An attack by Maoist terrorists in communist-ruled Kerala has sent shockwaves through the state. A gun-wielding gang of four Maoists raided a luxury resort on Kozhikode-Bengaluru national highway in Lakkidi, Wayanad district on Wednesday night.
An encounter with police ensued in which one Maoist, CP Jaleel, was killed and two cops and one other Maoist was injured, reports Manorama Online.
Two Maoists managed to escape in the shootout which ended on Thursday morning. CP Jaleel’s elder brother and ‘human rights activist’ C P Rasheed alleged that the police team targeted and killed his brother in a ‘fake’ encounter. The staff and guests of the resort are said to be safe.
Manorama Online adds that Maoist presence has been reported recently at Sugandhagiri & Petukunnu in Wayanad district, and Thamarassery, Kodancheri & Thiruvambadi in Kozhikode district of the state. According to police, the Lakkidi attack is a ‘protest’ against the setting up of a new police outpost in Sugandhagiri.
Why Maoism in a ‘liberated’ communist-ruled state like Kerala?
Kerala & West Bengal are two states in Bharat that have embraced communism like no other. But just as Communism has failed to bring either social justice or decent living standard in any country of the world where this socio-political ideology was tried, so has it failed in improving the lives of ordinary Keralites or Bengalis.
And as is the trait of all such exclusivist dogmas which proclaim their belief system as the only valid one, they usually splinter into sects, each deadly opposed to the other, united only in common hate for the total non-believer. So too has Communism devolved into Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism and other variants.
After the 1967 Naxalbari ‘uprising’ in West Bengal by Communist Party of India (Marxist) i.e. CPM cadre, the party split into two – ‘hardliners’ in favour of a violent revolution and armed over-throw of the state, versus ‘moderates’ who aimed to bring about the same revolution through Constitutional means.
The ‘moderates’ of CPM adopted the parliamentary route in order establish a ‘dictatorship’ of the proletariat and their thinking was best articulated by Kerala’s first CM and leading CPM ideologue EMS Namboodirip when he said –
“The communists’ project in participating in India’s parliamentary institutions was to wreck the constitution from within“!
The CPM ‘hardliners’ went to China later in 1967 to meet Mao Zedong and started identifying themselves as Maoists. Since then, these Maoists terrorists, colloquially also known as Naxals, have been waging a war to overthrow the Indian State through armed struggle.
So it is no surprise that even the Communist utopia of Kerala, which prides itself on being more ‘liberated’ than the ‘cow-worshipping’ West & North of the country, today finds itself battling its ideological cousin, the Maoist/Naxal communists. And this spurt in Maoist activity in Kerala comes at a time when the rest of the country has seen a significant reduction in Maoist terror – number of districts afflicted by left-wing terrorist violence fell to to 58 in 2017 from 75 districts just 2 years back.
In the end, practitioners of these ideologies driven by exclusivist supremacism turn upon themselves in a race to prove which one is ‘purer’ than the other.
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