Changing face of Maoist threat draws police attention: Left wing extremism
Sections of the ultra-Left allegedly joining forces with backward caste presents a socio-political and security challenge
Image Credit: AP
Dubai: On August 28 police from India’s sprawling city of Pune arrested five people — in different cities across the country — for their alleged role in fomenting caste-based violence.
The communal violence had occurred at Bhima-Koregaon, in Maharashtra, on January 1 this year.
Pune police and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) alleged that those arrested in the nationwide raids — Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira — were associated with ultra-Left Naxalite and Maoist organisations.
The also charged them with direct involvement in inciting members of the Dalit (backward caste) community to stage violent protests against the state administration across Maharashtra.
They have also been linked to a reported plot to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The arrests of the five accused were connected with the arrests of five other suspects in June this year who, according to investigators, were involved in organising a public meeting just a day before the Bhima-Koregaon violence, sympathising with members of the Dalit community and exhorting them to violence.
With these recent arrests, the term “Urban Maoists” is suddenly front and centre in India’s political discourse.
The terms “urban Maoists” or “urban Naxalites” have often been loosely used to refer to members and sympathisers of ultra-Left Naxalite organisations such as Communist Party of India (Maoist) – a banned outfit — and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or CPI (M-L).
The five persons arrested in nationwide raids on August 28 have been accused of belonging to such ultra-Left groups.
However, according to some political analysts, apart from a partial consolidation of the anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vote, “urban Maoists” are unlikely to have any major electoral impact in the immediate future.
“Urban Maoists can help mobilise pro-Dalit sentiments and that can reflect poorly on the BJP in certain pockets of India in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. But to say that Maoists-Naxalites pose a threat to India’s federal structure would be an overstatement,” Debashish Bhattacharya, a former CPI (M-L) member-turned-journalist, told Gulf News from Kolkata on Tuesday.
In India, historically, a section of the Left-leaning intelligentsia, particularly on the campuses of some renowned universities and other higher-education institutions, has often been found to have harboured a certain modicum of sympathy for ultra-Left ideologues.
In that sense, the term “urban Maoist” is neither new nor is the trend unheard-of.
Yet, what has been worrying law-enforcement authorities in recent months is an offshoot of this ultra-Left sympathy that has apparently set out to find common cause with disgruntled elements within the backward caste communities.
The prime target of this “urban Maosist’-Dalit combine is the ruling dispensation at the Centre, led by the BJP.
Keeping this new contagion in mind, a consolidation of the Dalit and backward caste vote in next year’s Lok Sabha election cannot be ruled out.
If opposition parties led by the Congress can join forces with the Dalit sentiment, then BJP is likely to feel the heat at the hustings, as the Gujarat assembly elections had showed earlier this year.
But Bhattacharya still believes that these “urban Naxalites” or “urban Maoists” can only have a limited appeal in the current context. Numerically, too, they are hardly formidable, he reasoned. “Unlike the Soviet Union in 1917 or China in 1949, India is certainly not going through a revolutionary struggle right now. I myself was an active Naxalite member in the 1950s and 1960s, but later on, ideological differences with this brand of politics forced me to quit CPI (M-L). India still believes in a parliamentary struggle. Therefore, if any Naxalite or Maoist organisation hopes to bring about a socialist revolution through a bloody armed struggle, it will only be too far-fetched,” Bhattacharya added.
It is still early days to predict the political impact of an apparent Maoist/Naxalite-Dalit combine, but the security challenge thrown up by this presumable nexus has kept the state apparatus on tenterhooks for now.
Source: https://gulfnews.com/news/asia/india/changing-face-of-maoist-threat-draws-police-attention-1.2288369
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