The brutal massacre of Chhattisgarh Congress leaders and near fatal wounding of 82-year-old party veteran Vidya Charan Shukla, a former central minister, shocked the nation to its core. Yet, we are still to see the same people, who sought to raise hell when the preacher of violent revolt against the Indian state, Dr Binayak Sen, was detained by the state government, uttering even a word of sympathy for those killed last week or the many Indian security men massacred earlier in different incidents by the same Maoists. The Supreme Court which decreed that sympathy and call for violent overthrow of the state by itself did not constitute crime, must chew over its observation in Dr Sen’s case. Marx may not have called for such massacres as have occurred under communist regimes in Russia and China — massacres that have now been acknowledged even in official communist party histories. But the ends-justify-means politics that these “progressives” preach inevitably end up in the most inhuman and widespread killings. “Liberty, freedom and fraternity” shouted the Jacobins and others who ushered in the French Revolution and set up the guillotine in Paris to celebrate the daily processions of the hundreds of the condemned who were marched for being beheaded. You commend and condone killing for the cause and then killing blooms into massacre and massacre itself becomes the goal. The refusal of the self-proclaimed “left liberals” to draw this lesson from the history of French, Russian, Chinese and other revolutions is how these “innocents” promote mayhem. When the Maoists brutally killed Mahendra Karma, the Congress leader who conceived and implemented the idea of arming the villagers to resist Maoist impositions on them, in this incident at Darbha, they danced around his body, the reports from the Bastar village say. What difference there is between the bloodthirsty Maoists and a columnist who next day writes in the daily Mint calling him a “wolf who preyed on the tribals of southern Chhattisgarh, many of them from his own tribe”? Lest he be dubbed insensitive, this columnist who has praised Maoism and found justification for it in his book, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, says that he “abhors violence” including the violence perpetrated by Maoists at Darbha but projects the so-called “misdeeds” of Karma to cover up the barbarism of the Naxalite killers. Communists and their crypto-followers invariably end up covering up the millions whom diehard Marxists like Stalin and Mao Zedong crushed under the wheels of the state in the name of the Marxist revolution. The killing fields in Cambodia are surely a million times more inexcusable compared to the alleged daily burden and “ill-treatment” of tribals and others under both feudalist past and exploitative present. The Indian state where governments are elected by the people owes its power to the periodic exercise of the vote by the millions. Even conceding several failures of the governments, the large gap between their promises and performances, no one can deny that the Indian state under democracy has succeeded in reducing the areas of exploitation, and improving living conditions. Karma may have done many things wrong but it was he who awakened the tribal villages to defend themselves from Maoist impositions — like using women and children as shields when the state pursues Naxalite leaders. The institution of special officers from among the people armed to protect the villagers from Naxalite diktats for the first time gave Bastar tribals a means of asserting their right to seek a democratic path out of their poverty and exploitative systems. True, the Supreme Court found it illegal to arm the special forces from the villagers without sanction of specific law for this sake and ordered disbandment of the Salwa Judum that Karma initiated. That legal view, however, overlooked the fact that it was the government that armed them and that such popular forces were accountable to the government that in turn was accountable to the people who elected it. It is the confusion at the top that has resulted in a situation where India is repeatedly bled, either at the hands of Maoists or Islamic radicals. On May 14, 2010, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi wrote a letter to Congressmen in which she said “extreme neglect” of tribal areas has triggered the Maoist movement, and thus provided an ideological justification that proclaims that power flows from the barrel of a gun. No wonder, the super cabinet she constituted, called NAC, included faces with sympathies for those who believe in bleeding the civil society to death. Only the other day the daylight murder of a policeman on duty in London provoked the British prime minister to cut short his foreign visit and return to chair a cabinet meeting and send security alerts across Britain with many European countries joining in. The murder was justified by a cleric in Lebanon who had been thrown out of Britain for his Islamist extremism. The comparison is intended to underline that there cannot be an iota of compromise with such extremism. If they want to survive as civil societies ensuring freedom of choice, democracies have to take a very tough stance on all types of terrorism. Maoism or Naxalism is also in the category of terrorism in the name of Marx and Mao, while the other is terrorism in the name of religion. In both ideologies there is no freedom of choice and all individualities are suppressed. Both oppose democracy. While one is institutionalising autocracy in the name of dictatorship of the proletariat, the other yearns for return of the age-old caliphate. Both have no place for multi-party elections. Both place barbaric killings on an ideological pedestal. No wonder in the last three years many instances of collaboration between Islamist terror and Naxalite groups have been reported. While the former get ideological and financial support mainly from ISI in Pakistan, the latter are inspired and funded by China. Both nations abhor India’s pluralistic and democratic traditions. And both have their intellectual promoters in India, a Gilani here, a Dr Sen there. Both have also their apologists, people who raise human rights when terrorist gangs are busted by police or when Naxalite activists are cornered by security forces. And both have managed to infiltrate the Indian establishment from top to bottom. Given this background, what chance does India stand in its fight against the forces of evil?