Many people are not aware of the red menace causing immense bloodshed and horror in India. While going through the headlines, it is not difficult to spot the atrocities and how Maoist terror is turning life into hell through the most brutal savagery. Recurring Maoist attacks in Kochi, the attack against a government- owned hotel in Kerala’s Wayanad district, the explosion of a bomb on a rail line in Orissa, the assault on a stone quarrying unit in the Kannur district of Kerala, the hijacking of passenger buses, the unearthing of huge arms caches belonging to Maoists in Odisha, threats against road construction in Maoist-affected districts, Maoists blowing up train tracks protesting Obama’s visit, a spurt in Maoist activity along the C’garh border and Maoist violence taking a waning trend in Bihar are some news reports making the strife evident.
What is this Naxalite movement that is a scourge in India? The Naxalites are left-wing extremists and take their name from Naxalbari, a village in the state of West Bengal where they first staged an uprising in 1967. The Communist Party of India (Maoist), representatives of the same faction, emerged in 2004 when the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of India (CPI) merged with the People’s War and the Maoist Communist Center.
The Maoist terror practiced by the communist party in India is reliant on brutal violence that has resulted in the killing of 10,000 citizens and displacement of another 150,000 since its inception.[1] These Maoist insurgents, or the Naxalites, are mostly active in the heartland of India and most dreadful in the area known as the Red Corridor covering Andhra Pradesh in the south to West Bengal in the east. They have some sort of presence in 21 out of 28 states in India,[2] and according to an Al Jazeera report, “An Indian government assessment states that the Naxalite influence extends over nearly 92,000 sq km, or roughly a third of the country.”[3]
They terrorize people by committing numerous abuses, such as targeted killings of police, political figures, and landlords, breaking open jails, looting ammunition depots and seizing explosives, destroying power transformers, and attempting assassinations, abducting police officers and ordinary villagers. In some cases, the Maoists bring alleged “enemies” before their self-declared jan adalat, or people’s court, and they conduct public show trials and mete out harsh penalties such as beheading or shooting suspected informers. Because of this savagery, many officials do not want to be assigned to Maoist dominated areas. What is more, in the past 10 years, the Communist Party of India (Maoists) organized as many as 489 training camps for more than 40,000 cadres who have been taught about the use of sophisticated weapons and guerrilla warfare, according to information obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act from the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Just like a contagion spreading all over the body, Maoists have also set up an ominous organizational structure in the form of ‘Regional Bureaus’, further subdivided into special zonal and state level jurisdictions for coordinated political and military mobilization in India. This planned expansion displays their systematic move toward establishing more guerrilla bases in the cities for infiltration into urban life.[4] Focusing on highly populated areas, they are following a long-term strategy to win over the industrial working class, trade unions, unorganized labor, employees unions, youth and student bodies, intellectuals and NGOs through ideological propaganda. In other words, the Maoists are looking towards the urban areas to supply them with literate cadres that will constitute their leadership in rural areas; by means of this trained group of terrorists, they seek to mobilize front organizations, as well as the media, social activists and human right activists to subscribe to their cause.
And clearly, it is not only India where the Communist Party of India (Maoists) is seditious. They realize that armed struggle will not bring them the expected outcome, so through an international agenda they attempt to take their movement to the next stage by means of high-level visibility and propaganda, assuming international recognition will bring them global acceptance.
It is obvious that this Maoist terror is a severe threat not only to the people of India. The use of violence and bloodshed, and resorting to all kinds of unlawful methods to sow fear in the public in order to carry out a bloody revolution is the tyranny that is corrupting the entire region. Yet, security force operations, force deployment and augmenting intelligence collection are not the proper methods that will eradicate this Maoist insurgency.
There needs to be an intellectual effort against the ideology of terrorism indoctrinating people with the fallacy of violence and bloodshed. The main error shaping the entire agenda of Maoist terror is the Social Darwinist weapon, the model proposed by the theory of evolution, which regards human beings as a mere species of animal. In fact, this Darwinist worldview – which caused Mao to regard those who opposed communism as animals – is emphasized in the book China and Charles Darwin by James Reeve Pusey, a historian from Harvard University: “Mao Tse-Tung in an angry moment (as late as 1964) swore that ‘all demons shall be annihilated.’ He dehumanized his enemies, partly in traditional hyberbole, partly in Social Darwinian “realism.” Like the Anarchists, he saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction. The people’s enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated as people.”[5]
That is why the Maoists seek to construct a world where humans live and behave like animals. According to this distorted thinking, those in opposition are to be treated like animals and can be ruthlessly persecuted, exploited and eliminated. Those who believe that human society can progress only when these savage policies are implemented regard such slaughter and ruthlessness as a form of progress. Without doubt, that is a most perverted and dangerous way of thinking. Perceiving this danger is of the greatest importance for all those who oppose the Maoist terror in India.
Societal models based on Darwin and Darwinism are models that will inevitably lead to catastrophe. On the other hand, the moral values of love and compassion that God commands to humanity and reveals in the Qur’an will always bring with them peace and well-being.
[1] http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/awi/professuren/intwipol/india.pdf
[2] http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2013/05/29/who-are-indias-maoists-and-why-they-are-in-the-news/
[3] Al Jazeera , “Q&A: The Maoists of India The decades-old insurgency is a major internal threat facing the world's largest democracy”, 24th October 2011
[4] http://www.ipcs.org/pdf_file/issue/RP27-Kujur-Naxal.pdf
[5] James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, p. 455 (emphasis added)
