August 21, 2011
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/fight-against-corruption-maoists-ask-team-anna-to-join-them/1/148641.html
Observers of the Maoist movement said there are serious lessons to be learnt from Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign that has pushed large sections of urban India on to the streets.
They point out that the government’s kneejerk attempt to suppress Hazare’s non-violent agitation through ‘force and deceit’ vindicates the Maoists’ stand on the nature of the Indian state. “If this is how the government handles a peaceful protest, imagine what a sham its offer of peace talks with the Maoists can turn out to be,” G. Hargopal, the Hyderabad University political scientist who was an interlocutor when Maoists had abducted Malkangiri collector R. Vineel Krishna.
The CPI (Maoist) holds that the government had used the ploy of talks to kill its spokesperson Azad in a fake encounter, a charge substantiated by Swami Agnivesh, who had been requested by home minister P. Chidambaram to bring the Maoists to the negotiating table.
Hargopal said Hazare’s movement is superficial, touching just the tip of the deeper malaise that lies in the Indian model of development. “It has no rapport with large sections, particularly the rural poor and the tribes, whose very survival is at stake due to the lopsided structure of development,” he said.
Naxal-watchers, however, unanimously condemned the suppression of the “right to protest”. “The denial of the right to dissent to them (Team Anna) was illegal and unwarranted,” social activist Binayak Sen, who was recently freed from a Chhattisgarh jail said. Sen, however, said he is still studying the nature of Hazare’s campaign and can’t comment on it yet.
Maoist ideologue Varavara Rao, while pressing for the universal right to dissent, asserted that the creation of a Lokpal isn’t a panacea to all the problems.
“It is a diversion from the basic movement of adivasis and working classes. Capital lies the root of corruption. Hazare doesn’t talk of killings, counterkillings and rapes in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand,” he said.
“As a Maoist, I feel we are hitting at the core of corruption. My suggestion to Hazare and his team that, as true patriots, they should join the Maoist movement. They should now realise that their Gandhian path also invites violence, naturally so because state the source of violence,” Rao said.
Maoist sympathiser N. Govindan Kutty said the recent spate scams reflects the extent of corruption in India. “Scams surface because of the dogfight among the political class. A single agenda Hazare-like movement too feeble to tackle it,” he added.
