ML Update

A CPI(ML) Weekly News MagazineVol. 20 | No. 38 | 12-18 Sep 2017

The Martyrdom of Gauri Lankesh Shall Not Be in Vain

Fearless journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh was assassinated in Bengaluru on 5 September evening when she was about to enter her home in Rajarajeshwari Nagar after finishing her engagements for the day. As editor of the widely read Kannada weekly Gauri Lankesh Patrike, Gauri was a powerful voice against communal hate, caste oppression and all kinds of injustice. She was a tireless campaigner for social justice and human rights. On the day she was killed, she had earlier attended an anti-communal convention. Her last editorial was against the phenomenon of fake news and its systematic use by the Sangh brigade to sharpen communal polarisation and prejudice and mislead the public.

The manner in which Gauri Lankesh was killed bears close resemblance to the assassinations of well known rationalists and scholars Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi in the recent past. The investigation in these previous cases has pointed to the involvement of one Sanatan Sanstha, a Goa-based Hindu supremacist group; most of the key suspects are still absconding.

In the case of Gauri Lankesh, even as the news of her assassination stunned the whole country, the Sangh-BJP troll army began an obscene celebration in social media. Even I&B minister Ravishankar Prasad had to face the wrath of these elements for criticising this social media celebration. And now even as the Karnataka unit of the BJP has sent a legal notice to eminent historian and writer Ramchandra Guha for mentioning the possible involvement of the Sangh brigade in this assassination, Karnataka BJP MLA Jeevaraj has said that had Gauri not been vocal against the RSS she would have been alive today!

Gauri was quite alive to this danger. BJP MP from Dharwad, Prahlad Joshi and his personal secretary Umesh Dushi had slapped defamation cases against her in connection with some stories published in her journal in 2008 and in November 2016, she had been convicted by the Judicial Magistrate of Hubbali in north Karnataka. She had challenged this conviction in the higher courts. The BJP had sought to use this case to try and silence her, and even use this example to intimidate journalists across the country. Gauri had carried on undeterred. She knew that the murder of Kalburgi was also a message for her. Speaking to the website Newslaundry in November 2016, she had observed that ‘in Karnataka today, we are living in such times that the Hindutva brigade welcomes the killings (as in the case of Dr M M Kalburgi) and celebrates the deaths (as in the case of Dr U R Ananthamurthy) of those who oppose their ideology, their political party. I was referring to such people because, let me assure you, they are keen to somehow shut me up too.’

Gauri was also involved in a running battle with the forces of bigotry and caste oppression. She would passionately invoke the egalitarian inspiration of Vasavanna and Ambedkar, and boldly resist the Sangh Parivar's design to appropriate these icons and subvert their legacies. Prof. Kancha Illaiah has described Gauri as the modern Akkamahadevi of Karnataka after the renowned 12th century female poet of the Veerashaiva Bhakti movement famous for her Vachana poems. With her multifarious activism and fearless journalism, Gauri Lankesh will go down as a great martyr who has laid down her life for the cause of freedom and democracy, social justice and communal harmony.

While saluting the ever inspiring legacy of Gauri Lankesh, we must see to it that her martyrdom becomes a decisive blow to the fascist design and offensive of the Sangh-BJP establishment which is celebrating her killing. Like communal riots and lynch mob violence, the culture of killing ideological opponents has been integral to the Sangh's history. It is instructive to remember at this juncture how the Sangh's journey had begun in independent India with the assassination of Gandhi. At that juncture the Home Minister of the day, Sardar Patel had held the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha squarely responsible for the creation of the atmosphere in which the ghastly tragedy of Gandhi assassination could take place. Consequently, the RSS was banned.

Seventy years later, the crucial issue once again is to address and transform the environment in which the serial killings are taking place. In a different political climate, the RSS and its affiliates would have been banned, but today with the BJP in power the RSS enjoys utter impunity. The battle to bring the killers of Gauri Lankesh to book and to confront those who have emboldened them is therefore much more difficult today. Despite this, there are encouraging signs that the Indian people are determined to defeat the fascist threat and defend democracy, ranging from the powerful protests across the country in response to Gauri Lankesh’s murder to the recent emphatic verdict delivered by the JNU students against the Modi government's war on JNU and higher education. To consolidate and extend this resistance to fascism is the urgent task now facing all progressive forces in India.

Journalist Gauri Lankesh:
Latest Bold Voice Against Sangh Assassinated

In an assassination that has shocked people all over the country, journalist Gauri Lankesh has been shot dead at her home in Bengaluru by unidentified men on a bike. Gauri Lankesh was a bold and intrepid independent journalist who wrote tirelessly against communal fascists in India. The manner of her death appears to be similar to the assassinations of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi, in which the Abhinav Bharat, a saffron terrorist outfit, had been implicated. The fact that the killers of Dabholkar, Pansare and Kalburgi are yet to be punished is a comment on the impunity which these terrorists enjoy.  

