let us do an IPL on the naxals

The Times of India had an article on a naxal leader in its Mumbai edition a couple of days ago. It was a partly vilification and a partly robinhoodising effort by the paper of 28 year old Kundan Pahan, the Maoist red rascal who ordered the beheading of Jharkhand inspector Francis Indwar.
In an earlier blog, we had touched upon the danger of the Maoist menace disintegrating into a thousand wars led by a hundred warlords if the Indian state didn’t act fast enough. That could be an absolute horror for the country. Imagine swathes of land under the control of different warlords with their own laws, some bordering on insanity.
To get the picture just think of Somalia or closer home the North West Frontier Province.
Coming back to the article, the headline was ‘Veerappan of the East’, referring to Pahan.
It spoke of how he went the bloody red way when rich landlords forced his family out of the village he hailed from. There are no details of when, where, how or what, lending credence to the fact that it might just be a journalistic way of giving a humane face to a man who is acting just the opposite.
So far the movement has been a shadowy one with no newspaper or even the cops managing a picture of Mupalla Laxman Rao or Comrade Ganpathy, as he was known, though with the outing of the moniker he might have changed it.
No one knows the structure of the organisation, or how many members are there in the Politburo or indeed in which part of the ‘liberated’ stretch between ‘Pashupati to Tirupati’ do they meet.
We have not even dwelt enough on the fabulous story of Saket Rajan or Comrade Prem, a man who could have become with some media benevolence and folklore passing of as fact, the Indian version of Che Guevara. Rajan was the son of a strict Army officer, went on to top class from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, was editor of the defunct Mysore Star which wrote scathing articles against uranium mining in India, wrote the encyclopedic History of Kannadigas which is still taught in almost all Karnataka universities, and then left to become the commander of the naxal army in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and known and dreaded by cops as Comrade Prem.
He got killed in a firefight with the Greyhounds of Andhra some years ago.
Rajan died a unheralded death. Let us not make heroes of people like Pahan.
Like the stories we had in some papers – I think DNA- of how mellifluously Ajmal Qasab sang his prayers during Ramzaan.
Let us do to the naxals what Lalit Modi did with the Indian Premier League. Copy the format from the Indian Cricket League, get it officially approved from the IC, spend money, make it a success and force the ICL to shut down.
Similarly let us listen to the naxals, take the good from their rhetoric, implement them with our laws and money and then go after them.