[Reader-list] The Naxalites overreached

[anupam chakravartty]

Memories of inferno still remain fresh
NEWSLINK Monday, March 05, 2007
Bureau report

Aizawl, March 5th, 1966: Today marks the 41st anniversary of the
historic Aizawl bombardment, which had turned the once-beautiful hill
town Aizawl into ashes, a few days after the declaration of the
"Mizoram independence" by the Laldenga-led Mizo National Front.

While Mizoram now has emerged as one of the most peaceful states and
marching ahead as one of the most developing states of India, memories
of the inferno still remain with those who survived the trial by fire.

"In the afternoon of March 4 1966, a flock of jet fighters hovered
over Aizawl and dropped bombs leaving a number of houses in flames.
The next day, a more excessive bombing took place for several hours
which left most houses in Dawrpui and Chhingaveng area in ashes,"
recollected 62-year-old Rothangpuia in Aizawl.

According to some records, Hunter and Toofani fighters were deployed
for the Aizawl bombardment, which became the first and only aerial
attack India has carried out against its own people. The fighters came
from Tezpur, an IAF air base in Assam. Apart from Aizawl, Tualbung and
Hnahlan villages in northeast Mizoram were bombarded. Surprisingly,
there were no human casualties officially reported in any of the air
raids.

"In the first wave of attack the planes used machine guns and later on
used bombs. The attack came in three waves, on the second day the
attack lasted for about five hours," MLA Andrew Lalherliana recounted.

According to Joe Lalhmingliana, a retired wing commander of Indian Air
Force, Tezpur Air Force base - which presently hangars MIG 21
Operational Flying Training Unit (MOFTU) - was the base for the
Mizoram aerial attack of March 1966.

"The Indian Air Force deployed Hunter and Toofani jet fighters to
carry out the mission; it was the first time India used its air force
to quell a movement of any kind among its citizens. Goa was a
different story, it was a move to drive away the Portuguese," the
former airman said.

Till today there has been no satisfactory answer as to why India used
such excessive air force against its own citizens in order to suppress
an insurgency. Surprisingly, the Mizo National Front was outlawed only
later in 1968.

In the aftermath of the Aizawl air raids, two MLAs of Assam, Stanley
DD Nichols Roy and Hoover H Hynniewta, came to Mizoram (then Mizo
district under Assam) to see with their own eyes what happened to the
people of the Mizo District and were totally shocked by what they saw.
Later in April, Nichols Roy moved a motion in the Assam House on the
Aizawl air attack.

"The use of excessive air force for taking Aijal (the former name of
Aizawl) was excessive because you can not pinpoint from the air who is
loyal and who is not loyal, who is an MNF and who is somebody pledging
allegiance to the Mizo Union, the ruling party in the Mizo district,"
Roy was quoted as speaking to the Assam chief minister by Mizo
historian JV Hluna in his book 'Debates on Mizo Problems on
Insurgencies, with special reference to the contributions of Stanley
DD Nichols Roy, MLA and Hoover H Hynniewta, MLA.'

JV Hluna noted that a hot debate over the Mizo issue continued in the
House. Nichol Roy even referred to a statement made by Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi published in the Hindusthan Standard on March 9, 1966
where the PM, answering a foreign correspondent, insisted that the air
force was "deployed to drop men and supplies."

"Nichols Roy stated that whether the shells of bombs, which had been
dropped in Aijal, be sent to Delhi to ask the Prime Minister, 'How do
you cook this ration? If these are supplies, please tell us how you
cook these things'?", JV Hluna said in his book.

Strongly condemning the use of air force, the other MLA Hynniewta
produced photographs of one unexploded bomb and some fragments of
exploded bombs as proof of the Aizawl air attack, which was strongly
denied by the Government of India.

