All this hullabaloo at the Jawaharlal Nehru University was an agenda of the communists to align with Islamic extremism, gain wider support from the public in view of the upcoming elections in West Bengal and Kerala
Even as Siachen braveheart lance Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad was battling for life at an Army hospital in New Delhi, a bunch of students from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, were busy chanting anti-national slogans such as Kashmir ki azadi tak jung chalegi, Bharat ki barbadi tak jung chalegi. Nothing could have been more ironical than this.
The incident at JNU is not in isolation. In Chandigarh, activists of the Aam Aadmi Party were busy celebrating the birth anniversary of militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Bhindranwale was a Khalistani ideologue who was responsible for the execution of hundreds of patriotic Hindus and Sikhs. He had met his end in Operation Bluestar that was ordered by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Irrespective of the label that the activists carry, such programmes are the handiwork of the left or the political adventurists who have no ideological baggage.
Read this along with the campaign at JNU, against the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat, as martyrs or innocents. At the Hyderabad University, it was Rohith Vemula and his group who organised campaigns against the hanging of Yakub Memon who was convicted in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts.
All these executions were carried out after the accused were given all opportunities to prove their ‘innocence’ if any while the Ishrat Jahan encounter was to prevent her and her associates from carrying out the task on behalf of their Pakistani handlers.
In the Ishrat Jahan case, the then Congress-led UPA Government used her killing as a conspiracy of the Gujarat police, to earn for its officers, Government recognition and to show leading figures in the State Government that was headed by the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi, as promoting extra judicial killings targeting the Muslim community.
Anti-Modi organisations then castigated Mr Modi and prominent police officers in the State as carrying out the killing of innocents in line with the ‘communal’ event of Gujarat in 2002.
However, David Headley’s statement that Ishrat Jahan was a lashkar-e-Tayyeba operative has come as a blow to the Congress and has exposed the activities of the so-called jihadi elements who receive support from the Pakistani establishment, whose main aim is to destroy the Indian state.
However, those who knowingly or unknowingly sided with these jihadi elements and who sought to pillory true nationalists, stand exposed for what they really are.
The left, with its anti-India mindset, wants to connect the anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit strands, to support each other and to make the world believe that the two are a part of the Indian State’s ‘anti-people’ mindset. Thereby, the left is being used as a tool by Pakistan in its campaign to bleed India white through inflicting a thousand cuts.
Being a willing tool for Pakistan is nothing new. The left has a history of opposing anything that is in the nation’s interest, especially those of communist Russia (so long as Russia was the leader of the international communist movement) and then to China, when it challenged Russia through the Maoist theory of destroying capitalism through subterfuge and violence.
In the pre-war 1930s, the left was generally opposed the national movement for independence, claiming that true independence should be when power is snatched from capitalism. The left was opposed to the World War II as a capitalist conspiracy. However, the moment Russia joined Britain and the US in resisting Hitler, the left changed its course to support the War. So, when Indian nationalists gave the people the slogan of ‘Quit India’, the communists and fellow travelers overnight turned out to be supporters of the war and Britain.
The Communist support to British against Indian nationalism also resulted in communist party lauding Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s demand for partition of the country. It refused to recognise the emergence of India as an independent country in 1947 and actively launched an underground violence against the new Indian state.
In 1962, the anti-national trend in communist activities were again visible. The moment Red China attacked the India militarily, it refused to identify itself with the rest of the nation that had declared China as an enemy. This period also signified the Great Divide within the international communist movement. In India too, the communist movement split into two with the majority faction going with China and holding up the Maoist communism as the most suited to India.
The 1940s and the 1950s saw communists in particular and the left in general, opposing Indian nationalism as nothing more than capitalist conspiracy against people’s democracy and violence was its main thrust. Afterwards too, when the communist movement or at least a section of it sought to capture power through parliamentary means, there was a strong Chinese communist thread running through the Marxist party with official delegations making its presence felt in Beijing even as Red China was criticising the Indian Government and its national policies and the Indian communists joined the chorus. The more violent section of the Marxists totally joining forces with China became the China’s cats paw in India.
The political tie of the communists with Islamic communalism and Islamist movements is no recent phenomenon either. The communists supported Islamist exclusivism all through till now. Politically the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was a great supporter of Islamic extremism, both in West Bengal and in Kerala, the two States that had maximum traction among other States. But we know that Islamism and its extremist politics have worked with Naxalites and communists together.
Since 2009, the left has seen its political support from the middle class steadily declining. This led to a loss of power for the Marxist party in both West Bengal and Kerala and also a decline in its membership. The communists now want to align with Islamic extremism, to gain critical wider support from the public to gain power in both the States. So, this stronger support to Islamist movements and strategies here.
The leftist activists at JNU were not only seeking to make a martyr out of Afzal Guru, but were ready to support Pakistan’s stand on Kashmir. This is what the JNU left group said in its recent meeting. A report in the Hindustan Times on the meeting said, “The student faction organised a ‘cultural evening to protest the judicial killing of Afzal Guru and Muqbool Bhatt’ and to show solidarity with the Kashmiri people for their democratic right to self-determination”.
Certainly, even Pakistan would not have gone that far. The left-inspired protests are no innocent idealism. It is an outward symptom of deeper connectivity of Indian communists with Islamist extremism.