Declared and and undeclared war against the people

In the aftermath of the Dantewada attack, there is a war hysteria being created by the combine of the political class, corporate media, and the security analysts. There is a talk of using the air power and even the army to tackle the “menace of Naxalism”. Anyone who tries to link the great historical injustices against the Adivasis as the root cause to the violent manifestation on the surface and the role played by the State in this sorry state of affairs is being branded as the Naxalite sympathizer. The fact of the matter is that one does not need to be a Naxalite sympathizer to see that the ruling classes of India have blood in their hands and the white shirt and lungi of the Home Minister carries the blood stains of not only the slain security personnel but also of the innocent Adivasis. By the time this war gets over and the Naxalites are “exterminated”, which would take 2-3 years according to the Home Minister, the white shirt and lungi would be immersed with the blood of countless people. One wonders who would be the beneficiary of this war.
Much dramatic and sensational this declared war may appear, the real battle lines, however, are not there in the forest of Dandkarnya. There is an undeclared war which has been waged by the ruling classes against the people, the manifestation of which can be seen in the factories and farms of India where the people’s land and rights are being taken away forcefully. The real battle lines can be seen between the tiny minority of the beneficiaries of the “spectacular economic growth” and overwhelming majority of the victims of it who ironically are the key contributors of this growth. The fault line lies between the growing number of billionaires and millionaires and the burgeoning millions of poor unorganized laborers and famers. The divide lies between the glittering shopping malls and posh apartments and the dark and filthy slums being inhabited by the workers who actually build these malls and apartments with their back breaking labor of 12-14 hours a day. One does not need to be a Naxalite sympathizer to see the paradox of the Capitalist development in terms of the coexistence of the Super specialty hospitals and pathetic primary health care centres; the paradox between the world class educational institutions and widespread illiteracy; the paradox of the growing number of weight loss centers and the largest number of malnutrition people in the world.
There are many well intentioned reformists who naively advocate that the solution to the problem lies in pressurizing the government to adopt certain welfare measures for the people. But they fail to see that numerous welfare measures have been taken after independence but the problems are actually aggravated. It only indicates that the problem is structural and systemic wherein the economic system is profit centered and not people centered which inevitably creates poverty and inequality. The alternative is to work for the foundation of an economic system which is people centered and governed by people and not by profit seeking corporates. But such an alternative requires a mass based comprehensive and creative revolutionary movement. Certainly it would be a long tortuous haul, but there is hardly any other short cut alternative available to the people. The so called Maoists and Naxalites want to bring revolution in a hurry through the barrel of the gun and not with the revolutionary energy of the masses, but their adventures actually betray the cause of the revolution because it gives the State the justification to militarise itself. So any genuine revolutionary mass movement must not only struggle against the ruling classes but also oppose the short cut, carbon copy approach of all such adventurism which is a clear cut deviation from Marxism, Leninism and Maoism.