Wanted: A Holistic Approach

The accident that took place at a major Metro construction site in the Capital in the wee hours of July 12 with the collapse of a pillar killing six people was indeed horrific. But that it was followed by the toppling of three cranes and a launching girder at the same construction site on July 13 injuring several persons even before the debris from the first incident could be removed has only aggravated public fears on the maintenance of safety norms during such construction work.

In the process the credibility of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) itself has taken a severe beating. This is not to suggest that DMRC Managing Director E. Sreedharan’s offer to resign from the post, owning moral responsibility for the July 12 mishap, that has been rejected by the Delhi Government, should be accepted forthwith. Far from it. As has been mentioned in sections of the media, the Delhi Metro is in need of Sreedharan today far more than ever. But at the same time it is necessary for the DMRC to ensure that safety norms are adhered to by not merely the big contractors but also the smaller subcontractors even when there is a real pressure to meet the Commonwealth Games’ deadline. Under no circumstance should incidents of the kind witnessed at Laxmi Nagar last October and Zamrudpur now be allowed to recur. This is where both the DMRC and those running the Delhi Government have a pivotal role to play.

Meanwhile the CPM Central Committee’s decision to stand by the scam-tainted Kerala party Secretary Pinarayi Vijayan and demote the State CM, V.S. Achuthanandan, a man of impeccable and exceptional integrity and probity, by throwing him out of the party’s Polit-Bureau in the name of ”party discipline” only goes to prove how much the present GS in charge of the central party apparatus, Prakash Karat, has been aping that arch-priest of Left sectarianism, B.T. Ranadive. One must, however, hasten to make one qualification: whereas after the disastrous experiment with “Left-wing infantilism” in 1948-50, the entire party leadership with BTR at the head and including such stalwarts as Bhowani Sen, Dr G. Adhikari, Somnath Lahiri, Arun Bose was made to resign, this time around Karat and Co have not even tendered a formal apology to the party cadres and Left masses for the CPM’s worst showing at the hustings since 1964. (This holds true of the CPI leadership as well with A.B. Bardhan too refusing to step down from the party General Secretaryship after the party’s electoral debacle across the country—if he had done so he would have set an example before the entire Indian polity.) Actually Karat has paid back his debt of gratitude to Vijayan, the accused in the corruption case involving the Canadian power company SNC Lavalin, for having stood by him like a rock when the demand for the party GS to resign was rising in intensity both inside the CPM and outside. By this “unholy understanding” among themselves the two have further isolated the CPM from the Kerala public even as the State party leadership’s alienation from the people in West Bengal continues to grow with each passing day. Bereft of any idea of the Indian reality especially in the context of democratic functioning Karat and Co are all set to take the Left downhill in the days ahead unless common sense of the Surjeet-Jyoti Basu brand prevails among at least a section of the party leadership and the latter is able to assert over the wooden-headed “radicals” in the near future. (The same applies to the CPI as well although there is in that party a remote possibility of S. Sudhakar Reddy and D. Raja breaking clear of the CPM’s tight embrace and abandoning Karat’s suicidal path and thus saving the entire Left from oblivion and extinction in due course.)

The latest Maoist attack in Chhattisgarh on July 12 in which 36 policemen, including an SP, were killed in the State CM’s own Assembly constituency, Rajnandgaon, barely 70 km away from the State capital Raipur, only goes to show that the CPI-Maoist may be banned but it has not lost its clout, base and influence in the most backward tribal areas of the country covering Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa in particular. Interestingly The Statesman has editorially observed:

There is little doubt that the counter-mobilisation (by the Maoists) was meticulously planned. The ban and the branding of Left radicals as terrorists have certainly steeled their resolve. The latest blitz exposes the State’s failure to curb the phenomenon. Such dangerous strategies as clamping sympathisers inside jail (as in the same of Binayak Sen—S.C.) and mobilising teenagers against the Maoists have been trashed. Chhattisgarh needs to rework its formulations.

Incidentally this view—that is, only military operations to exterminate the Maoists will not help resolve the Maoist problem (a point repeatedly highlighted in this columns)—is now gaining ground within Parliament too with Opposition members not belonging to either the BJP or the Left voicing this opinion quite vigorously of late. Even the Union Home Minister has been forced explain that his objective is not to decimate the Maoists (although one wonders how far ‘decimation’ of Maoists is different from ‘flushing them out’ of the entire tribal belt as P. Chidambaran has been advocating).

The question is: Is the government at all interested in unveiling the process of political negotiations with the Maoists without any precondition (as it has been doing with North-East insurgents like the NSCN-IM in Nagaland and as was suggested last year in the report of the Expert Group set up by the Planning Commission to explore the causes of discontent, unrest and extremism in large tracts of the country)? Unfortunately it is yet to shed the old colonial mentality of regarding the Maoist upsurge as just a law-and-order problem without going into the basic socio-economic reasons behind the rise of Maoism among tribals. It is all the more regrettable and indeed tragic that today’s Left establishments too are subscribing to this view completely rejecting their own past and absolutely unconcerned about the possibility of the state-sponsored military operations sparking a mass tribal revolt reminiscent of the Santhal rebellion of 1856-58.

Mounting complexities on the national plane demand effective intervention by genuine democrats who have the bounden duty to mould public opinion along a positive course by discarding every form of narrow and sectarian attitude and outlook. A holistic approach is the need of the hour.

July 15 S.C.