rampant mccarthyism in the UPA

Has Congress an enemy from within?
Source: Free Press Journal

At the height of the Cold War, an American Senator from the state of
Wisconsin (1947-57) called Joseph R. McCarthy wanted to ferret out any
American with Leftist or even liberal leanings in any walk of life and
made him pay for his beliefs.

As a result, teachers and professors, film and theatre personalities,
economists and journalists, writers and authors, in fact anyone who
had intellectual pretensions come under his and a Senate Committee's
scrutiny which spelled disaster to them. For almost a decade
intellectual life in the United States all but came to a standstill.

Betrayal of friends almost became standard practice, so great was the
fear of McCarthyism. It was the most disgraceful period in American
history and the worst betrayal of human rights. McCarthy finally died
of drinking and was soon forgotten. But he wreaked untold damage to
civilizational life in the United States.

What McCarthy did for America, H. R. D. Minister Arjun Singh seems
determined to do in India. If Communism and Communists were McCarthy's
bugbears, for Arjun Singh it is the Rasthriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
He suspects that many from the RSS have by now been recruited into
government service and he wants to `detoxify' it, by eliminating all
people suspected of being members of the RSS or its supporters. It
will be remembered that Hitler in his time wanted to get rid of Jews.

Hitler eliminated some ten million Jews by sending them to the gas
chambers. What Arjun Singh has in mind, only Arjun Singh knows. In his
Memoirs, Mein Kamf, Hitler wrote: "The receptivity of the greatmasses
is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of
forgetting is enormous. In consequence of those facts, all effective
propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these
slogans until the last number of the public understands what you want
him to understand by you slogan".

What Hitler advised, Arjun Singh is trying meticulously to follow.
Hitler's Propaganda Minister Herr Goebbels would have been proud of
Arjun Singh who has been repeatedly saying that it was the RSS which
was responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and therefore
anybody who has any connection with the RSS even howsoever distantly,
deserves to be thrown out of the government apparatus.

In the first place, the law long ago absolved the RSS with any links
with the Mahatma's assassination. Men of such high distinction and
credibility like Acharya Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan have
praised the RSS which does not require a certificate of good character
from an ageing but ambitious politician. But Arjun Singh apparently
hopes that by repeating a charge ad nauseum it will finally stick.
Thereby he shows Nazism's influence on his thought structure. In the
second place there is no law in the country which states that anybody
who believes in the RSS ideology or, for that matter, any other
ideology automatically disqualifies himself from being into government
service. What the rules specify is that government employees cannot
become members of any political party under the Service Rules.

As far as ideology is concerned it is assumed that this is strictly a
personal matter, so long as it does not affect the actions of an
individual as an official. That means that no government employee can
be a member of the Congress, the CPI or CPI(M), the Janata, the BJP or
any other party, even if his or her sympathies lie with one or more of
them. That is the position. But consider Arjun Singh's charge that it
is the RSS which was responsible for the assassination of the Mahatma
and by that token the RSS has been held guilty by dint of association
with the past.

Never mind if the charge was dismissed a long time ago but what is
both shocking and painful is that even after fifty-seven years of
independence the Congress has not dared to condemn the CPI(M) and the
original CPI for the traitorous role they played during the Quit India
Movement initiated by the same Mahatma. Those Leftist parties had
betrayed more Congressmen in the months between August 1945 and we
have their own word for it than anyone cares to remember, to be
tortured and killed by the British police.

Several files in the National Archives of India will show that:

* The CPI made several secret approaches to the British Government
with offers of assistance (to capture Congress rebels);

* Communist leaders held several secret meetings with the then Home
Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, Sir Reginald Maxwell and
British intelligence officers and other bureaucrats;

* CPI gave assistance to the bureaucracy in intelligence work against
underground Congressmen. Worse, CPI also submitted reports to the
government about the excellent work it had done in sabotaging the Quit
India Movement.

After Gandhiji was released on 6 May 1944 numerous Congressmen
complained to him about the treacherous role of communists. Writes K.
K. Chaudhuri in his comprehensive study entitled Quit India Revolution
(page 206); "Gandhi referred the complaints to Bhulabhai Desai who
found that on the CPI's own documents, the Communist members of the
AICC acted in a manner diametrically opposed to the Congress, A
sub-committee of Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel and G. B. Pant too found
the evidence true".

