Sunday, November 01, 2009

*State of the Enemy* - *Manas Chakraborty*

http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/columnsothers/State-of-the-enemy/Article1-471400.aspx

Dear Shri Kishenji,
Sub: People’s War

Your latest outrage in targeting the Rajdhani Express has crossed all limits. As long as you hijacked some train that travelled from the back-of-beyond to some other equally godforsaken place, we didn’t really care. Losers travel by those trains. But this time you unwisely picked on a VIP train going to New Delhi.

Some of us might have had friends and relations on that train. They may have been killed, kidnapped, or at the very least, looted. After all, passengers get looted on some train or the other almost every week. That you didn’t do any of these things is due to the sheer stupidity of your tribal followers. All those guys took away was food from the pantry car and blankets, the fools.

So you want to pick a fight with us? You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. A recent study said 2 million kids die every year in India due to entirely preventable causes — malnutrition, diarrhoea, neo-natal diseases. That’s two million children of your kind of people, the kind who might support you. We achieved that without even trying, through mere neglect. And we did it democratically, of course. Who needs a war? Imagine what we could do if we really wanted to hurt them. And don’t think our children will be affected — they aren’t born under city flyovers, don’t live in fetid hovels and stinking slums and unlike the dead millions, they will grow up and go to America.

Robbing pantry cars is not going to help. The Global Hunger Index says that 240 million of the country’s population go to bed hungry every night. We’ve accomplished that just by looking the other way. Just think what we could do if we actually wanted them to go hungry. And it’s not going to affect us — our supermarkets will still overflow with exotic foods from every corner of the globe. Your people are welcome to press their noses against the glass and watch us shop.

So you want to fight, eh? You’ve killed 6000 people in the last 12 years, mainly poor policemen and villagers. You think that’s something? Why, the number of farmers committing suicide in the last 12 years is around 200,000. Just ask the human rights people how many of your supporters we and our organisations like Salwa Judum have killed or rounded up. In Kashmir, we’ve walloped terrorists armed to the teeth and backed by Pakistan. And you guys don’t even have rocket launchers. You are dead meat.

You know these facts as well as we do. All we’re saying is don’t incite these poor sods to rebel. We’ve kept them firmly under our thumbs for centuries with scarcely any trouble. Besides, we also have a soft side. We’ve given them democracy. Once we get rid of you, we might even take their lands and develop them. See how well we’ve developed the mines in Jharkhand. Some of them might soon be listed on the stock exchange.

We’ll also start some social programmes. We plan to reduce the number of kids who die every year, maybe to 1.5 million in a couple of years, then down to a million in another decade and pretty soon we’ll have, say, only half a million children dying per annum. That’s progress. You, on the other hand, are anti-poor and anti-development. We will bury you.

Manas Chakravarty is Consulting Editor, Mint

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Arise Awake Stop not till the goal is reached. - Swami Vivekananda Swami ji is my inspiration, not as a monk but as a social reformer and for his universal-ism.