At a time when allegations that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is behind the murder of TP Chandrasekharan in Kerala is going the rounds, one would have imagined that the party members would tone down their violent rhetoric for some time. But the party surprised one and all as its members kept on going with their calls for violence. If MM Mani was boasting how the party had killed many of its enemies in the past, many other leaders of the party from seniors like Ilamaram Karim, MV Jayarajan, P Jayarajan to juniors like M Swaraj and Shamseer have continued with their tirade against the police and the media whom they consider their rivals. On the hartal day, which was called for as a protest on the arrest of P Jayarajan, the party workers went on the rampage and destroyed public property in the state and attacked commuters at will. However if one carefully examines the different Communist movements in the world one should not be surprised on the violent rhetoric of the party members as one can find that violence is in the DNA of Communism.
Marxian ideology, based on which present day communism (political system) works, is basically an economic and socio-political ideology, which is humane in its spirit. Karl Marx believed in the ultimate creation of a proletarian state where the proletariat or the working class has control of all political power. Political practitioners of this ideology, like Lenin, Stalin, Mao and others, believed that this political power can be acquired only by violent struggle, which they call revolution. As Vladimir Lenin once said, "the supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without violent revolution." In this violent struggle, or revolution, the communists eliminated their political opponents resulting in mass killings which can only be called genocide in all the countries where communism emerged. These mass killings were at its worst in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, in People’s Republic of China under Mao Tse-tung and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union can be termed as a period of Red Terror, where as many as three million people were ruthlessly executed and murdered, according to official records made available to the outside world after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This include people who were executed for political offenses, deaths in Gulag, the government administered forced labour camp and deaths during the forced resettlement. The Great Purge, Stalin’s execution of various people in his effort to solidify his position as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, involved execution by a gunshot to the back of the head, torture by beatings while in ‘investigative custody’ and overwork and starvation in the Gulag camp. Joseph Stalin, who many communists, including those in India, consider to be a great leader, is no one but a mass murderer, who can compete with Adolf Hitler in his brutality and terror.
After the communist revolution when Mao Tse-tung seized power in People’s Republic of China, his policies and political purges resulted in the death of millions of people. After studying the experiences of the Soviet Revolution, Mao came to believe that violence is necessary to achieve what he believed would be an ‘ideal society’. So he planned and executed violence on a grand scale and killed counterrevolutionaries, political opponents and those whom he considered disloyal to him and his ideas. He believed that for agrarian reforms to become a reality one-tenth of the peasants would have to be destroyed. Deng Xiaoping, considered as the architect of China’s transformation into a market economy and its present day prosperity, was purged twice by Mao during the Cultural Revolution as their political ideologies were at odds. Mao gave his Red Guards all rights and power to abuse and execute the revolution’s ‘enemies’.
A detailed account of
mass killings under communist regimes in different countries of the world can be found out in Wikipedia, which forms the basis of the above mentioned facts. These killings by the communists have been so widespread, extensive and rampant that it could well form a subject of study in itself.
History of communist regimes and communist parties all over the world is riddled with such instances of violence, mass killings, torture and executions. Marxism is an absolutist ideology and the communism that it wants to achieve ultimately is all about attaining absolute power and this absolute power can only be attained by silencing critics and maiming all who stand against the ideology. Therefore communism without violence is non-existent and if communism has to prosper it needs to be violent. Communism is also about secrecy and hardly can an outsider be able to see through and understand what is happening inside the party and if this secrecy is lost, again the communist party will perish. A practical example of the same factor was seen in Soviet Union, where as a result of Gorbachev’s crusade to introduce Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) the party collapsed and as a result the Soviet Union disintegrated into small countries. The openness and transparency that Gorbachev wanted to bring inside the party was antithetic to the secretive style of the party and hence it was not able to withstand it and thus collapsed. One can also notice that communist parties have always failed to come to power in countries where there is a healthy functioning of democracy. They have always excelled in places where there is a predominantly one party rule; see examples in China, North Korea and Cuba, where the party has been in power for very many years. In these countries, democratic dissent is often crushed, protests trampled and those who oppose the party are always put behind the bars or executed. In communist regimes there is hardly any personal freedom and citizens’ liberty is always under threat, if at all it is present. These countries are nothing but totalitarian states, where every aspects of public and private life are regulated and controlled by the regimes and citizens are forced to live as the regimes would tell them to live.
One of the gravest crises that the communist parties in India face is the inability to conceal their violent natural disposition and to present a facade of peaceful nature in front of the public. In a country like India, which has a proud history of non-violent struggle to attain freedom under the guidance and leadership of none other than Mahatma Gandhi, it is impossible to influence people and to sustain their confidence for a long period unless you are a party of the non-violent, peaceful patriots. Communism will survive in India only if it abandons violence and embrace peace and non violence; but as its genetic makeup is one of violent struggle and violent revolution, it would be very difficult for the communist parties to transform themselves into a non-violent entity, where in lies their real challenge.
