Deciphering the Mysterious Letters of Comrade M

Reading Time: 8 minutes

The Maharashtra Police have released two purported letters through which, they allege, the Maoists communicated with the arrested civil rights activist Rona Wilson. These letters are prima-facie evidence against Rona Wilson, which the police will use in the court. But even before the court, they’ve shown these precious catches and sensitive information to the press, the corporate-controlled mainstream press to be precise, who used the occasion to evangelise the dogma of its most revered police apparatus as Gospel truth. Leave alone the question of authenticity of the letters, the corporate-controlled mainstream media didn’t even question the fact that why a material that consists of sensitive information, vital for national security as per the police, was released to the press and not mentioned in the seizure list?

The letters are allegedly written by some “Comrade M” (Police claims it’s Maoist leader Milind Teltumbde but let’s stick to Comrade ‘M’ only), who doesn’t feel shy using the title “comrade” as a prefix to his own name. In one of the letters, it’s written that PGP encryption in emails is helping the Maoists. It’s another sign of the growing desire for securing and encrypting communication by the Maoist organisation, which has the police and all central intelligence agencies at its tail. Now, the irony is, this encryption-fetish ends in the letter of “Comrade M” as he/she takes the liberty to declare, in unambiguous terms, that which overground workers and frontal organisations are playing what type of role for the Maoists. Our beloved “Comrade M” even gives a list of Ambedkarite and left student activists along with their phone numbers in the same letter, telling the recipient to contact them as they are arousing the Dalits, tribals and marginalised people against the Modi government.

As a banned organisation, the Maoists operate in the underground space and no such organisation will reveal the details of their crucial supporters or overground organisers to someone else in such an unencrypted fashion. All Maoist communication or the communication of other banned outfits take place using code language. No Maoist or militant leader would write in a letter, in the 21st century, that these are our people and they are working to revive our political fortune in the overground. It’s infantile to think that a Maoist, unlike “Comrade M” will give out crucial details like name and phone number of activists to someone else in such a fashion.

In one letter, the Modi government is subtly praised for its “development works”, with a note describing the utmost frustration within the Maoist camp and even an assassination plot to kill the prime minister is dealt with. The writer appeals to the civil rights activists to execute the assassination plot, quite surprisingly leaving the battle-hardened veterans of the Maoist People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army and its notorious espionage wing, which has conducted numerous IED explosions in the past. It’s still not clear how the civil rights activists, who would be busy with legal tussles, can execute an assassination plan better than the armed militants with years of combat and espionage experience. Even the suggestions to rope in hardcore anti-communists like Jignesh Mevani and Prakash Ambedkar into the Maoist movement shows how politically immature a top leader like “Comrade M” is actually.

Killing Narendra Modi would be a big thing for the Maoists and anyone with common sense will know that if an organisation took such a decision of assassination then they will not let the plan out to people who are vulnerable due to their overground work. Why would the Maoists and its top leader, “Comrade M”, want to jeopardise the plan by revealing it in an unencrypted letter to someone like Rona Wilson, who wouldn’t destroy the letters but preserve them for several months for the police to find them and charge him with the conspiracy of killing the prime minister? If this is how the Maoists operate, then they wouldn’t have existed for five days, forget five decades.

It didn’t end with Narendra Modi. Even the Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis suddenly came up with two letters, which he alleged the Maoists have written to him with a clear threat of killing him and his family members. The funniest part was that one of the letter, Fadnavis claimed, came from the CPI(Maoist) Central Committee. It’s certainly quite interesting to see that the Central Committee members of the banned outfit sitting together, discussing, debating issues on national and international politics, Marx, Lenin and Mao, and then concentrating on drafting a letter threatening Devendra Fadnavis, who lives in Mumbai. Yet, Fadnavis didn’t release these letters to the police earlier, it’s only when the letter plotting “Modi assassination” was recovered that he came up with his own plight. The Maoists, probably after their recent setbacks, may have got enough spare time to write random conspiracy and threat letters. The postal service must be thankful to the Maoists for reviving the letter culture at an odd time.  

The peak of comedy in tragedy happens when the letter orders the civil rights organisers to speak to the Maoist sympathisers within the Congress Party and then ask them to help the Maoist cause by pulling in recently-elected Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani and others to arouse the Dalits against the Modi government and tear up the RSS’ much sought – Hindu unity. This was written forgetting the fact that the Congress had dealt similarly or in a harsher fashion with the civil rights activists vis-a-vis the Modi regime and the Congress-led UPA I and UPA II governments killed numerous Maoist cadres and leaders.  

It was the Congress government in the centre that has launched the most brutal war on the tribal people of Central and Eastern India, codenamed  Operation Green Hunt. The brutal war was launched by P. Chidambaram, who was the CEO of the UPA government’s war against the tribal people on behalf of the big mining corporations. Moreover, it was the Congress that, along with the BJP, nurtured and fed the brutal Salwa Judum terror campaign against the tribal population of Chhattisgarh, when the former prime minister claimed atop the Red Fort that the Maoists are the “single and largest internal security threat” of India. After being the most brutal Maoist slaughterer for nearly five decades, how could the Maoists and the Congress forge an alliance? They can if the BJP thinks they can and if it benefits the Sangh Parivar in the election year, then, of course, they can. Probably Swarajya Magazine will write an article on this oxymoron.

