There is a suspicion of Maoist hand in the disturbances at Maruti’s Manesar plant. So far, Maoists are viewed as troublemakers somewhere out there―God-forsaken places like Dantewada and Gadchiroli. But the space-time continuum is seamless; Maoist presence, or the fear of it, at Manesar shows that Dantewada and Gadchiroli may not be as distant as they might appear. Whether or not the Maoists, also called Naxalites or Naxals, were responsible for the violence that left one dead and many injured will be known only after an impartial inquiry, but the question that needs to be addressed is: can we handle the situation arising out of their becoming active in cities?

The answer to that question is a big ‘no.’ It’s not that Naxalites have become so strong as to take on the might of our military and paramilitary forces; it’s just that we, the people of India, don’t have the cerebral muscle and moral courage to take on the enemies of our Republic. We, or a substantial and even influential chunk of the population, have already been conquered by the salient features of their ideology; unsurprisingly, we have started believing in the justness of their cause and the nobility of their goals, even if we dislike their means. Most of us have been softened up and gulled into wooly-headed thinking. Yes, softened up.

While discussing assault strategy, military commanders use a term called “softening the target.” It connotes actions that facilitate the capture of a post, bunker, or any other target. The actions can be bombardment by the air force aircraft or heavy shelling by artillery; both were used by India in its war with Pakistan in Kargil in 1999. Aerial and territorial bombardment softens up the target by causing destruction and engendering disarray in the enemy camp, thus making the task of the infantry less dangerous.

Communists and Leftwing intellectuals are waging a war for which they soften up the people. Their weapons―the weapons of mass deception―are guilt-mongering and indoctrination. The ultimate objective is the destruction of capitalism.

Their task is two-pronged: one, of deflecting attention of society from their own misdemeanors (in Russia, China, Cambodia, North Korea, etc.); and, two, of shifting blame to others. For this purpose, they use guilt, among other things, to seek acceptance and legitimacy in a civilized society. Usually, they succeed; for guilt is, as historian Paul Johnson wrote, “the corrosive vice of the civilized,” and they are adept in increasing the potency of this vice.

Reds and intellectuals drill guilt into the hearts and minds of the civilized. In schools, we are taught about the greatness of Marx, Marxism, Russian and Chinese Revolutions―and little, if anything, about the Gulag, labor camps, the brutal collectivization drives, the violence perpetrated by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, the millions killed in various experiments and purges. For instance, millions of educated Indians have been brought up on a history book (The Story of Civilization, Party II) which presents the Russian Revolution great humanitarian exercise: “Russia then launched on its programme of building a new society.” “Glaring inequalities in society disappeared.” Nothing on the killing of thousands of people by Bolsheviks, nothing on Cheka, nothing on the Red Terror that ensued. Such was their bloodlust that even a Marxist theoretician, Karl Kautsky, said, “Among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, terrorism, which begins with the abolition of every form of freedom of the Press, and ends in a system of wholesale execution, is certainly the most striking and the most repellent of all.”

The Communist Revolution in China (1949) is also presented in soft focus, with Mao as hero and Chiang Kai-shek as villain. In this struggle between good and evil, while the Communist Party was “a party of workers and peasants” whose policies gradually “won over millions of Chinese people to its side,” the Kuomintang “mainly represented the interests of capitalists and landlords.” And the reality? As Jung Chang and Jon Halliday wrote in their authoritative biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, “Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime.” Yes, 70 million; this is no writing or editing error.

The communist propaganda in our textbooks has brainwashed many of us; becoming guilt-ridden is the natural corollary.

While the propaganda can mold impressionable minds, it cannot alter the reality. So, the followers of history’s greatest butcher cannot be and certainly are not peaceful activists; the Maoists in India kill security personnel and innocent people, terrorize the masses, impede development and perpetuate poverty in poor districts of the country. When they face the barrel of the gun, they and their over-ground sympathizers cry hoarse about the violation of human rights; red and pinkish intellectuals portray the Maoists as the champions of the tribals, the poor, the marginalized, etc.

Such portrayals are possible because communists and fellow travelers not only write textbooks but also lord over academics, academia―in fact, the entire opinion-making paraphernalia. Therefore, most manmade ills are attributed to one or the other defining feature or consummate fruit of civilization, be it capitalism, globalization or Western ethos. Usually they are attributed to capitalism: treatment of children in the days of Charles Dickens, poverty in India, paid news, rising crime, etc.

Public discourse, the mirror in which a nation looks at itself and converses with itself, has been distorted. The mirror distorts everything; it shows fiends as angels. And we don’t fight angels, do we?