SINCE TWO DECADES, Saketh Rajan has remained a folk hero in the fervent imaginations of the most die-hard Naxals such as still exist. A hardcore Naxalite chiselled in the 1970s Naxalbari mould, Rajan alias “Comrade Prem” alias “Master” alias “Pandu” was eliminated by a police squad on February 6, 2005 in the thick jungles of Chickmagalur. His death also wrote the premature obituary for trigger-happy Naxalism of which he was the progenitor in Karnataka.
The Naxal - Maoist annals still celebrate him as a fearless martyr and there is even a commemorative website in his honour.
But Saketh Rajan is also a warning and a symbol of everything wrong with Naxalism — from its ideological conception to its eventual extinction if Operation Kagar is any indication. His story is the classic archetype of a promising young lad who had potential to become a productive citizen but went astray after being fed on a heady diet of hardcore Communist literature and brainwashed by warmongering Naxal terrorists who used him as cannon fodder.
The brainwashing was done in the 1980s by the Andhra-based Naxalite, Cherukuri Rajkumar, a leader of the (former) People’s War Group. Rajan was studying at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi. Rajkumar had a bounty of ₹ 10 Lakh on his head at the time.
Recruitment quickly followed brainwashing. Saketh Rajan became a full-time Naxalite terrorist tasked with expanding operations to Karnataka. In turn, he went on frequent tours to university campuses and hostels and enlisted fresh student talent.
Rajan’s recruitment at IIMC is symptomatic of a widespread and prolonged phenomenon, which the smart phone and social media generation is largely ignorant of — how our university campuses had acted as incubators of Left wing terror for more than half a century.
The immediate aftermath of Saketh Rajan’s death reveals the other side of this coin.
Almost the whole of the “humanities” academic establishment, writers and the Kannada media closed ranks and mounted a venomous tirade against Chief Minister Dharam Singh, not exactly known for his decisiveness. Bowing to pressure, he uttered some homilies in praise of Saketh Rajan on the floor of the assembly.
The late U.R. Anantamurthy mourned Rajan.
But the most vocal elegy came from the pen of the late Gauri Lankesh, who was Rajan’s senior in both Bangalore University and IIMC. Months before his death, she had conducted a sympathetic interview with him deep in the jungles of Malenadu and later, wrote a long, glowing obituary in Tehelka.
Saketh Rajan’s death had rather far-reaching consequences.
IT WAS THE PERFECT opportunity to increase Left wing temperatures. A post office entity titled Citizens Initiative for Peace jumped into the fray and demanded that Dharam Singh hand over Rajan’s body to its custody. Unsurprisingly, CIP was populated by powerful Leftist activists of all hues. Its members included among others, (the late) Rajinder Sachar, Harsh Mander, Mahasweta Devi, Medha Patkar, Aruna Roy, Teesta Setalvad, Ramachandra Guha, Sandeep Pandey, Shabnam Hashmi, G. Haragopal, Nandini Sundar and Binayak Sen. It is quite a spectrum ranging from Maoist theorists to Maoist terrorists. Some of these eminences made their way into Sonia Gandhi’s unconstitutional National Advisory Council.
Expectedly, the unsolicited intervention of the CIP in this case brought the Karnataka government almost down to its knees. At the time, the Congress was in power both in Delhi and Bangalore. To cite just one more example of the ramifications of Saketh Rajan’s death, the Columbia Journalism Review prominently mentions his name as a victim of the Indian state in a quasi case study related to Gauri Lankesh’s murder in 2018.
This timeline is extremely significant.
The 2004-2014 decade was when Maoist terror peaked in the country in an unprecedented manner. A 2013 Ministry of Home Affairs affidavit tabled before the Supreme Court made chilling revelations:
The ‘frontal’ organisations of CPI (Maoist), operating under the garb of human rights NGOs, have kept the Maoist movement alive and are more dangerous than armed cadres. These ‘mass organisations’ (‘frontal’) are generally manned by ideologues, who include academicians and activists, fully committed to the party line. Such organisations ostensibly pursue human rights related issues and are also adept at using the legal processes of the Indian state to undermine and emasculate enforcement action by the security forces. They also attempt to malign the state institutions through propaganda and disinformation to further the cause of their ‘revolution’. The state governments are required to initiate legal action against the Maoist front organisations in towns and cities….However, initiating legal proceedings against them has often resulted in negative publicity for the enforcement agencies due to the effective propaganda machinery of the CPI (Maoist).
