WOW, this snake must have got into the hooch or is smoking some really potent stuff these days!!!
No wonder that the then NAC member Harsh Mander is very quiet on the urban naxal debate these days. Usually, he is right up there spewing his bile and usually doing his nut on freedom and whatnot.
Shekhar Gupta Verified account @ShekharGupta
Remember, it was the Congress that messed up India’s fight against armed Naxals
One part of UPA was killing the “snake” but the other was feeding them at the same time...
Read in full, if you have the time.
Remember, it was the Congress that messed up India’s fight against Naxals
SHEKHAR GUPTA 3 September, 2018
For nine years now, the UPA and its various elements, ranging from the prime minister to those considered close to Sonia and speaking for her, from the home ministers (I use the plural because even the three who ran that ministry, Shivraj Patil, Chidambaram and Shinde, spoke in different voices, with the first being a pure root-causes man) to NAC members spoke at cross-purposes. One set called them a grave threat, a bunch of bandits and so on, while the other romanticised them as merely misguided, well-meaning people fighting for the tribal victims of “extractive” industries.
For a full nine years, the leadership of the Congress bought this unquestioningly. It allowed, even welcomed, the embedding of the Maoist middle ground and sympathisers within its establishment, notably the NAC and the Planning Commission. Remember that one of those eight Maoists released in exchange for the abducted Malkangiri collector Vineel Krishna was A. Padma, wife of top Maoist Akkiraju Haragopal alias Ramakrishna. And she managed Aman Vedika, an orphanage run by activist and then NAC member Harsh Mander.
Many of us sympathised with Dr Binayak Sen for being charged and convicted under the obviously archaic sedition law. He is also a very likeable, soft-spoken, sincere paediatrician. But must you appoint him in a key Planning Commission committee (steering committee on health, drafting their 12th Five Year Plan)?
Gentle, children’s doctor, yes. But he is a convicted Maoist sympathiser. Bringing him inside the tent like this, what message are you sending out to the security forces, to the police and intelligence agencies and people of India? Or, to twist the knife, and twist a popular Hindi heartland slogan as well, sainiko tum sangharsh karo, hamein pata nahin hum kiske saath hain (fight on soldiers, just that we are not sure whose side we are on). And finally, what message are you sending out to the Maoists? They only let you know last week how they read your confused minds, by wiping out the entire leadership of your party in Chhattisgarh, including the veteran Vidya Charan Shukla.
This is not the first government to be confused while dealing with an internal security challenge. The one comparable example is V.P. Singh sending Jagmohan as governor to throttle the then incipient Kashmiri insurgency and, at the same time, designating George Fernandes as the Kashmir affairs minister to apply the healing touch. The two worked at cross-purposes, clashed and confused everybody, from the armed forces to the people of Kashmir, even the separatists. The price of that schizophrenic approach, we are all still paying. The UPA’s nine years have given us a bit of this. It was reassuring earlier this week to see the rural development minister speak out on TV channels, finally using the correct and fitting description for the Maoists. But the same minister was saying smugly until the other day that Maoism only prospered in states not governed by the Congress.