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.

Union home minister P. Chidambaram might be a better and dynamic captain of the ship at the North Block compared to his dour and uninspiring predecessors, but I am sure even he would agree that the back-to-back strikes — bomb blast in Pune and the Maoist destruction of a security force camp in West Bengal’s Paschim Mednipur district, have some connection. It would do the country much good if he views these issues as connected — planned together as part of a larger conspiracy to destroy India.