The same affidavit also tells us that “Naxal influence” had doubled in areas under its control: 203 districts spread across 14 states. Its troop strength had swelled from 7000 to 13,500. Its armoury boasted of state-of-the-art killing machines supplied through illicit arms trade. It freely extorted money to the tune of ₹1200 crores per annum and paid monthly salaries to its cadre. This is unambiguously how the affidavit concludes:
Left Wing extremism is pure and simple terrorism… they are prepared to make a common cause with all those who… give expression to their dissent through violence. They support everything that negates Indian nationhood… They stand against India’s sovereignty, unity, democratic polity and civilisational values…
The reason behind this frightening explosion of Maoist terror is rather straightfoward: the first term of the UPA Government depended for its survival on the 60 Lok Sabha seats netted by Communist parties.
Likewise, the slew of dangerous legislations enacted during both tenures of the UPA has “Marx” written all over them. In fact, these merit a thorough academic study by a team of Constitutional and legal scholars. The aborted Communal Violence Bill is a case in point — its authors were part of the same Leftist - NGO ecosystem.
It is also no coincidence that Nepal — the only Hindu country in the world — was de-Hinduised during the same period in a violent Communist coup. The new Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai, a committed Maoist activist, had been indoctrinated at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. He had also been the avowed leader of Nepal’s decade-long Maoist insurrection aimed at overthrowing the Government.
HOME MINISTER Amit Shah’s vow of wiping out Maoist terror exudes great clarity against this canvas. At least three generations of countless Saketh Rajans across India have become the unwitting victims of a soulless, nihilist ideology cloaked in the language of justice, emancipation, equality and utopia.
When subjected to philosophical inquiry, there is no fundamental distinction separating Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and Naxalism. It is a millenarian Godless religion armed with a Holy Book. It stands to reason that the Communist organisational alphabet soup — CPI, CPI (M), CPI (ML), CPI (M-L) Naxalbari, PWG, Forward Bloc, CPIML Liberation — merely differ on the finer points and methods propounded by a clear and well-established ideology which has an unambiguous theology, which its devotees regard as infallible.
Zhou Enlai affirmed this truth in an interview with an American journalist in 1945. The reporter questioned him whether it was true that Western journalists had painted a false portrait of Chinese Communists by likening them to their Soviet counterparts while the reality was that they were actually “radical agrarian reformers.” Chou’s reply: “we do not mind what the sons of bitches believe about us so long as the belief helps our revolution.” (Italics added)
The same playbook has been at work in India since the erstwhile USSR’s injection of Communism into India. All Communist organisations converge on the goal of overthrowing democracy in India. Both its theory and its blood-soaked practice hinges on an unanimous ideological core: the sovereign nation of India is an illegitimate state. This in turn, is a derivative of sorts of another dogma: India’s freedom from British rule was a betrayal of “revolution.” In fact, there are voluminous records that reveal Communist complicity in sabotaging the Indian freedom struggle at every stage as well as Gangadhar Adhikari’s notorious “thesis” justifying the creation of Pakistan. The CPI was the Muslim League’s best friend.
The aforementioned dogma was the precise trigger for Charu Mazumdar to break away from his mothership, the CPI(M) and to embark on Naxal terrorism in 1967.
The fundamental superstition that an armed revolution that slaughters millions of your own innocent countrymen will usher in utopia, has caused the maximum number of genocides in a single century. History is the best proof that totalitarianism, not utopia, has been the consequence of this superstition put into action. The Black Book of Communism which meticulously documents this horror, is an appalling litany of Communist genocides in the 20th century.
In fact, the genocide and mayhem perpetrated by Communists is the most closely guarded open secret of Left wing terror in India. This includes mass murders committed using official machinery in states ruled by Communist governments — the most infamous being the Marichjhapi Massacre, circa 1979.
NAXALITE OR MAOIST TERROR is evidently the bloodiest and the most sustained saga of Left wing terror. Yet, it has received negligible coverage, commentary and opprobrium that it really merits. No body of serious academic research from the non-Left has been forthcoming barring stray - but brilliant critiques from patriotic Indians such as Ram Swarup, Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, N.S. Rajaram, Koenraad Elst and others. In fact, the the RSS and its affiliate entities waged their most protracted and pitched battles against the Communist realm than against any other ideological group.
Two main reasons explain this chasmic imbalance.