"We touched it, we measured it and we took photograph of it. We have
fragments of the bombs. We have the testimony of hundreds of people
who have heard the explosions the moment the planes flew over in Mizo
Hills," Hynniewta addressed the chief minister. "If you want to
suppress the MNF rebellion, ordinary bullets are sufficient. From any
point of view, military, physical or economic, these weapons should
never have been used," the MLA told the House.

"Given that the only sources of information regarding the insurgency
in Mizoram for the outside world were the words of the Assam chief
minister, the Assam chief secretary and the Prime Minister (who on the
other hand denied the air attack), the contributions of the two MLAs
were very notable," JV Hluna said.

Since the MNF rebels had already taken Army installations in Champhai,
Lunglei and Saitual in the initial stage of the rebellion and Aizawl
in danger of being overpowered, the Indian Government might have been
too nervous to have second thoughts about an aerial attack on its own
territory.

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 4:19 PM, anupam chakravartty <c.anupam at gmail.com> wrote:
> the blog says killing of indians by naxal...who is an indian and who
> is a naxal?
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 4:17 PM, Pawan Durani <pawan.durani at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indus-calling/entry/naxalites-in-delhi
>>
>> Seventy-six jawans who were on duty to fight the antinational and
>> barbaric Communist terrorists were killed in an ambush and the home
>> ministry says "there was an element of failure".
>>
>> This is not the time for a blame game. I wrote before too, "Support
>> Chidambaram's war", though the home minister dithered in between and
>> gave wrong signals to the Naxalites, hoping that they would listen to
>> him and his badly produced ads. In a way, the Indian polity helps
>> fissiparous tendencies. It's mired in taking revenge on Amitabh
>> Bachchan and making a tamasha of a nikah, which is strictly a matter
>> between two interested persons. Such a polity can issue carbon copies
>> of the previous statements of sham condemnation but can't instil
>> confidence in the citizens and the security forces. Ask Raman Singh,
>> the brave face CM of Chhattisgarh, who has been struggling hard to
>> tackle the Naxalite menace amid a volley of  attacks by Dilliwala
>> Naxalites, who accused him of being harsh on the barbarians, and
>> almost killed his Salwa Judum through false allegations.
>>
>> So far the government hasn't spoken about taking the war on the
>> Communist terrorists to its logical end. Neither has it announced a
>> free hand to the security persons to find, flush out and annihilate
>> the cowardly terrorists who have become a bigger threat to the nation
>> than the Pakistan-supported jihadis. It should be doing that
>> immediately. Home secretary Gopal Pillay has rightly questioned "not
>> only the CPI (Maoist) but also those who speak on their behalf and
>> chastise the government' as to what was the motive behind the attack
>> and what is the message the CPI (Maoist) intends to convey". The
>> "jholawala" supporters of the Naxalites should also be booked for
>> instigating murders and sedition.
>>
>> They are all Communists. They swear by Mao, Lenin and Stalin. Their
>> loyalties are extraterritorial. Their sources of inspiration - all of
>> them have smeared their hands in the blood of innocent people - from
>> Lenin, Stalin and Mao to Pol Pot. And they have thrived so far in
>> spite of having killed more than 6,000 Indian citizens and security
>> personnel because there is a powerful lobby in Delhi which portrays
>> them as revolutionaries and puts pressure on the government not to
>> take any stern action. When a publishing house like Penguin chooses to
>> publish a book of so-called poems of a jail inmate, a known supporter
>> and the voice of the mass-killer Naxalites, Varavara Rao, what can be
>> expected of the morale of those who are supposed to take on the
>> barbarians to protect the Constitution? There is a socially
>> desensitized section of the neo-rich enveloped in Anglo-Saxon
>> traditions that has taken upon the "responsibility" to romanticize the
>> butchers and win dollar awards.
>>
>> They are the writers, filmmakers and poster boys of the glitterati