The Congress filed chargesheets on several Communist members, traitors
all. All this is on record. That today's Congress, heirs to that great
party which fought for independence should today rely on support from
proven traitors, what can one possibly say of it?

If Arjun Singh has guts, he should boycott the Leftists and dare them
to throw out the UPA government. Instead he is embracing the Leftists
who have been saying that if the RSS sues Arjun Singh, they would
become a party to the case! It is to this depth of degradation that
the Congress has come to.

As for Arjun Singh's own credentials, this man didn't have the decency
to resign after the great Bhopal tragedy when he was the Chief
Minister nor has he any explanation to give to his links with the
Churhat Lottery. The Bhopal gas tragedy, incidentally, happens to be
the world's biggest incident of its kind.

What deserves to be taken seriously is that if Arjun Singh is not
stopped in his tracks he will create a vertical division in the
country and destroy its basic unity. If the RSS of today can be
associated with what happened 52 years age, why shouldn't the CPM be
equally well associated with what happened six decades ago? According
to Chaudhuri, "the 120-page main Report of (P. C.) Joshi on the good
work by the CPI to finish off the Quit India Movement could not have
been improved by any other collaborator of the British or by any
quisling.

Joshi was so anxious to prove the CPI's bona fides and its utility to
the British that he claimed that it was doing a better job of stemming
the Quit India Movement, of denouncing Subhash Bose and leaders of the
underground Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Achyut Patwadhan
etc. than the Government themselves".

If today's Congress has any self-respect, it will throw out the
Communists, lock, stock and barrel and dare it to upset the UPA
government. And let the Congress remember that in the last general
elections percentage-wise, the BJP won more votes than it did. More
people in India have faith in the BJP than in the Congress.

At this point to execute a witch-hunt against the RSS and by
implication the BJP and the entire Sangh Parivar is to invite
nation-wide trouble. Worse, it is to insult people who are as
patriotic as anyone else. Are we to presume that Messers Atal Behari
Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, to name only a
few are all traitors and only Arjun Singh and his ilk have the right
to rule this country?

What sort of nonsense is that? In what way has the NDA Government of
Vajpayee harmed the country's interests? If this trio can rule the
country well, surely lesser men and women serving at the lower and
lowest level can be equally trusted? The entire administrative staff
of West Bengal has been made slaves to the CPM and we have the
testimony of The Statesman (12 August) for that.As that distinguished
and objective daily put it: "West Bengal's officialdom, right down to
constables and peons, is arguably one of the best exemplars of
Stalinism outside the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Arjun Singh, thankfully, hasn't yet acquired the nerve and the
political training to start a full-scale Left-style ideological
cleansing, but that he is trying, obviously makes the communists
delighted. The question then arises whether it will be too high a
price the Congress may and up paying to keep the Left off its back on
economic policy.

India cannot really go West Bengal's way and survive as a viable
political entity", Sonia Gandhi and Dr. Manmohan Singh are warned. If
they let Arjun Singh get away with his hatreds, the country will not
only be divided vertically, but it will invite disorders of the worst
kind.

Neither the BJP nor the RSS is the enemy of the Congress. The real
enemy functions from within like Capt. Amarendra Singh of the Punjab
and Arjun Singh from the HRD Ministry and from without like the
Leftist parties. These people will destroy not just the Congress but
the hard won unity of the country. Arjun Singh is playing a very
dangerous game with the backing of the CPM for his own nefarious
purposes. He has been baulked of his ambition to be the Prime Minister
and he is sulking.

The Congress will do well to put him in his place which is outside the
door. The RSS will survive, the Arjun Singhs and the Communist thugs
notwithstanding. But in the end it will be the Congress which will
forfeit popular support. Let it not be said that it has not been
warned. What Arjun Singh is doing is as close to what Hitler and
Goebbels preached in the past. He is playing with fire. One day it
surely will consume him.

Send in your comments on this article to samachareditor@sify.com