India’s Backwards Needs A Better Avatar
(Maoists, Gandhi and Hollywood’s Avatar)
Vishal Mangalwadi

Mother India
You are not in Hollywood’s Pandora . . . where James Cameron’s “Avatar” incarnated as a Na’vi to save the tribals from greed-driven brutal capitalists. You are in Mahatma Gandhi’s land of non-violence, where snakes and monkeys are gods and trees and women are goddesses, and yet where paramilitary forces can slice off a 25-year-old-woman’s breasts before butchering her and her elderly parents and chopping off three fingers from her 2-year-old toddler’s. Why?

Because, her parents were Maoist informers.
If so, why not present the case against them before a court?
Aren’t we a democracy, ruled by law?
Of course! We are the world’s largest democracy,
but who fights a war with democratic niceties?
What? . . . Is India at war?

Why else would anyone blast a bus carrying 12 Special Officers 20-feet up in the air with sophisticated explosives? Does that sound like a law-and-order problem to you? Don’t you know that enemy nations have already trained and equipped a standing army of 10,000 insurgents into becoming brutal beasts? At least one more lakh (100,000) trained rebels are living as “normal” people. Justice is for humans, not animals. The bus had twice as many civilians as paramilitary officers. Had these heartless terrorists allowed civilians to get off the bus before blowing it up, we could have considered treating them with civilized justice. The Prime Minister knows what he is talking about when he says that these Hindus-turned-Maoists are a much greater internal security threat to our nation than the few Muslims-turned-Jihadists.

Wait a minute! Why were these Special Officers going to war in a bus filled with civilians? Do our forces lack vehicles? And is our intelligence so incompetent that no one warned them of a possible ambush? Did they forget that just weeks earlier an army of a thousand guerrillas had almost eliminated a whole unit of Special Forces in that very same district?

“Our intelligence is as competent as any in the world,” one can virtually hear Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, arguing before his colleagues in the Congress Party’s Working Committee. “We expected the ambush: that’s precisely why we sent them in plain clothes in a public bus, rather than in Special Forces’ vehicle. That would have drawn attention. We have learnt our lesson; that’s why these brave officers were trying to save their lives [using civilians as human shields]. We wouldn’t have lost these lives if you had listened to me in the first place. I sought your permission to send them in an Air Force helicopter, but you wouldn’t approve. First you tie up my hands; then you blame our intelligence as incompetent!

“Make no mistake! Everyone knows that our forces can finish off these bloody brutes in days. But the nation is wondering whether our Party has what it takes to meet our enemies’ challenge, protect innocent civilians, and harness our nation’s natural resources. Meanwhile, the BJP strikes a chord in our national pride when it argues that India can become a super-power but the Congress Party lacks the political will to make India the world’s greatest economy. A ragtag band of ruthless rebels is holding up our development but we are so concerned about human rights that we would not even acknowledge that we are at war. Why keep a standing army if we can’t use it to defend our national interests from these foreign trained militants?

“How long will we hide our heads in the sand? The world already knows that these backward bahujans are being used by our enemies to wage a war against India’s economic future. Our Industrial houses are anxious to pour billions of dollars to build mega projects that would generate electricity, make steel, mine coal, bauxite and what not. China is beating us at almost every turn because it has given up Maoism in favour of capitalism. And yet, we are allowing its outdated Maoism to frustrate those willing to invest in our development.

“State governments have signed any number of Memorandums of Understandings with world-renowned industrialists. [And remember the donations we took from them to capture power!] We are honour-bound to deliver under-utilized lands to these builders of India’s future. Let’s face it; investment dollars aren’t going to wait forever. Available capital is finite and it will go where governments are strong enough and progressive enough to support development. If we fail to honour our promises, industrialists will back a party that has the guts to support progress. Besides, our universities are churning out some of the world’s best trained graduates. This young talent isn’t going to wait either. Our graduates will grab the first opportunity to use their training. They will build other nations, while we drain our best brains. The maximum damage these Marxist avatars will do is to the tribals themselves: if they don’t get them killed, they will condemn them to perpetual backwardness.”

The Gandhi Avatar
The Home Minister (Chidambaram) perhaps looks to the Prime Minister (Manmohan Singh) to see whether he would reiterate his conviction that the saviors of our poor tribals are our country’s greatest internal security threat or if he would be bullied into inaction by the anti-development Outlook of Leftist avatars? Needless to say, the Prime Minister’s eyes can only turn to (the President of the Congress Party) Mrs. Sonia Gandhi . . . as would everyone else’s.

Mrs. Gandhi may turn to Rahul to see if he still thinks that his future is tied to his mothers’. As a wise son, Rahul is likely to strengthen her voice before she speaks: “Look! If my mother’s name was Indira Gandhi, I would be Sanjay. I would then spearhead this battle, not Chidambaram. But Mummy didn’t choose the kursi she has. She is aware of her obligations to the industrial houses, but she also knows that ultimately she owes her position not to them but to Destiny. Our nation’s destiny is tied to her, and her destiny forces her to ask: What would Mahatma Gandhi do?

