favour of ‘big industrial houses’ and the one which willingly fired and killed poor peasants in Nandigram who were unwilling to let go of their land, is the one best fitted for India.
It is only such a model that he perhaps sees as fitting into his larger ideological framework. In fact haven’t all of comrade Karat’s idols run such model Governments in the past — recall the perfect proletarian models which threw up Stalin’s Gulags, ushered in Mao’s ‘great leap forward’ and the ‘cultural revolution’, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and North Korea’s ‘re-education camps.’ Had it been left to them, comrade Karat and his ilk would have ensured with zeal the implementations of such models in India. It is really no fault of theirs that they cannot imagine a model which does not champion ‘class genocide’, the ones they fawn over, have, in the course of history, exterminated 85 to 100 million people and perpetrated the ‘most colossal case of political carnage in history.’
Comrade Karat would do well to desist from discussing models for India, the future of India is not in his hands and shall not be of his making, it lies elsewhere and in other hands, it lies in aspirations which his weakening ideological radar fails to grasp. Let him instead articulate how he proposes to rescue his party and his comrades from the ‘ash heap of history’.
Courtesy: NITI Central