The first was the stranglehold of the overall Communist - Marxist ecosystem over all avenues of public discourse. There used to be a time when any number of newspaper editors publicly addressed each other as “Comrade” with a rarefied air of pride. University academics regularly invited Naxalite terrorists to their campuses for plying indoctrination and recruitment drives in their war against the Indian state. The fortunate few new recruits were shipped to the USSR or China for advanced courses.
The second was the elaborate mythology woven around Naxalism. It was a mythology that fused fiction and nonfiction. School textbooks portrayed Naxals as selfless, self-sacrificing and courageous warriors against oppression and feudalism. Even today, Wikipedia, for example, peddles a sanitised version of the history of Naxalism. The decadal consequence of this deliberate myth-making gave Naxalism a halo of heroic romanticism. Naxalism became aspirational. Impressionable youth wanted to become saviours and liberators. Grenades, guns and landmines would transport them to the Promised Land. The Telugu cinema industry especially, carved out a sub-genre colloquially known as “Red films,” which had a dedicated audience. These movies also supplied a term of endearment for addressing Naxal terrorists: Annalu or brothers. Small wonder that almost from the beginning, (undivided) Andhra amply supplied generations of Naxalites and Maoist “intellectuals.” Vara Vara Rao, Kondapalli Sitaramaiah, Gaddar, Ganapathy, Sitaram Yechury — and now, Nambala Keshava Rao, killed in Operation Kagar, hailed from Srikakulam.
THE CONGRESS is also one of the key enablers of the spread of Communism in all its manifestations. More specifically, the use-and-throw policy of successive Congress Governments both in the States and the Centre is a significant contributor.
Indira Gandhi was the most avid practitioner of this cynical tactic. The story of how she surrendered to Communist demands in exchange for support is well-known. Among other things, it gave India the independent Marxist republic of Jawarharlal Nehru University. This applies in equal measure to the late Y.S. Rajashekhara Reddy who executed a similar feat in his quest for Chief Ministership. But both leaders turned against the Communists once they had captured power — Indira Gandhi launched a dogged war against Communists around 1981-82 and Reddy declared a Maoist manhunt in 2005.
However, the damage had already been done. The Left ecosystem had proved how incredibly adept it was in strengthening itself by exploiting every concession made by the Congress. In the Congress’ unquenchable thirst for permanent power, it had forgotten a simple law of nature: consequences always outlive and outlast ambition.
Fast forward again, to the UPA era. It was the Leftist - NGO - missionary nexus that now dictated terms to a hopelessly weakened Congress.
Fast forward again to 2018 when the nation was treated to the spectacle of Rahul Gandhi breaking bread with the veteran militant Naxalite, the late Gaddar. The proverbial tail was now wagging the dog.
Thus, even when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had openly declared that Maoist terror was the greatest scourge eating India away, there was little he could do about it. This neatly squares with the aforementioned MHA affidavit in which enforcement agencies expressed their helplessness against dealing with Maoist terrorism. It appeared that the Maoists had nearly perfected the art of using the State’s apparatus to usurp the State.
INDIA HAS BECOME almost unrecognisable a decade after the UPA’s deserved exit from power.
The reason Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have succeeded in smashing Maoist terror is rather evident from the foregoing narrative. The duo has dumped the weak-kneed charade of “peace talks” and “reform of Naxals” that had been the norm, reminding us of Andrew Marvel’s memorable phrase, “inglorious arts of peace.”
Amit Shah’s take-no-prisoners approach has yielded rather spectacular outcomes.
In a sense, Amit Shah is resuming the work of Sardar Patel whose dogged combat against Communist terror deserves an independent volume. Among other things, he had kept a tight watch over the CPI and had published an official dossier (Communist Violence in India) in 1949 documenting Communist atrocities throughout India. The work has stood the test of time. Patel had also, on the side, encouraged public-spirited bodies like the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia in their ideological fight against Communism.
The Modi Government’s offensive against Maoist terrorism is not limited to field warfare. Over the last 11 years, institutions that had once enjoyed Leftist ideological monopoly have been systematically defanged. Like India, JNU too, has largely become unrecognisable. But more needs to be done in this realm — weeding out half a century of subversion takes more than one generation.
Operation Kagar, which closely followed Operation Sindoor, will eventually prove to be the stuff of legends. By any measure, it is one of the brilliant, if underrated, successes in combating internal terror acts and deserves to be made a case study in say, the intelligence and anti-terror community.
Most importantly, Operation Kagar marks a decisive triumph against the deadliest enemy of all: the enemy within.
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