>> that find it fashionable to safeguard Maoists and have them as an
>> acceptable phenomenon in a society that's described as (a positioning
>> to justify the murders) 'ridden with corruption, administrative
>> lethargy, rich class insensitive towards the poor and the
>> downtrodden', etc. So the logic is, if there would be so much of
>> political and administrative injustice to a large number of poor, they
>> would, rise in revolt. Yeah, sounds good. Doesn't it? Poor revolting
>> against the rich, burning their bungalows and establishing a just,
>> fair and Communist reign of the proletariat!
>>
>> Like they did in Moscow and saw the disintegration of the Soviet
>> Union? Like they did in Cambodia and saw the mass murder of 25% of the
>> population? Like they did in China and saw millions killed and
>> ultimately a Communist regime giving way to the market forces? There
>> is not a single place on this earth, including the haven of the Red
>> revolutionaries West Bengal where they have been able to establish a
>> small corner that portrays the model success of their revolution. Bad
>> roads, dillapidated schools, no industrialization, poverty-struck
>> labour class and the fattened Commissars. That's the end result of
>> their struggle. Naxals too become rogue armies, blackmailing gullible
>> villagers and their kids to join their ranks, destroy schools, public
>> health dispensaries and roads. They are, in the words of Chidambaram,
>> just criminals.
>>
>> This must make Indian citizens to sit up and ask the media and the
>> government some inconvenient questions. Did the Sania-Shoaib
>> controversy really merit front page when the nation's foreign minister
>> was in Beijing negotiating the country's most sensitive issues? Did
>> Penguin do the right thing by publishing the so-called poems of a
>> barbaric supporter of the mass murderers, giving him and the book a
>> halo of revolutionary spirit, thus according the criminals a social
>> sanction. Those who mock at the patriotic people and heroes like
>> Savarkar, decorate gun runners who kill citizens with a sadistic
>> pleasure? That lady, Arundhati they say is her name, with a penchant
>> for laughing at the beheading of security personnel like Francis and
>> eulogising in her inimitable de-Indianised style the savagery of the
>> Naxals must be charged with sedition and supporting mass annihilators.
>>
>> Who were those seventy-six killed by the Naxal? And who felt happiness
>> seeing their dead bodies? Who were the bereaved families and who were
>> negotiating electoral alliances and secret pacts with the killers? The
>> rebels or the antinational insurgent groups called Naxal, Maoist and
>> Red revolutionaries have been working in 220 districts in 20 states
>> and the government has established a special cell to monitor and
>> resist them. They created a Red Corridor from Tirupati to
>> Pashupatinath. Help from China to Nepalese Maoists to them has been
>> suspected by Indian intelligence agencies. They are working against
>> India and it's a war, in real sense. Still the rebels prove weightier
>> than the patriotic jawans, who had nothing in their mind except to
>> protect the citizens and the Indian constitution? Why? So far this is
>> a skeleton of some official statistics describing killings of Indians
>> by Naxals:
>>
>> 1996: 156 deaths
>> 1997: 428 deaths
>> 1998: 270 deaths
>> 1999: 363 deaths
>> 2000: 50 deaths
>> 2001: 100+ deaths
>> 2002: 140 deaths
>> 2003: 451 deaths
>> 2004: 500+ deaths
>> 2005: 700+ deaths
>> 2006: 750 deaths
>> 2007: 650 deaths
>> 2008: 794 deaths
>> 2009: 1,134 deaths
>>
>> Why the sacred forces of the state die like cattle unsung and often
>> insulted like it happened in the case of Inspector Mohan Lal Sharma
>> and pilgrimages are organized to the homes of the terrorists in
>> Azamgarh but none to the homes of the patriotic soldiers? Why it helps
>> to be a terrorist in Delhi to remain safe and have civil rights
>> committees to organise interviews in magazines and channels and its
>> often embarrassingly deadly to be soldier, with none coming to hear
>> their woes and interview the mother of the martyred?
>>
>> It is this Naxalism that needs to be crushed. They don't remove
>> poverty through guns. They use poor to help their luxuries.
>>
>