Afrazul Shaikh's Murder in Rajsamand Shows the Dire Need of Resistance
Friday, December 15, 2017
What bolsters the courage of the Hindutva terror mongers like Shambhulal Raigir of Rajsamand, Rajasthan, who hacked and then burned to death a Bengali migrant labourer Afrazul Shaikh because of the latter's religious identity? What made Shambhulal Raigir believe that he can get away with the murder of a human being by accusing the victim as a “love jihadist”? Who gave Shambhulal Raigir and millions of his ilk in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana and West Bengal the right to kill and maim Muslim men, rape Muslim women and burn their unborn embryo? What helps them to kill with impunity the people from the marginalised Muslims, Christians, Dalits and Tribal people?The answer is - it's the inherent communal bigotry of the state machinery and the ruling classes, which aims at dividing the people along communal lines. It's this bigotry promoted by the entire system that bolsters the courage of murderous thugs like Shambhulal Raigir and others, like the notorious cow vigilante, to kill Muslims, Christians, Dalits and Tribals with impunity.
When the Babri Masjid was demolished, or long before that, when thousands of Muslims of Nellie in Assam, were massacred in one night, when the policemen rounded up numerous Muslim men in Hashimpora and massacred them, when the communal pogrom incited by the RSS killed hundreds of Muslims in Bhagalpur, the state machinery, then under the command of the so-called “secular” parties, didn't prosecute and punish the culprits. The state embraced the culprits, provided them immunity and gave them the thrust to rise high on the ladder of political success by hailing those killers and their masterminds as the true “nationalist” and “Hindu saviours” of the country.
The politics of hatred always existed in India, the murderous thugs like Shambhulal Raigir grew up amidst them and they are continuously nurtured to spread the volley of hatred and bigotry all over the country. These murderous thugs have been ruling the country ever since the British colonial rulers passed on the baton to them, to manage the erstwhile direct colony as a neo-colony of multiple imperialist powers. They have worn several jackets of different shades while ruling, exploiting and duping the people of India and their motive has remained the same - divide the people to plunder the country and its resources.
The politics of hatred always existed in India, the murderous thugs like Shambhulal Raigir grew up amidst them and they are continuously nurtured to spread the volley of hatred and bigotry all over the country. These murderous thugs have been ruling the country ever since the British colonial rulers passed on the baton to them, to manage the erstwhile direct colony as a neo-colony of multiple imperialist powers. They have worn several jackets of different shades while ruling, exploiting and duping the people of India and their motive has remained the same - divide the people to plunder the country and its resources.
Narendra Modi is just another, very rudimentary and unpolished mask worn by the predator system that calls itself free, just and democratic to dupe people, or shall we say, dupe the urban middle-class and elites, who are continuously getting divorced from the socio-economic reality and are living in a self-built paradise, webbed with lies and preconceived notions. The ruling classes and their state and government didn't become communal and bigot overnight, this has been the phenomenon since time immemorial.
The Congress and the host of other secular parties never prosecuted Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi or Uma Bharti for the crimes committed by them; Congress, the party of Rahul Gandhi, which now positions itself as a champion of secularism and liberal values, arranged a full-fledged state funeral for Bal Thackeray, the mastermind of Muslim massacre during the 1992 Mumbai pogrom. It was the Congress that never acted against Narendra Modi, Amit Shah or Yogi Adityanath when the party was in power in New Delhi for a decade. The Congress didn't oppose the beef ban, it never supported the agonised minority community members or the ostracised Dalits and Tribals against the atrocities and oppression of the upper-caste ruling classes and their Hindutva bootlickers.
The Congress and the host of other secular parties never prosecuted Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi or Uma Bharti for the crimes committed by them; Congress, the party of Rahul Gandhi, which now positions itself as a champion of secularism and liberal values, arranged a full-fledged state funeral for Bal Thackeray, the mastermind of Muslim massacre during the 1992 Mumbai pogrom. It was the Congress that never acted against Narendra Modi, Amit Shah or Yogi Adityanath when the party was in power in New Delhi for a decade. The Congress didn't oppose the beef ban, it never supported the agonised minority community members or the ostracised Dalits and Tribals against the atrocities and oppression of the upper-caste ruling classes and their Hindutva bootlickers.
