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Mushrooming Terror Groups, Private Armies Mock Indian State
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Ranvir Sena massacre at Jehanabad, Bihar state
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By
IOL South Asia Correspondent
NEW
DELHI, August 30 (IslamOnline) - The arrest of Brahmeshwar Nath Singh,
chief of Ranbir Sena (Brave Warriors Army) in Patna Thursday, August
29, has brought into focus the mushrooming of private armies of
lawless individuals and groups all over India.
Singh
is accused of murderingf 200 peasants in the northern state of Bihar
over the last seven years. Most of the people Singh’s “army”
murdered were poor, low-caste Dalits (the so-called
"untouchables") involved in disputes over agricultural lands
with prosperous high-caste farmers.
Despite
an officially proclaimed manhunt and sizeable amount of award money
(from Indian standards) on his head, he kept on moving around freely
through towns and villages of Bihar, including the capital Patna,
where he was finally nabbed while speaking to a press conference. Half
a million rupees were promised for his arrest, but nobody dared inform
on him.
The
reason why most people avoided informing on him was that the police
themselves might betray them and inform Singh of them. The fact that
men like Singh survive is because sections of the police, civic
administration and the political class are hand-in-glove with the
mafiosi.
At
the time of his arrest Singh said his imprisonment would not affect
his movement against low-caste tillers of land who demand ownership of
the lands they work. The arrest, observers feel, came because Singh
had fallen out with the political class presently ruling Bihar.
The
vestiges of a feudal order, lack of land reforms and grinding poverty
in rural areas of a sizeable part of the country has created
resentment among the poor and dispossessed, who in turn have been won
over by Marxist demagogues. The result is a bewildering array of
violent Marxist outfits that have spread from the southern state of
Andhra through the central states of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh
to eastern states of Orissa and West Bengal, to the northern states of
Bihar and Jharkhand. The most prominent of these Marxist outfits is
People's War Group which is popularly known as the Naxalites.
It
is to counter these violent groups with greater violence that the
landlords of Bihar created Ranbir Sena. This particular group of
counter-revolutionaries has been active in the eastern state of Bihar
only.
Areas
which don’t have Marxist militants have other kinds of militancy
like ethnic militancy in North-Eastern states and ethno-Islamic
militancy in Kashmir. Similarly originating Sikh militancy in Punjab
has been crushed by superior Central forces over the years.
Much
of the militancy is the product of centuries of exploitation and
injustice by India’s elite class. Over the last few years the new
menace of Hindu majoritarian tyranny emerged as a major threat to
India’s long history of religious tolerance and cohesion. This
terror is behind the pogrom of Gujarat earlier this year which left
hundreds of Muslim women raped and hacked, 2000 Muslims dead, their
homes burnt or demolished, their mosques destroyed, and a hundred
thousand forced into refugee camps.
The
majoritarian menace represented by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
and its political offshoot Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) heads the
ruling coalition at Center constitute the greatest threat to the
country’s integrity. Of late, the RSS and its affiliates have openly
been giving arms training to their cadres.
As
education spreads and more people from traditionally suppressed
classes are aware of their situation and their rights, resentment and
frustration grows. That is an ideal situation for Marxist radicalism
to grow, which explains Marxist violence in large areas in India
spreading deep into neighboring Nepal.
This
situation also breeds counter-violence. Delayed (and sometimes
aborted) justice further fuels “revolutionary” violence. Most of
the time, the justice-dispensing system fails to deliver because the
courts are overburdened and the sluggish justice dispensing system
does not function well. This leaves the underprivileged with the
impression that resort to violence is the only way out.
Violence
in India has become endemic and systemic. Most of the time the police
themselves are involved in violence against the undefended as was
evident in Gujarat. Extra-judicial killings by the police in what is
called "encounters" is a common practice here. The arrest of
one Singh is not enough to stem the rising tide of societal violence.
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