It has been one of the criticisms of the Left Front government in West Bengal that at one point during the Nandigram episode the state stood aside while two groups of the farming community engaged in armed violence.
That this did happen for a week or so is true enough, the defensive shamefacedness of the West Bengal government notwithstanding.
What is, however, deeply disingenuous is the fact that the raucous hullabaloo about that lapse should have been and continues to be raised by political forces that have demonstrably instituted a civil war among tribal communities in the BJP-led state of Chattisgarh. All true to the British-colonial pattern of killing two birds with one stone; namely, getting Indians to fight among themselves while creaming off the fruits of their labour.
For more than a year now the government in Chattisgarh, supported, it must be said, by some local Congress stalwarts, has quarantined some fifty thousand tribals in make-shift camps away from their homes, provided them arms of primitive make, and obliged them to fight the naxalites—all against their will.
These marginalized unfortunates are thus used as human shields behind whom the state hides both its impotence and its unwillingness to redress the circumstances which make naxalism possible and which oppress the tribal communities seamlessly.
It is instructive to recall that the great successes of the right-wing hindu majoritarians in the state of Gujarat owed to similar protracted indoctrination: there the disenfranchised mill workers and deforested adivasis were told that their misery owed not to the exploitation engendered by class-rule but to the muslims who were usurping all their opportunities of employment and trade.
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