Articles by Sumanta Banerjee

Will liberal humanists care to look at the track record of India's paramilitary forces and their brutalisation by the State which has turned them into robots conditioned to press the trigger at anyone dissenting against the State's policies? These guns make no distinction between the Gandhians and the Maoists, between the peaceful anti-steel plant agitation in Kalinganagar and the armed resistance of forest dwellers in Chhattisgarh, between non-violent and violent movements. If the ruling powers continue to ignore popular grievances and shrink the space for democratic protest through peaceful avenues, the democratic urge will then take the form of violent resistance against the paramilitary forces which have been deployed against them.

Even a week after the destruction of the Gyaneshwari Express on 28 May, none among the important CPI(Maoist) leaders and spokespersons – Ganpathi, Kishenji, Ramanna, Azad, among others – has as yet officially come out with a public statement denying their role (or owning up).

What does one make of the present generation of time-serving Bengali intellectuals, quack literati and their culturally half-baked political patrons? The most prominent specimen of the latter is Mamata Banerjee, whose rise in West Bengal politics is a sign of the bankruptcy of the traditional Bengali left, as well as the political cul-de-sac that the intelligentsia are facing. As for the latter, it is a combination of naivety among a few, a knee-jerk support for an opposition political leader by some, and a calculated bid by others to make hay under her patronage, that has paved the way for Mamata's success in the Bengali cultural scene.

The case of the Sri Ram Sene leader Pramod Muthalik, who is facing some 40 criminal cases in Karnataka, epitomises the Indian state's pussyfooting in dealing with Hindu religious extremists, while that of the Maoist leader Kobad Ghandy typifies the same state's trampling down on dissenters upholding the cause of the poorer classes. In parallel, the confrontation between the morality of those who govern the Indian state and that of their Maoist opponents can best be encapsulated in a recapitulation of the careers of Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and the Maoist ideologue Kobad Ghandy.

Terrorists of both the Hindu and Islamic varieties continue to celebrate their acts of massacre, thanks to the patronage they receive from their respective states.