It will not be wise to single-out the Congress, but if we see in the Indian parliamentary political space, we will find that most of the political parties, of all hues and shades, have played as the pawns of the Hindutva hatred-monger ruling classes, the comprador and crony capitalists, the big feudal landlords and the giant foreign corporations and banks that form an unholy alliance to oppress, exploit and plunder India, its resources and labour.
While the Samajwadi Party allowed a ghastly communal pogrom to happen right under its nose in Muzaffarnagar, within a year of winning a clear majority in the state assembly election. After rearing and nurturing the communal riot-mongers during its reign in Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati, the self-styled Dalit icon, repeatedly befooled the Dalit community of the largest state of India by joining hands with the Hindutva fascists in order to form her government and to expand her political power-base in Uttar Pradesh and beyond.
Laloo Prasad Yadav once won the secular fame by arresting L.K. Advani and stopping his Ram Mandir cavalcade in Bihar. He and his party, the RJD, milked that secular credential for years to seize and consolidate power in the state and strengthen the fiefdom of the criminal-feudal rule, which saw the goriest atrocities committed on the Dalits by the upper-caste feudal armies like the Ranveer Sena and Sunlight Sena in the massacres of Jehanabad, Laxmanpur Bathe, etc. The communal polarisation never neutralised under the rule of the RJD and Laloo Prasad kept the division between the Hindus and the Muslims widened in Bihar to gain political mileage in elections.
The Dravidian parties, especially the once-upon-a-time anti-North Indian DMK, the MDMK, etc., make tall claims about their secular ethos, however, all forces of Dravidian parliamentary politics either join their hands with the Congress or the BJP, under covert or overt arrangements, to usurp power in New Delhi. The communal bigotry in the Dravidian society intensified ever since the Ramaswamy Periyar-led anti-communist Dravidian movement started in the Southern parts of India as a strong antidote to North Indian Brahminical Hindutva. The movement of Periyar neither rid Dravidian society of the caste system, nor it ended the communal division caused by bigotry inherent in the system. The Muslims, Dalits and Tribals happen to be the most oppressed and exploited communities in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, where the state governments collectively spend millions of rupees from the state exchequer to celebrate Hindu rites or rituals.
If we look at the Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee ruling West Bengal now, which projects itself as a dedicated secular party, we will find a dark history of the party and its supremo, who was in an alliance with the BJP, even when Modi was overseeing the infamous anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002, and she helped the RSS and its cadres to entrench deep into the rural heartland of West Bengal and unpack vitriol against the Muslims to rake up severe communal hatred and tension since the late 1990s. The saffron camp succeeded in making an unprecedented headway in West Bengal under Mamata Banerjee's rule, utilising the scopes of communal polarisation provided by Mamata Banerjee. The free reign of the TMC and its patronage allowed the communal riot mongers like Tapan Ghosh of the Hindu Samhati to thrive and prosper at the cost of the agony of Bengali people.
The “self-righteous” parliamentary left bloc leaves no opportunity to criticise the Modi government, but it sweeps beneath the carpet its own connivance with the BJP during the V.P. Singh rule, which led to the beginning of the Rath Yatra of L.K. Advani, which passed with state patronage in the Left Front-ruled West Bengal. The CPI(M) used to rule West Bengal at that very period when the comprador capitalist Todis got Rizwanur Rahman, a computer teacher, murdered with the help of the state machinery and the ruling party because the victim dared to marry their girl, Priyanka Todi. One of the classic cases of “love jihad” and then, in 2007, the CPI(M) shamelessly defended the Todis, who generously donated to the party's “revolutionary” fund. Nearly 10 years later, ironically, the CPI(M)-ruled Kerala is entangled in a strange case of “love jihad” where one Hindu girl, Akhila Ashokan, who converted to Islam to become Hadiya, is now tormented by the state machinery, the judiciary and the Hindutva forces in tandem with each other.
So which party, out of a rainbow on offer here, can dare to free India and its people from the evil of communalism, bigotry and caste system? Which political outfit can annihilate the system that breeds killers and terrorists like Shambhulal Raigir? Which political party can promise the people about swift justice by prosecuting and punishing all culprits of communal and caste violence of the past and leave no stone unturned to protect people from any such untoward incident in the future? Moreover, which party can dare to declare that it will ban the terror-monger organisations like the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and other such outfits that spread hatred and terror throughout the country? Which political party can promise that they will, on coming to power, lift the ban on beef throughout the nation? Which party can promise that they will allow the people of Kashmir their right to live their lives with full dignity and independence, sans the fear of military atrocities? Which party can promise - justice, equality and freedom - to the people of Manipur? Which party can promise and then really stop the state's large-scale war, waged on behalf of big mining corporations, against the Tribal people in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha?
