The JNUSU elections, which took place over the weekend, were allegedly marred with electoral malpractices and violence to benefit communist student unions. According to sources, the ABVP’s election agents were kept waiting on false pretexts at the entrance, and were later informed that the counting had already begun. After this, they were not allowed to enter and observe the counting process on the pretext that they were late. Naturally, they protested, and they were beaten up by communist students outside.
At the same time, communist students in another part of the country had gone rogue as well, but this went unnoticed by the national media. In Pondicherry University, over 400 of them had gone on an indefinite strike, protesting against the lack of amenities, the alleged clampdown on the freedom of expression, and the alleged saffronization of the institution. The students are currently holding the university to ransom, as the NAAC (National Assessment Accreditation Council) is visiting the institution to re-evaluate its grade. If the university is degraded, it will lose out on funding, exchange programs and placements. However, the communists seem unconcerned about their own future and those of the students.
In 2011, India’s biggest Communist citadel, West Bengal, was finally breached. And just last year, the other smaller citadel, Tripura, was also breached. The communists’ political foothold across the country is shrinking fast. However, their sway in campus politics still looms large. Quite clearly, rendering them insignificant in universities is proving to be much tougher than breaching West Bengal or Tripura. What the country witnessed over the weekend are not one-off incidents, and this goes to show that their stranglehold on universities is unhealthy and will prove to be costly.
The Communists have played a sinister game to retain this hegemony in campuses across the country. They have positioned themselves as champions of equality, which makes them an idealistic choice for gullible young men and women who are yet to encounter the real world. The fact that equality is merely a façade, and that they are only ‘useful idiots’ to advance a nefarious agenda, is lost on the gullible completely.
Perhaps some day we will have a government that calls out this bloodthirsty and treacherous cult for what it is, and cracks down so hard on their thinking and functioning that it is forgotten for a long long time. But until that golden, politically-incorrect era comes about, steps must be taken to ensure that generation after generation stops wasting its prime years living in poisonous delusion, and that instead, they are spent productively. Awareness about what communism really is, and the baggage that it carries along with its superficial sermons of equality, needs to be brought about much before the individual is confronted with making a political choice at the college level.
There are three aspects of awareness which desperately need to be mainstreamed. The first is communism’s tryst with independent India. People are hardly aware of the fact that the communists rejected India’s independence to begin with. This was followed by their demands of breaking the country into several smaller countries, a demand that stemmed from the belief that India was an artificial entity wherein the different regions had nothing in common, rejecting millenniums of shared thinking and culture of the subcontinent. During India’s war with China in 1962, lo and behold, they supported the Chinese! During the emergency under Indira Gandhi, surprise surprise, they backed her steadfastly! And to this date, when the government officially refuses to engage with Kashmiri separatists, the likes of Sitaram Yechury are the first ones to knock on the doors of those Pakistan agents, god knows on whose behalf.
The second aspect which people are hardly aware of because they do not encounter it on a day to day basis, are some of the more extreme forms that this cult has taken in India. This is something that students need to be particularly aware of and wary of, since campuses can serve as breeding grounds for these extreme forms. Despite the government’s best efforts to wipe them out, there are some pockets in India which are a law unto themselves. Acres of poppy fields ensure a thriving narcotics business. An extortion racket takes a steady commission from business tycoons who mine natural resources, as well the poor tribal who makes less than fifty rupees a day. Police informers often have their limbs cut off and are thrown into a pit where they are left to die. Sometimes, just to teach communities a lesson, infants are thrown into fires or crushed with rocks. When young students in urban India, thinking that they are fighting for the right to dissent proudly proclaim that they are urban Naxals, are they even aware that this is what they are essentially supporting?
The third aspect is Communist ground realities. The best example is Venezuela. A country that not too long ago was talking about how everyone would have everything, is now asking its citizens to eat rabbits so that they don’t die of hunger. Millions have died of hunger in communist countries throughout history. And tens of millions have been cold-bloodedly murdered for dissent. One doesn’t even have to look to Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, rivers of blood flowed under our very own Jyoti Basu. And the excuse they give you each time- it wasn’t done right this time. When will they realize that their asinine idea doesn’t work? When they have murdered the entire earth’s population?
People cringe when they hear Hitler’s name, or that of the Nazis. The fact that their actions crossed a line and should never be repeated are embedded in the world’s collective consciousness, and rightly so. Unfortunately, this monster which is far more violent and treacherous continues to be a legitimate political option in most countries of the world. In India, we must come together and do our bit to ensure that the young see through this cult, and sidestep it effectively.