Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Taking over from superannuated Director General of Police Sri Gopal Nanda, the new DGP Sri Man Mohan Praharaj has put priority on ending communal conflicts in Kandhamal.
Communal conflicts are not absolutely criminal in character. Hence how can Sri Praharaj lead police to end them?
Every peace-loving and patriotic citizen must want that there should never be any communal conflict. But utopia has nowhere come true. And, Kandhamal is no exception.
As I have discussed earlier, communal conflicts are religious conflicts. As long as every religion is not banned there shall exist different religions. Existence of different religions means existence of rival religions. Existence of rival religions means existence of rival communalities. Existence of rival communalities means existence of the fire of communal conflicts. Police cannot extinguish this fire. So the new Orissa DGP’s assertion that he will end communal conflicts in Kandhamal as his first work is mere sophomoric.
As the new DGP took over, curfew has been promulgated afresh in Kandhamal. This itself is the proof of the fact that despite earlier repressive steps taken by the police, communal rivalry has not ended as yet.
Orissa High Court has asked the Union to press more police to action in Kandhamal. The Judiciary is worried over continuing communal conflicts. But verdicts or judicial directions cannot terminate communal conflicts.
In Kandhamal, the ongoing communal conflicts are conflicts between the indigenous culture of immemorial age and an alien culture of recent origin. The conflict has aggravated since killing of Laxmananada, as persons who oppose the alien culture suspect the alien culturists to be the culprits, notwithstanding Naxal claims that he being a religious revivalist and a stooge of local mafia they have under notice executed their death sentence on him.
Both the police and judiciary have failed to catch and punish the culprit(s) so far. The blatant inability or deliberate negligence of the law and order machinery to catch and punish the culprit(s) that killed the known antagonist of the alien culture is surely instigating the indigenous culturists to avenge the killing by taking the suspected alien culturists to task the way that suits them and how can this be stopped before the culprit(s), who killed Laxmanananda is/are punished?
Congress autocrat Sonia Gandhi, born a Christian, being the supreme boss of the central minister that holds home portfolio, the police controlled by IPS officers of central service like Praharaj may unleash state terror on indigenous culturists of illiterate Kandhamal in the name of law and suppress the conflict. But that would be mere suppression. Suppression is not extinguishments. So, even if the present communal conflict in Kandhamal will be suppressed, communal rivalry will not die.
This is the danger to our democracy that needs urgent attention.
The illiterate peoples of Kandhamal have given a golden opportunity to administration to understand this danger so that correctional measures may be evolved. But it seems the failed political leadership both in the state and the center, concerned only with their careers and tenures, are not interested in India’s future and hence, they want to manage the instant scenario with the muscles of the police force.
More baffling than this is the intelligentsia’s total failure to study the real cause of communal conflicts.
As stressed supra, existence of rival religions flares up communal rivalry. If peoples are not addicted to religions, wherefrom communal passion would surge and communal conflicts emerge?
Why should peoples be addicted to religion? As I have told earlier in these pages, despite brain and virtues, human beings by birth suffer from a sense of insecurity to overcome which they form their society or nation and cherish societal or national solidarity. Nationality is the collective formation of the peoples of a geographic unit to ensure economic stability. Economic stability of all of the society is ensured by elimination of all process or factors of exploitation. The state that eliminates exploitation and ensures economic stability is epitomized in terms of unreserved allegiance of its peoples. This allegiance is termed as political nationality. When anti-people programs of the state shatter economic stability of the peoples, political nationality dwindles and the peoples in search of collective identity to overcome inherent sense of insecurity build up or revive their cultural solidarity, which is expressed in the name of religion. So religion is a pervert expression of peoples’ anxiety to have a collective identity in order to overcome their inherent sense of insecurity or in reality the fear of economic insecurity and therefore, all the religions are pervert socio-economic formulations. Every pervert formulation is susceptible to control by schemers. So the schemers, who use the strength of solidarity amongst peoples under their control for factually their own economic benefit in the guise of the peoples’ economic stability, patronize and control every religion. This being the position, different religions compete with each other to expand their support base so that economic empires of their respective patrons would expand. In Kandhamal, political nationality having dwindled due to continuous state support to economic exploiters, the religious nationality has raised its ugly head as the substitute and in the specific circumstances, competition is going on between the Hindu and Christian schemers to keep the area under their grip. Hindu schemers are known saffronists who work for business community of India when Christian schemers having their fountainhead in foreign lands are suspected shadow workers of imperialism.
If economic exploitation of our peoples will stop, both these religious schemers shall have no impact on the minds of our peoples and political nationality will revive to extinguish communal conflicts.
Politicians will fail to bring out this as they have en mass lost their credibility. The new DGP can play a positive role if he directs his police force to eliminate economic exploitation of the peoples. It is well known and he can, if he wants, see that all the welfare programs are being derailed as traders, contractors and bureaucrats hand-in-glove with unscrupulous politicians are looting the allotted funds. He as the police chief can intervene and arrest these scoundrels without delay. He can take stringent punitive action against caste supremacists in Hindu religion to stop socio-economic exploitation and this will stop exodus of people from Hindu religion to Christian religion. He can investigate and find out the time and cause of conversion of Hindu members to Christianity and under the anti-conversion Act in force can start stringent action against the Christian conversionists while moving for legal nullification of the so-called conversions so that the unholy competition between communalists of both the Hindu and Christian sectors would stop.
Laws of the land have given him enough power to take these steps. If he fails to do this and in stead, takes steps against peoples who emotionally join either sector in search of collective security in view of administration’s blatant failure in preserving political nationality that a real welfare state could only have given, he will fail and be seen as fallen in the trap of a confused concept.