“We know that the Mahatma would go on a fast unto death against our government’s brutality as much as against Maoist violence. Tribal ‘Gandhis-with-guns’ have no regard for the Mahatma’s legacy but we have to [at least pay lip-service].

“The problem that the Mahatma doesn’t solve is how to persuade backward bahujans to give up their lands for developing mega industries. In fact the Mahatma’s answer is embarrassing: He would fast in Birla Mansion, teaching our industrialists Tatas and Ambanis to spin their own khadi clothes, milk their own goats and forget industrialization. He would have condemned us to the stone-age but for my great grand-father [Pandit Nehru] whose foresight saved our country from the Mahatma’s idealistic non-sense. Thanks to Panditji, now even (anti-materialistic) Vedanta wants to borrow [financial and intellectual] capital from the Church of England to chase the maya of mega-industries. Our swadeshi party is backing modern capitalist Vedanta.

“Mummy’s Inconvenient Truth is that Hollywood’s filthy-rich Green avatars are bullying us to follow the Mahatma: instead of using our coal to generate power, they want us to sit naked on our mountains of coals in pristine jungles, eat wild berries, and learn how to worship trees from their 3-D movies, usingtheir solar batteries and wind mills.

“The silver lining is that Marxists have delivered our tribals from the opium of Hollywood’s hypocritical spirituality. Our poor do want development. But they want it for their children, not for the super rich. So the question is how to ensure that our national development will benefit the backwards and not send them to live in slums.”

“The answer,” Mrs. Gandhi spoke up, “is obvious: What we lack is cultural will, not political will.”

The originality of her phrase made the Committee curious; so she continued, “It’s time we come to terms with what our reformers such as Jotiba Phule were trying to tell us 150 years ago. As a part of our Five Year Plans we built schools in these backward areas. But our attempts have failed. Last year all the teachers fled from their posts in one of these Maoist occupied territories. Parents didn’t even ask them to stay because what these well-paid public teachers taught did not equip their children to benefit from our mega projects. Those teachers are still drawing salaries, but they live in their homes and tutor the children of our netas and bureaucrats.

“What do you think is happening to the village children? In one case, the Maoists invited Christian missionaries from South Indian to give English education to these children. The missionaries asked the District Collector. With the Chief Minister’s consent they are now using empty government schools to teach younger children, while the Maoists sometimes use the same government buildings to train older kids to fight against the state.”

“Why don’t we send Hindu Saraswati Shishu Mandirs to run these schools?” A CWC member inquired.

“It’s time,” Digvijay Singh (the former Chief Minister of MP) may muster up the courage to say, “that our nation comes to terms with some more inconvenient truths. By now the tribals in the Red Corridor could have become like the Tribals of Mizoram, taking care of their own development and offering exemplary service to the nation in all walks of life. We’ve lost fifty-years and made this mess because we allowed militant Hindus to use the Niyogi Commission to drive out Western missionaries who were educating the bahujans at great personal sacrifice. Hoping to woo Hindu voters, even our Congress governments encouraged Hindu missionaries to move into the vacuum and convert tribals to Hinduism. It hasn’t helped, it cannot help because no Brahmin priest, however good his intentions, can turn an untouchable Shudra or a tribal Adivasi into a Brahmin. The best that the tribal converts to Hinduism have done is to team up with greedy political netas and corrupt bureaucrats to start militant Salwa Judum which [funded by the state and the capitalists] began this vicious cycle of ugly violence that has grown into this bloody war. In most cases, the tribals trust Maoists more than they trust Hindu missionaries. There is no doubt that historians will say that the explosive that blew up that bus was not foreign but swadeshi [nationalistic]: it was made by fusing Hinduism with Capitalism. The caste system that has oppressed the Bahujan for millennia is being reinforced by democratic capitalism. This mixture is proving to be deadly. It has turned our beautiful cities such as Mumbai into slums thatSlumdog Milionnaire showed to the whole world. Hindu-Capitalism is at the root of this war.”

No one had expected this (imaginary) Congress Working Committee session to go this way. So, once again they turned to the Prime Minister for direction. Who knows that in the confidentiality of such a meeting he may have the courage to surprise everyone. “Let me be frank,” he should admit, “the Chief Minister did not allow South Indian Christian missionaries to use state schools without consulting me. I consented because the Bahujan are beginning to agree with the nineteenth century low-caste reformer Mahatma Phule that at this moment Jesus Christ seems to be the only avatar available to save our backward people from this horrible war between Hindu, Maoist, Leftist and Capitalist saviours.”