Communist China had to develop artificial, coercion based and politically monolithic society. This was, since the first day, a humongous task. Given the credentials of communism in Soviet Russia, China knew that propaganda, bloodshed and suppression will be inevitable. Ironically, humans long for freedom. This is the basic fault with communist ideology. Tiananmen Square massacre was the result of this dilemma and incompatibility. Thousands of students were killed in broad daylight to achieve ‘death-like sameness’, indigenous culture, human values, dissenting voices were mulled to achieve and survive an artificial, incompetent and undemocratic socio-political system.
Violence and communism are united at the elemental level. From China to India, the inability to comprehend social life and democratic functioning of the political system compels communists to validate violence. At every step of evolution, communism requires blood. Tiananmen is a testimony to this. Thanks to modern technology and human rights, the assault on people do not go unnoticed, be it china or JNU. Recently radical groups’ masquerading as students led a violent streak on common students of the university who were against the lockdown and wanted to register for the next semester.
Tiananmen Square Massacre
Thirty-one years have passed since the crime against humanity was perpetrated at Tiananmen Square. What happened on 4thof June in 1989 can/should not be seen in isolation. It was a well-prepared plan from the communist party of China. According to a report in South China Morning Post, Deng Xiaoping and other Communist Party leaders believed the protests to be an existential political threat and agreed to use coercive measures.
The State Council declared martial law on May 20 and placed more than 300,000 troops on streets of Beijing. The armed soldiers moved inside the capital city and advanced into central parts of Beijing on the city’s major thoroughfares in the early morning hours of June 4, killing both demonstrators and bystanders in the process. Most of these protesters were university students.
These students were killed because they were demanding democracy, pro-people reforms and awakening of consciousness. Every year the Chinese government shows its gratitude to the forces for their sacrifice but they have tried their best to wipe out the history of the massacre from their history. However, the images of the heinous crime committed by the communist government cannot be erased from the minds human race. Whatever little information could come out from the grab of communist, was enough to leave the global community awestruck.
One question that is crucial to ask is, what happened after the barbaric attempt of silencing the protestors was over? Where did the protesters or supporters of the protest go? Did the Chinese government silence all of them through this one heinous act or the act followed even in the aftermath? The answer lies in the fact that the Chinese Communist Party sees the 1989 pro-democracy protests as an existential threat for them. So they do not let any voice raise in any form, they ruthlessly silence any slightly budding pro protest voice. According to Human Rights Watch, which has published a document based on 30 years of close observation of post-Tiananmen massacre, the Chinese Communist Party never tolerates any political opposition on the name of free speech and democracy, if it has Tiananmen in the backdrop.
There have been several incidents where victims of Tiananmen tried to make political parties. They were sentenced to be jailed for at least 10 years. China Social Democratic Party, China Freedom and Democratic Party are among such examples of the first half of the 90s.
The international community has constantly raised this as a crime but communists in India find it comfortable to stay silent. This is because they are hand in glove with communist china. They too believe in violence, in radicalization, in creating chaos and above all they too are murderers.CPI(M) resolution adopted at the 14th congress- Madras, in (January 3-9) 1992. Celebrating the Chinese revolution and calling it a historic triumph, it stated- Chinese revolution “was a source of great inspiration that galvanized the struggles of the peoples of the colonial countries for their Liberation”. The same CPIM in its 20th congress document- “Resolution on some Ideological issues”, downplayed the Tiananmen Massacre by calling it an “internal turmoil” in China and instead of calling it a massacre, called it “Tiananmen square development”
Tiananmen remains one of the most sensitive and taboo subjects in China today, banned from both academic and popular realms. Even the actual number of deaths from the military crackdown remains unknown. Every year on the anniversary of June 4, the government intensifies its control, and citizens who commemorate the events are put under various forms of surveillance. The Tiananmen Mothers are prohibited from openly mourning family members who died in the massacre, and exiles are prohibited from returning home, even for a parent’s funeral. Many older supporters of the movement, leading liberal intellectuals in the 1980s, died in exile.
Silence of the sold
A few years ago China hosted the Olympics. Apart from architecturally marvellous infrastructures, there was one more thing that grabbed the attention of visitors. The slogan of the event, “A country of dreams. One world, one dream. Civilization and harmony.” A news reporter, Amit Sengupta who was there to cover the event stood in front of a board, staring at the slogan. He was diving into the past of his university times when he was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He remembers the night of 4th June 1989 at the university.
He shares his memoir, “The students’ union at the time was led by the students’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which backed the Tiananmen Square Massacre and glorified the Chinese regime led by Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng. They termed the students as “CIA lackeys, juvenile delinquents, and bourgeois reactionaries,” among other clichéd communist abuses. They even claimed that the massacre and the clampdown simply did not happen: that it was all manufactured, a figment of biased imagination of the Western media.”
Unfortunately, The Indian political system has been significantly influenced by communist intellectuals who are committed to ideology and not people. For their selective myopia, Tiananmen massacre does not even exist. For them, the patronage received by CPC is handsome enough to ignore the value of human life. This does not stop here, in an attempt to create a chaotic, ideologically motivated and democratically destructive force they have marginalized a public university to the verge of alienation from the Indian society.
JNU has become an epicentre of “protest as a business” where left-leaning intellectuals criticize everything under the sun but keep black hole type silence on war against people and their human rights in China. In an interview with journalist Barkha Dutt, Sitaram Yechury recalls: “When I entered St. Stephens, you had on the chappel written, CHAIRMAN MAO IS OUR CHAIRMAN. 13 students were expelled. Those were the Great Maoist of the time. Some of them are eminent academicians today”.
These enemies of the people support radical Bolshevik jihad and manufacture vulnerable groups of individuals as intellectual Fidayeens and attack the people. Interestingly enough, they often succeed because of patronage and propaganda. India shall do away with such vultures at the earliest. Decoding their modus operandi has become essential as Indian people are actively engaging in self-dependence and this will not go down well with the communists in India.
Rakesh Batbyal in his book ‘JNU: The Making of a University’ presents the plot of JNUSU election of 1989. He writes that there were two events running in the backdrop of the elections, one, Polish revolution and second, the Tiananmen massacre. The established leftist organisations SFI and AISF could not manage to win the election that year. This happened for the first time in the history of JNU. Even though the communist ideology was dissolved in air of JNU of that time, it is remarkable that core communist parties could not win the election after supporting the massacre of Tiananmen. It was this space of morality that portrays the space for ethical-political forces. Today, when Hong Kong is struggling for their autonomy against China, when Uighur voices are being silenced, when indigenous culture of Tibet is being vanished, the least we must do is to ask questions to the communists of India is this, ‘what stops them to criticize the heinous crime committed by Communist Party of China?’ Why is it that they cry the song of democracy everywhere but become silent on the autocratic regime of China? We need to ask these questions because (if) communism is an ideology, it indeed has a bloodshed genealogy.
(This article has been co-authored by Subh Kirti who is a PhD research scholar at CES, SIS, JNU and Prashant Vats Shahi who is a PhD research scholar at CEAS, SIS, JNU)
