The atrocities committed in the remote Nandigram area of southern West Bengal, by the cadres of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have now found a most unwelcome echo in the state's capital. Muslims have been the majority of the sufferers (victims, if you will) in Nandigram, and a street protest organised by a Muslim organisation led by a Kolkata lawyer snowballed out of control on Wednesday and quickly became a general law and order problem. Unrelated issues like the hospitality given in India to a controversial Bangladeshi writer have also been thrown into the cauldron. Given the potential for more trouble, and given also the loss of credibility suffered by the West Bengal police because of the manner in which it played handmaiden to the CPI(M)'s cadres in Nandigram, as also its role in the Rizwanur Rahman affair in Kolkata itself, the state government did well to waste no time and call in the army for help. This is what it did in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, and then too Kolkata was spared the atrocities and rioting that were witnessed in cities like Mumbai. This time, too, the end result has been that the trouble has not spread and no lives have been lost. | |
| Whenever the time comes to look back on these events from a suitably distant academic perspective, one issue that should get attention is the emergence of what can only be described as private armies. The fact that these armies are glorified by the name of party cadres should not make a difference. Typically, when a small group of highly motivated persons is willing to carry out the commands of the bosses and gets armed (reports from Nandigram even speak of AK-47s being used), a cadre becomes a private army. This is exactly what both the CPI (M) and the BJP have at their disposal. In some senses, so does the CPI (M-L). The difference, of course, is that while the first two have sworn to operate within the confines of the Constitution, the last has not. In that sense, it is the first two that constitute the greater danger. Certainly history says so. |
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| The first lesson comes from Italy in the 1920s, when the Black Shirts of Benito Mussolini's Fascist party operated as a private army. Taking advantage of economic distress and a weak central government, the fascists soon managed to grab power. A decade later, the same thing happened in Germany when Adolf Hitler and his Nazis grabbed power. The disturbing question arises: can a government afford to lose its monopoly over the use of force? Indian history is instructive. The Mughal Empire fell because it lost its monopoly on force. More importantly, the British Empire grew and consolidated itself because it established such a monopoly (the Indian princes were systematically defanged). The danger now is that private armies will challenge the Constitutional scheme just as their predecessors undermined central authority in an earlier age. |
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