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GUEST ARTICLE

        On 18 May, 2004 when the Congress Party was not in power, the present UPA Finance Minister, P Chidambaram, in a column that he wrote for The Indian Express said with profound wisdom that mainstream political parties that claim to have the larger national interest at heart must stop co-habiting with political parties 'that have brought ruin and misery to millions of human beings.' But power is everything.

        The Congress - allegedly a mainstream political party - has been, for all practical purposes, co-habiting with the CPM and has been so dependent on it that it dare not condemn the Nandigram carnage that L K Advani described as worse than the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, And how right he is.

        The CPM followed the old Stalinist line in Russia where, soon after the October Revolution, some II million peasants were killed because they opposed collective farming. After the CPM came to power in West Bengal, it ruthlessly dealt with landlords and industrialists, throwing democracy out of the window. Within seven months of the CPM - led United Front came to power, some 43,947 workers were laid off; 'gherao' was the way in which managers were terrorised. Industrial capital flew out with a vengeance.

        As many as 4,314 workers became unemployed after their factories were closed down.

        According to one estimate, flight of capital during the Marxist regime amounted to more than Rs 2,500 million. In 1967 alone there were 438 Marxist-sponsored 'industrial disputes' involving 165,000 workers resulting in the loss of five million manhours.

        By 1969 there were 710 'industrial disputes' all sponsored by the CPM itself, involving 645,000 workers and a loss of 8.5 million manhours. Mr Chidambaram must be having a poor memory of those days. According to Kanchan Gupta, writing in The Pioneer (21 March) Mr Jyoti Basu justified the Marich Jgapi massacre by the police in 1979 when 'refugees were shot dead in cold blood'. And then there was the occasion when, on 30 April, 1982, sixteen monks and a nun of the Anand Marg were beaten to death and then set ablaze in south Kolkata by a mob of Marxist goons.

        According to Gupta, 'the man who led the murderous plot was known for his proximity to Mr Basu'.

        Then there was the occasion when Mr Basu's police shot dead 13 Congress activists a short distance from the Writers Building (Government secretariat) on 21 July, 1993. The list of CPM crimes is endless.

        In the Nandigram carnage, according to media reports, a number of outsiders owing allegiance 'to a particular political party' (guess which) could have been involved in the violence that left 14 men and women dead. Indeed, evidence gathered by CBI is believed to suggest that the West Bengal police acted in connivance with the CPM's Harmat Brigade, comprising Marxist cadres trained in hit-and-run tactics.

        It is believed that Rs 50 lakh was sanctioned for the police operation on Nandigram peasants for the purchase of 50 mobile phones and 25,000 bullets according to The Pioneer (22 March).

        Now the CPM is killing the very peasants it once boasted to have rescued from greedy landlords. And that is the irony of it all. As usual, the CPM's model is China. China went on a spree to set up Special Economic Zones. Between 1992 and 2005, some 20 million farmers became victims of land acquisition with over 21 per cent arable land grabbed for SEZs. In one district, Shenzen, there were 74,000 riots in the countryside against government encroachment of peasant lands. Nothing of this has been reported in the Indian media which has to depend upon foreign news agencies, which are frightened to reveal the truth about China.

        West Bengal has always remained a faithful chamcha of Chinese Marxism or Maoism. It was West Bengal's Marxist government that openly supported the Chinese invasion of India - another fact that Mr Chidambaram seems to have forgotten.

        On the issue of Chinese invasion and the West Bengal government's attitude towards it, the UPA government obviously does not want to rake up the past. It wants to stay in power. But consider what China is doing now. In the second week of March, China's legislature passed a law designed to protect private property rights.

        The legislation stopped short of disavowing the principle that all land belongs to the State, a fundamental part of the Communist system put in place by Mao and religiously observed by the CPM in West Bengal where, at Nandigram, the party tried to have its way. China is changing but its brutal disciples in West Bengal want to have everything their way.

        The fact of the matter is that there is no one to tick off the brutality of the CPM regime where party cadres and not the police run administration in rural areas.

        The Tatas did no service either to industry or to the peasant of Nandigram, much less to India in general, by agreeing to set up an industrial plant in an area that displaces poor peasants. This is almost the first peasant revolt in West Bengal. Others, no doubt, will follow in due course. The number of people killed in Nandigram is officially put at 14 but nobody should be surprised if the final figure reaches seven times that number with those wounded reaching upto the figure of 1,000. If the Congress has courage, it should disown the CPM and tell it in plain words that its support is unacceptable.

        No government for whatever reason can seek to displace farmers from their cultivable land. It is a major crime. Nandigram may well be the beginning of the end of the CPM thugs against whom even the CPI has protested. Perhaps Mr Chidambaram knows that when the UPA government was formed the Cabinet included a few Ministers whose record was not exactly illustrious. A number of MPs are reportedly still engaged in legal procedures for avoiding imprisonment.

        The bloodbath of Nandigram is more heinous than the riots that followed Godhra. The post-Godhra riots were caused as a reaction to outsiders who burnt a couple of railway coaches incinerating, in the process some fifty five odd innocent women and children. The bloodbath in Nandigram was caused by the West Bengal CPM-led government itself by bullying peasants.

        Why are our liberal, secular intellectuals silent on this score? Or is it that Leftists, by definition, cannot do anything wrong? In this case the fault is clearly that of the government itself, a point that needs to be stressed over and over again. China is no model.

        According to official statistics there were 87,000 'public order disturbances' in 2005 there, up 6.6 per cent over 2004. And a UN report has said clearly that SEZs have done more harm to the environment than is permissible. In the circumstances, about its incestuous relations with the CPM, the UPA government must think again.

        The CPM is a discredited party in its death throes. It should be given a decent burial and the sooner it is done the better it is not only for the UPA but for India at large.