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Haunted By History

By Mukul Dube

26 May, 2010
Countercurrents.org

In this benighted present, with a bleak future stretching ahead, pieces of our history have come back to haunt us. There are differences, of course, but there are samenesses also.

“Naxalism” was described as a threat in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Areas, tracts of land, were called “Naxalite infested”, just like areas that harboured malaria or pets who harboured fleas – and “Naxalites”, whose battle was political, were lumped together with common criminals both in the realm of ideology and in the prisons of reality. All this is true today also, but the “Maoists” have been elevated from a “law and order problem” to an enemy within who must be tackled militarily. We may well call it a civil war: although this time those who fight for the rights of slaves are wrong-doers without honour and respectability.

We must look back not just to our own history but also to the history of our current godfather, the U.S.A., which is also the Holy Land to be blindly imitated. The witch-hunt launched by Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s is echoed by our own P. Chidambaram when he has his home ministry issue a statement – or warning or declaration of intent – saying that those who speak up for the Maoists, or who express sympathy with them, will invite action under the Unlawful Activites (Prevention) Act, a singularly obscene threat in a country which calls itself a democracy.


Mrs. Gandhi Senior's Emergency too has come back to haunt us. That was a time when not only was all dissent gagged, facts were actively suppressed too, a time when a country which declared itself to be a “socialist republic” – whatever that may have meant – was home to a totalitarian repression supported by what some of us described as Soviet social imperialism. Is it not only a matter of time before the press and other media are prevented by the Unlawful Activities Act from reporting affairs in the country fully and honestly?


That most anachronistic aberration of our times, the destructive freak show that is Hindutva, is left free to spread it tentacles and its poison while the Congress Party forgets all about its election promises and its government rains hell upon those traditionally exploited peoples who dare to protest against the plunder of their resources by a greedy and blood-thirsty capitalism which makes no distinction between the Congress and the BJP of India and Vedanta Resources of London and POSCO of South Korea.
But who cares, nowadays, for history? In every field, the leaders can only fly into the future at speed, eyes firmly closed. The past lies dead: while profits, with their come-hither reek, lie ahead. To hell with history and to hell with justice and humanity. All that matters is profit.

[To appear in Mainstream weekly]