The rise of the BJP and the Modi regime has emboldened the forces of Sanghi terror in the country. They indulge in widespread threats of violence – and assassinations – to silence voices of dissent. Gauri Lankesh was one voice, who in spite of being convicted in a criminal defamation case by a BJP leader, had refused to be intimidated or silenced.    

We demand justice for Gauri Lankesh. The anger against her assassination will only strengthen the determination of democratic forces in India to keep the flame of dissent alive and shining bright.    

Reshuffling Ministers Cannot Hide Government Failures  

BJP’s spin doctors have been trying to push his latest Cabinet reshuffle as an instance of Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Perform or Perish’ mantra. The reality is that the Cabinet reshuffle is Modi’s way of trying to shirk responsibility for his Government’s abject failure to keep his promises even after three years.

The most glaring failure of the Modi Government has been on the employment front: with job growth in 8 key sectors at their lowest level in 8 years. The Skill India program launched in 2015 made tall claims which were found to be a sham by the Government's own committee headed by Sharda Prasad. The committee report found the scheme to be a “hotbed of crony capitalism”, with the private “skill councils” siphoning off public funds while lacking even basic infrastructure to provide training, and making fraudulent claims of enrolment. By dropping Rajiv Pratap Rudy as Skill Development Minister, the Government is trying to protect the PM himself for accountability for the Skill India sham/scam. It is notable that Modi’s admirers try to credit him even with Court verdicts like the Instant Triple Talaq verdict – yet they assign no blame to him for his Government’s failures, even though it is well known that extreme centralization of all power in the PMO is a hallmark of Modi’s governance model.

In the wake of demonetization and GST, the GDP growth rate has slumped to 5.7%, and crores of jobs in the unorganized sector were lost due to demonetization. Who but Narendra Modi himself can bear the burden of blame for these disastrous decisions?    

Another glaring failure is on the agriculture front – with the Modi and Shivraj Governments colluding to shoot dead farmers who were reminding them of Modi’s own promises to increase MSP and waive loans. But the Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan – notorious for blaming farmer’ suicides on love affairs and impotency and for advising protesting farmers to do Yoga – has kept his job. This is probably because the Modi Government is unwilling to concede their failure to address farmers’ distress.

What is the record of the new inductees in the Modi Cabinet? Satyapal Singh, MP from Bagpat, had blamed rapes in Mumbai on “promiscuous culture” and offered moral policing on couples as the solution, when he was the Commissioner of Police in 2013. Satyapal Singh was also a public devotee of the rapist Ram Rahim and notorious for dismissing the Dadri lynching as a “small incident.” A BJP Karnataka MP Anant Kumr Hegde appointed as Minister of State for Skill Development, has qualified for the job with his “skill” in tweeting obnoxious sexist and communal tweets targeting JNU women, as well as Islam, Buddhism and Christianity.  

A section of the media is trying to project Modi’s choice of Nirmala Sitharaman as the first woman Defence Minister after Indira Gandhi as a boost in the arm for India’s women. The fact is that the Modi Cabinet is replete with Ministers who trivialize violence against women. Modi himself publicly praised a rape-accused Dera head in exchange for votes. BJP MPs like Sakshi Maharaj and Subramanian Swamy publicly accuse victims of Asaram and Ram Rahim of being liars. Emboldened by BJP Governments, Sangh outfits all over the country are unleashing organized violence against inter-faith relationships. The Modi Government is offering regressive arguments in Court to defend its refusal to criminalise marital rape. Ms Sitharaman is a JNU alumnus – her party colleagues compete with each other to utter vile sexist slurs against JNU women students and teachers. Ms Sitharaman remained silent on all the violence by her colleagues against women; and she defended Yogi Adityanath’s crackdown on slaughter houses by making the absurd and communal claim that the freedom movement was inspired by cow protectionism. 

The fact the JDU was not accommodated in the Cabinet reshuffle underlines the loss of stature of the party and of Nitish Kumar as a result of his betrayal of the Bihar mandate to make an opportunist alliance with the BJP.

Modi’s Cabinet reshuffle cannot shield him and his Government from the growing sense of disillusionment and anger among people. It is time to hold the Government accountable for its broken promises and its crimes against people. 

