CPI(M) To Counter Maoists Politically, Ideologically

B Prasant

THE Left extremist menace has plagued Bengal for over three decades now.  They have been, are, and will be countered politically and ideologically.  Anil Biswas, state secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M) said this while speaking to the media at the Muzaffar Ahmad Bhavan late in the evening of July 12. The Maoists’ fate will be that of the Naxalites of the 1970s.

The members of the corporate media, in particular, appeared full of snide commentaries on the Maoist attacks and the ‘failure’ of the Bengal CPI(M) to resist them.  The corporate media, over the past few days, following the latest round of Maoist attack on CPI(M) workers in two western Bengal districts on July 10, have commented that the Maoists could make armed incursions chiefly, if not solely, because of the poverty of ideology of the CPI(M).

A section of the media has gone so far as to play down severely the brutal killing of the CPI(M) workers by the Maoists and has gone on to virtually lionise the killers.  Fabrications galore are carefully resorted to ‘prove’ how the assassins had the ‘backing of the local populace.’

Answering a few of the posers put up by the corporate newspersons, Anil Biswas made it quite clear that the Maoists were following the blind alley of an ideology that was distorted, hateful, anachronistic, and utterly reactionary.  Challenging the very concept of ‘Maoism,’ Anil Biswas pointed out that even Mao-tse Tung himself was quite opposed to the fostering of any ideology in his name.

Anil Biswas went on to posit that the Maoists were seeking to confuse young men and women with their distorted ideology and their politics of assassination.  Strongly rebutting the Maoist aspersion that the CPI(M) was ‘reformist,’ Anil Biswas pointed out that the CPI(M) ‘struggles for a revolutionary social change and that there has never been any deviations from the chosen path.’

The CPI(M) leader noted that the people of Bengal remained with the CPI(M) and that this had been proved repeatedly through the resurgence of the democratic process.  The massive participation of the people in the CPI(M)-led struggle for wages, the fight for land, and the multitude of class and mass struggles, and the electoral struggle have proved how the mass base of the CPI(M) went on widening.  It is the widening mass base of the CPI(M) that has struck terror into the hearts-and-minds of the Maoists who are alienated from the people in a big way. 

Taking up the question of development of the western districts of Bengal, Anil Biswas said that a concerted process of development has been taking place all-over the state. Anil Biswas commented to say that the task was to further strengthen the ongoing process of developing those regions that were yet lagging behind, even if marginally, the general pace of developmental growth of the state.

Elsewhere, the CPI(M-L) Liberation, condemning the recent Maoist killing spree, has described the Maoists as mercenaries in the pay of bourgeois parties in states like Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, and Andhra Pradesh.  The Maoists, according to the CPI(M-L) Liberation, ‘do not represent the Naxalite movement in any manner.’