Most of the readers, who are well acquainted with the basics of Indian politics and the nitty-gritty of the secular credentials of all political parties know that these political forces, somehow and some way, supports the Hindutva fascist endeavour of the Sangh Parivar and the BJP. They fulfil the very conditions that help the big foreign monopoly and finance capital-owned corporations, the big comprador capitalists and the feudal landlords of the country to consolidate their rule and to subjugate the people by dividing them along communal identity. The unconditional servility towards the corporate-feudal nexus, shown by all parliamentary political parties in India, is an evidence that these parties, even if all of them are provided with the opportunity to rule, will not be able to resolve the principal issues of economic disparity, poverty, unemployment, communalism and socio-economic discrimination that are collectively eating up the nation as a moth.
Then what can be done to transform India into a democratic, egalitarian and secular nation where the people will be treated with equality, respect and their cause will be prioritised by the government of the day?
Honestly, the present system doesn't allow any such possibility within its ambit even in the near future. The present system and its weapons and tools are programmed to act against the interest of the people on behalf of the big comprador and crony capitalists, feudal landlords and their big foreign corporate masters. If the hope and aspiration of the people are rested upon the government's and the system's goodwill, then the people will be forced to suffer under the jackboots of those who intend to plunder and loot India and its resources.
The system will keep deceiving the people into believing its fabricated tales, while people like Shambhulal Raigir will keep hacking hapless Muslims like Afrazul Shaikh, Narendra Modi and Mohan Bhagwat will keep telling the world how peace-loving the fascist RSS and its progeny are, however, the poor Muslims like Pehlu Khan or Junaid will be lynched in public by the Hindutva fascists who claim they represent the interest of the overwhelming majority of Hindus in India.
The system will keep deceiving the people into believing its fabricated tales, while people like Shambhulal Raigir will keep hacking hapless Muslims like Afrazul Shaikh, Narendra Modi and Mohan Bhagwat will keep telling the world how peace-loving the fascist RSS and its progeny are, however, the poor Muslims like Pehlu Khan or Junaid will be lynched in public by the Hindutva fascists who claim they represent the interest of the overwhelming majority of Hindus in India.
Rather than crying like the liberal democrats, who would like to blame the Modi regime and spread pessimism without showing an alternative and sustainable plan for the people to defeat the Hindutva fascist empire, the forces that support democracy and progress must build up active resistance struggle against the fascist forces. The numerous struggles of the working class, the peasantry and different sections of the society against the fascist rule of Narendra Modi and his Hindutva camp must be threaded together to form a massive garland of dissent and the initiation must come from everyone who represents the cause of democracy, secularism and socialism.
The parliamentary parties will betray such an important and fundamental struggle for democracy to show loyalty towards their masters and gain brownie points, hence, the onus of building this massive resistance struggle falls on the political forces that are outside the parliamentary arena and aims to bring a total transformation in the country. It's upon those political forces that wants to build up a mass movement without succumbing to parliamentary opportunism and those who will not paint a rosy picture about the system that serves the ruling classes among the people.
To delay in building up the anti-fascist struggle will mean more Afrazul Shaikhs getting killed for no reason but their religious identity by Hindutva terror mongers like Shambhulal Raigir. The delay in building up a massive, nationwide workers and peasants' struggle against the Hindutva campaign by uniting the broad masses of workers and peasants who are rendered penniless and thrown to the abyss of absolute pauperisation by the Modi regime will mean that the forces that are hailing Shambhulal Raigir and his ilk as “valiant Hindus”, get more oxygen to breed bigotry and violence in the country.
The need to build up the anti-fascist struggle on the basis of a nationwide united front against the fascist forces represented by the RSS-BJP and other Hindutva outfits is a dire one and the patriotic forces must stop rallying behind the parliamentary opposition and unite under a common banner together, with the sole agenda of defeating the Modi-led Hindutva camp and establishing a democratic, progressive and patriotic rule in India, which will build an egalitarian, secular and socialist society to allow people of all communities, castes and ethnic nationalities to live and prosper together, without the fear of lynchings or without breathing the toxic air of hatred and bigotry.
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