By telling the Maoist “overground workers” to connect with other Maoist “Ambedkarite” student activists by providing their telephone numbers, the Maoist leader, who may have a ₹60 lakh bounty on his head, has opened the telephone directory of their secret organisation before the world. It’s not only that key organisational details were revealed by “Comrade M” in one letter, but it’s also that a letter (which surprisingly the Police claim was found in Rona Wilson’s laptop) that was dated in April 2017, talks futuristically about the Dalit agitation that will take place in Bhima Koregaon nearly eight months later, was saved by the addressee at a place where the police can easily get a hold of it. This rookie attitude shown by both doesn’t carry the signature style of the Maoist organisation, which is playing a hide and seek with the police for decades.

Rona Wilson, as an activist of the CRPP, has been vocal about the persecution of people’s rights activists, political organisers, Muslims, Dalits and tribal people, who become victims of state terror. Rona Wilson has also participated in events that call for the release of all political prisoners and in doing so he has visited the Jawaharlal Nehru University several times. He is an alumnus of the university and he vehemently opposed the government’s vendetta against the JNU students in early 2016. Rona Wilson, who has neo-Ambedkarite Umar Khalid and other anti-communist student activists in his Facebook friend list and for whose release he was vocal, didn’t need a formal introduction of Umar Khalid and other organisers from a “Comrade M”, whose jungle life may have disconnected him from all worldly affairs taking place in the cities.

Thus, when the letter of certain “Comrade M” dated April 2017 introduces Umar Khalid and gives his phone number to Rona Wilson, saying that he is one of the Ambedkarite student activists in JNU, it proves beyond doubt that the letter was not only a forged piece but also that this letter cannot be a product of the police or intelligence agencies, as its content is purely a product of novice apprentices of the ruling class.

Most of the intelligence agencies have trained men and women, especially those at the political desk, as their job revolves around the most crucial task of preserving the current state and its political line. Any kind of fabricated content from them wouldn’t look stupid at the first go because these people are quite expert on how banned organisations communicate, how encrypted messages are sent and how the organisers never reveal details on unencrypted communication. Therefore, if one looks at the quality of these letters, their political tonality, the infantile jargon they carry and the invisible signature of a greenhorn composing it, then they will find that all pieces of evidence point the finger towards the one and the only culprit – the notorious IT Cell of the BJP.

In the past too, especially during the JNU fiasco, the IT Cell of the BJP released doctored videotapes in association with the Hindutva bigot Subhash Chandra’s Zee News to malign the campaigners seeking justice for the victims of the Hindutva fascist state. The JNU row brought Umar Khalid, Kanhaiya Kumar and Anirban Bhattacharya to the national forefront and there, at that stage, they became the sworn enemies of the RSS and its different outfits. Since years now, the RSS and the different Hindutva fascist outfit connected with it, have been maligning the people’s activists, the civil rights activists and others, especially student and youth activists of the left. The Hindutva camp has used the Maoist label on anyone who opposes their line to open the possibility to persecute them and break the resistance. Even present Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was called an “urban Naxalite” by Narendra Modi.

It’s no wonder then, that the people like Advocate Surendra Gadling, Prof Shoma Sen, Sudhir Dhawale, Rona Wilson and Mahesh Raut will be called Maoists or “urban Maoists” by the present regime to easily persecute them and thereby attempt to dismantle the new wave of civil rights movement as well as the Dalit movement against Brahmanical exploitation. It’s no wonder that the BJP government’s police will toe the line of its masters and then execute the vendetta programme against the activists throughout the country using fabricated information that the RSS will provide them. We didn’t forget the Reichstag fire yet; fascists always follow a similar pattern.

The letters that are used by the police may not stand as evidence in the court of law, however, in terms of media trial, where the corporate-controlled mainstream media broadcasted the police story as Gospel truth without attempting once to critically examine the facts and figures, tell us volume about the intention of the state machinery. Each and every student activist, whose number was made public by the Pune Police, is getting more than thousand threat calls a day and the media trial of them is on. This will surely advance the BJP’s cause of diverting the people’s attention from rising fuel prices, rising inflation, falling industrial production and the sharply rising unemployment rate. In the midst of several corruption allegations being levelled against the Modi government and its utmost failure in providing relief to the farmers, who are agitating throughout the nation against the government, a wave of sympathy for the prime minister can be created a year before the general election by using such a thrilling plot written by some novice apprentice of the Sangh Parivar.

These letters are also a part of the conspiracy hatched by the RSS-BJP and the Maharashtra Police to do away with the FIR against Sambhaji Bhide and Milind Ekbote, the two Hindutva terrorists who triggered the anti-Dalit riots in Bhima-Koregaon on 1st January 2018. Though the police had to arrest Ekbote under immense pressure exerted by statewide and nationwide Dalit agitation, the notorious riot monger Bhide remained aloof from the law, despite the Supreme Court quashing his anticipatory bail appeal, by using the clout he has on the entire Sangh Parivar. It was Bhide who is regarded as a “guru” by the prime minister and it’s unlikely that the police will ever take a chance to catch hold of him. However, by turning the spearhead against the Dalit and civil rights activists, the police have created an opportunity for the culprits of the RSS involved in the Bhima Koregaon violence to have their own peace of mind in some salubrious corner.

Narendra Modi always loves to play the victim card and showcase himself as a potential target of terrorists. Before each crucial election, such incidents of victimhood is used to generate mass sympathy. The best thing in this worsened situation is that the majority of the people, the majority of the Dalits and marginalised people are not buying these stories peddled by the police and like most of the opposition politicians who have called this letter a fabricated one, the people too have called them a desperate attempt by Narendra Modi to create sympathy. This signals that despite imprisoning the civil rights activists, the genuine voice of opposition, Narendra Modi and the RSS will not get a cakewalk this time as the people have suffered tremendously under the Hindutva fascist rule and they want to see an end to it at any cost.