THE Union Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee has observed that there was nothing objectionable in the Railway Minister, Ms Mamata Banerjee’s statement suggesting that the killing of the top Maoist leader Azad was "not correct".
Mr Mukherjee is a politician with great experience in dealing with important issues that the country has faced over a long period. He is among the seniormost colleagues of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh and the Congress president, Ms Sonia Gandhi. Ms Banerjee’s statement criticising Azad’s killing in an alleged encounter had caused quite a temper in the Congress circles both in West Bengal and in Delhi, some of them even commenting that she was violating the coalition dharma!
There is hardly any doubt that Ms Mamata Banerjee is wooing Maoists in order to broaden her electoral support in preparation to the elections to the West Bengal Assembly in 2011. The Maoists have built up bases in many rural parts of West Bengal where they can influence from a few hundreds to a few thousands of votes. A similar thing happened in Bihar when Mr Lalu Prasad was rising in politics. The illusion of the "empowerment of the underprivileged" that he was able to create attracted many sympathisers of the Marxist-Leninist groups, as Maoists were known then, toward him, influencing the vote aggregation in his favour. Ms Mamata Banerjee is hoping to make similar gains. She has been able to present herself as a strong, combative leader of the underprivileged. Her role in preventing acquisition of land in certain parts of West Bengal by big industrial houses has given her that kind of image.
Much like Mr Lalu, she knows how to connect to the masses, and she has built her persona very consciously as a fighter in a land that the Marxists supported by their left allies have kept in their fist for more than a quarter of a century. The Marxists originally got power by fighting the goondas of Congress; so we can say that there is something in the tradition of Bengal to respect fighters. In the 1960s and 1970s it was the Congress that was the detestable villain whom the Marxists fought; today it is the Marxists whom the Trinamool Congress is fighting. The Marxists have even otherwise ruled for too long to deserve a new term. And they have not given Bengalis any great things to write home about.
People are swinging away from the Marxists and no one more than Ms Mamata Banerjee is thrilled at seeing the possibility of her dream of occupying the chief minister’s office being fulfilled. Yet there are areas in the leftwing space that might not fall into her bag unless she makes some extra thrust. Her recent public rally in Lalgarh in which Maoists participated and where she talked of Maoists being victims of smear campaign and misconceived notions was one of the series of endeavours made by her to claim the radical left space. Both Maoists and Trinamool Congress share discontentment with the performance and attitudes of the Left Front.
Without doubt, Ms Mamata Banerjee’s wooing of the Maoists is a part of her electoral strategy. It has nothing to do with any fundamental solution to the problems raised by Maoists. But what is possible out of this marriage of convenience is that doors might be opened for a dialogue with the Maoists. And we need a dialogue most importantly if we are going to see the end of the cycle of violence in the Maoist-controlled areas that involves cruelty on the part of the radicals and savagery on the part of the state forces.
Let us never forget that the Maoists draw their strength from the support of the tribal masses. And the tribal masses have deep anger against their systematic dispossession and displacement in the name of development. When we condemn the Maoist violence we must not forget that the tribal masses have tried peaceful and non-violent resistance to their exploitation before and not succeeded. They took to arms because they found that this was the only way they could ward off state and private invaders into their homelands where they had lived for centuries. The armed tribals who we today know as Maoists are human beings who have taken to arms in desperation. If the state draws up a unique development roadmap for the tribal regions, Maoism would fade away.