NEET Killed Anitha 

The suicide of Anitha, a bright Dalit woman student of Tamil Nadu, has underlined the deeply unjust and biased NEET (National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test) medical entrance test. Anitha had been one of the petitioners from Tamil Nadu in the Supreme Court against NEET. The petitioners had pointed out that while NEET is being introduced in the name of bringing uniformity to the medical entrance test countrywide, the question papers in various Indian languages were more difficult than the ones in English. In other words, not only was there no uniformity, the NEET discriminated against candidates writing in Indian languages.

Students like Anitha – from desperately poor and oppressed households in Tamil Nadu – dreamed of being able to get a chance to study medicine, based on their good performance in school board exams. But the NEET tended to favour those with a CBSE schooling.

Both the Tamil Nadu Government and the Central Government have Anitha’s blood on their hands. The Tamil Nadu Government after posturing against NEET eventually settled for just one year’s exemption from NEET and accepted NEET in principle. It failed to push the Central Government to keep its promise to support the exemption of Tamil Nadu from NEET, in the Supreme Court. The Centre did a U-turn which led to a Supreme Court ruling imposing NEET. Anitha, who had performed extremely well in school exams, did poorly in the NEET exam and, her dream of becoming a doctor shattered, committed suicide.

The Vyapam scam had brought to light the dirty underbelly of medical exam scams in the country. The vicious corruption as well as deep seated bias in medical entrance exams plays havoc with the dreams of India’s younger generation, especially those from the most oppressed and deprived backgrounds.        

Myanmar: Stop Genocide of Rohingya Muslims

India: Stop Deporting Rohingya Refugees, Protect Them From Communal Violence 

The Rohingya people of Myanmar are facing a genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Myanmar Army. The Rohingya (the majority of whom are Muslim) have lived in the Rakhine State (Arakan) in Myanmar for the past several centuries. But a racist Citizenship Law enacted by Myanmar in 1982 denies the Rohingya people citizenship by refusing to recognise the Rohingya as one of the “national races.” The Rohingya have been subjected to several rounds of genocidal violence that have forced them to flee to Bangladesh and India.

As estimated 138,000 Rohingya were internally displaced and forced to live in unofficial camps for displaced people in Myanmar by 2015. Since August 2017, a fresh round of genocidal violence has been unleashed by the Myanmar military – burning the homes of Rohingyas, raping Rohingya women and massacring people. It is estimated that some 90000 Rohingya people have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh due to this violence.

The Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi is complicit in the communal and racial genocide of the Rohingya people. The Myanmar Government is now blocking UN supplies of vital aid in the form of food, water, and medicines to desperate Rohingyas in rural areas of Myanmar. By shamefully denying that the Rohingyas are facing persecution and refusing to consider amending the Citizenship Law that denies the Rohingya citizenship, Suu Kyi’s claim to be an internationally acclaimed human rights defender stands exposed and irrevocably tarnished.   

The Bangladesh government plans to relocate the Rohingya refugees to a flood-prone silt island, Thengar Char, which only surfaced eight years ago and is unsafe and uninhabitable.

Some 40,000 Rohingya people are refugees in India – where they are increasingly being subjected to communal violence and massacre threats. In April 2017, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Jammu threatened to “identify and kill” Rohingya refugees in Jammu unless they were deported. Just days ago, in Faridabad, Rohingya men and women of 40 Rohingya families living in a jhuggi cluster and eking out a living as rag-pickers, were beaten up by a communal gang because they had bought two buffalo calves for the Eid sacrifice.

In this backdrop, the directive by India’s Home Ministry to all states that Rohingyas be identified, rounded up and deported to Myanmar is unconscionable. India’s Minister of State for Home, Kiren Rijiju, has claimed that India’s plan to deport the Rohingyas is justified since India is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Refugees, and therefore India is not bound to recognise the refugee status granted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to the Rohingyas. But the Indian Government must be reminded that India is bound by the principle of non-refoulement which has time and again been upheld by the Supreme Court of India – which means that refugees must not be deported back if they face danger to their lives in their home country. 

India’s own Standard Operating Procedure also allows for India to grant legal status to people escaping religious persecution in other states, and specifically states that such people would be protected from deportation.

Deportation would mean a death sentence for the Rohingya refugees. The Modi Government’s refusal to recognise the Rohingya as refugees fleeing communal persecution, and its insistence instead on profiling them as breeding ground for terrorism, is consistent with its communal politics.

The Modi Government is on the one hand seeking to amend India’s citizenship laws to allow for Indian citizenship to be granted to refugees from amongst religious minorities in neighbouring Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh – i.e non-Muslim minorities. On the other hand, Rohingyas who are Muslims and therefore a persecuted minority in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, are being subjected to communal profiling and threatened with deportation by India. Thus, the Rohingya refugees, evicted by genocidal Buddhist nationalism and racism from Myanmar, are now being doubly victimised and discriminated at the hands of “Hindu Rashtra” politics of the Modi Government.          

