Violence and non-violence?

Can there be any perfectly non-violent agitation when the state apparatus is becoming more and more violent and suppress every people’s movement brutally? When the police and para-military forces used hundreds of rounds of lathi charges beating the protesters like street dogs, when hundreds of tear gas shells were fired directly against them and when lakhs of litres of water was targeted against them from water-cannons to throw out the tens of thousands of students, youth and women for two days, will not they react if they are living beings? When many gets killed in trampedes during Kumbha Mela and other religious congregations, do the police book them as murders and charge sheet the worshipers for them?

What the government and its criminalised police force is doing in Delhi now is nothing different from what the military and police are doing in J&K and Northeast and later against the Naxalite movement in 1970s and now in the adivasi areas in the name of suppressing the Maoists. It is pure and simple state terror to suppress genuine demands of the people. Was it not justified on the part of students , youth and women to protest against the ghastly gang rape of a girl in Delhi streets? Though it happened on 16^th evening, did the government come forward with any concrete proposals to prevent recurrence of this 1001th attack on women during this year in Delhi alone? The protests had started from 17^th, but the government did not respond. It was then it took massive forms on 22^nd and 23^rd. Still the government did not address the protesters. Instead the union home ministry ordered removal of the protesters by any means. The people were attacked in the most foul ways. It was when the protesters were provoked in most heinous ways including the police men dealing brutally with the girls there were some retaliation. Who was violent? The protesters, or the police who indulged in all vile acts to throw them out from the ‘sacred preserves’ of the ruling elite?

Without bothering to go in to these, the NGOs, a section of the petti-bourgeois intellectuals, a section of media etc have started echoing what the criminalized state machinery is repeating; they say violence should not be there! Was not the attack on the girl on 16^th violence? Are not all these attacks on children, girls and women violence? Was not the order of home ministry to throw out the protesters and the wanton way the police accomplished it violence of the worst sort? After all these violence, do these goodies want that the students, youth and others protesting there to act like inert things? Like the anti-people, anti-national government and its brute machinery, these goodies are also serving their masters, directly or indirectly: the upsurge of the students, youth and their supporters on 22^nd and 23^rd in Delhi streets was great; let us salute them and denounce the brutal state which tried to drown it with lathis, water cannons and tear gas, and now trying to vilify it and to suppress its participants.