We demand that Myanmar amend its citizenship law, recognise the Rohingya people as citizens and end the genocide of Rohingyas without delay. We demand that the Indian Government immediately stop all plans to deport Rohingya refugees, and instead recognise Rohingyas as refugees fleeing communal persecution, and take steps to protect them from communal persecution in India.

AIPWA Protests Haryana Govt's Abject Surrender to Rapist Ram Rahim

The AIPWA organized a protest March in Patna on 26 August 2017 against the abject surrender of the Haryana government in the face of the violence which broke out following the verdict in Panchkula against rapist Ram Rahim. The march started from Buddha Park and culminated in a meeting at the Radio Station Chowk. Slogans raised during the march demanded the resignation of Haryana CM Manoharlal Khattar, ending of protection to rioters, ending of violence in the name of religion, arrest of Sakshi Maharaj, and condemning PM Modi and CM Khattar for their role in encouraging rapist Ram Rahim.

Speakers at the meeting AIPWA General Secretary Com. Meena Tiwari and others said that it is a matter of shame that PM Modi and several other top BJP leaders have bowed down before a person who has been a rape accused since 2003. Modi gave an example of his low thinking when he made this rape-accused an honoured ambassador of the Swachch Bharat Mission. Now that Ram Rahim has been convicted by the court, Sakshi Maharaj is defending him and blaming the court; he is thumbing his nose at the Constitution and says that if Ram Rahim is sentenced the country should be prepared for even greater violence. The ever-tweeting Modi is silent and has no tweets for the courage of the two sadhvis who had the courage to fight the case against this powerful rapist. Clearly the BJP is a protector of rapists and must be held accountable for surrendering to the violence which led to the loss of more than 30 lives and crores of property.

A protest march was taken out in Bhojpur on 26 August before the start of the 6^th AIPWA State Conference.

A protest rally was also called in Bhubaneswar against rape convict, Gurmeet Ram Rahim, and BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj who defended rape convicts and accused like Gurmeet Ram Rahim and Asaram, claiming that since they have a large following, rape complaints against them should be dismissed. The protestors demanded the resignation of Haryana Chief Minister Manoharlal Khattar, whose actions prior to and post judgement clearly exposed the government’s support to the convict. The protest rally was led by Yudhistir Mahapatra, Devaki and Jayanti Bal, Mahendra Parida, Radhakant Sethi and Tirupati Gamango.

Communal Violence against Adivasis in Jharkhand

After the passing of the Jharkhand Freedom of Religion Bill, given a free license by the Raghuvar government, Sanghi forces have started attacking the religious freedom of adivasis. They have started targeting Christian adivasis and sowing divisive seeds among them. On 19 August 2017 a frenzied Gaurakshak gang attacked 10 adivasis in the name of beef-eating in Tengari Tola, Village Barkol, Block Bargarh, District Garhwa. The adivasis were beaten all night and one of them, Ramesh Minj, died the next day on 23 August. Despite there being a police picket in the village, no effort was made to save the injured Ramesh Minj.

A protest march was held immediately after the incident on 20 August and sent a team was sent by CPI(ML) on 23 August after Ramesh Minj’s death to find out the facts. The facts revealed the suspicious role of the Police Picket in-charge Arvind Prasad Yadav. The police gave all the injured fitness certificates after the beatings, whereas Ramesh died within 24 hours; this proves that the injured were definitely not given proper medical treatment.

Apart from the above incident there have been two more such incidents in Jharkhand—the attack on CPI(ML) and women workers’ leader Alma Khalkho on 22 August in Mandar (Ranchi district) and the brutal beating of an adivasi family in village Meral on 24 August. Both attacks were on the false pretext of beef-eating.

The CPI(ML) Garhwa district committee led a huge protest march against the above incidents which culminated in a meeting at the Deputy Commissioner’s office. Pressure was put on the Deputy Commissioner to agree to the demands submitted to him in a memorandum: arrest the culprits; compensation and employment for the victims; end the current atmosphere of hatred and communal violence. The warning was given through the protest meeting that if the demands are not fulfilled the administration would have to face even bigger people’s protests.

Protest marches, meetings and effigy burnings against the above incidents were also organized at Dhanbad, Ranchi, Ramgarh, Ara-Sadubera Collieries area, Gumla, Lohardagga on 24 and 25 August. In Mohanpur Thana protests were held on the above issues and also for the arrest of the killers of 10^th Std student Rohit Kumar three months ago.

The protests across Jharkhand raised voices for the immediate arrest of the attackers and killers, an end to the communal violence and hate-mongering and guarantee of social safety and security in the State.