The Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday took to Twitter to pose a question on why do so many dictators have their names starting with ‘M’. Though he did not care to elaborate on the context of the tweet, he shared a list of number of dictators whose names started with the alphabet ‘M’.
“Why do so many dictators have names that begin with M ? Marcos, Mussolini, Milosevic, Mubarak, Mobutu, Musharraf, Micombero,” the Congress leader tweeted.
Even though the Wayanad MP did not explicitly mention in his tweet, the indirect reference to PM Modi was hard to miss. For the last few months, Gandhi has been attacking the central government and accusing PM Modi of exhibiting fascist and dictatorial tendencies.
Rahul Gandhi drops off mentioning Mao Zedong in the list of dictators starting with ‘M’
While the Gandhi scion spoke about the dictators who had their initials starting with ‘M’, his list did not include the infamous Chinese autocrat Mao Zedong, who is arguably the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world.
Most people assume that Adolf Hitler or Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin to be the biggest despots the world has ever seen. However, both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by the former Chinese premier Mao Zedong, also the founder of the People’s Republic of China. From 1958 to 1962, Mao presided over a hare-brained campaign of Great Leap forward policy that led to the deaths of about 45 million people—easily making it the largest episode of mass murders ever recorded.
However, a book ‘Black Book of Communism’ chronicling the tumultuous years of Mao’s regime pegs the number of people died due to Mao’s policies even higher. It states that 65 million people perished because of Mao’s merciless attempts to create a utopian socialist society in China. Under the “Great Leap Forward”, China suffered an unprecedented famine, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Five years later when Mao sensed that the revolutionary fervour in China is on the wane, he announced another campaign—Cultural Revolution. Under this revolution, gangs of Red Guards — young men and women between 14 and 21—prowled the cities targeting the revisionists and those who were perceived as enemies of the state, especially teachers and intellectuals.
Teachers and Professors across the length and breadth of the country were humiliated, their faces smeared with think and they were forced to get down on their knees and bark like dogs. Some of them were beaten to death by the rampaging Red Guards Army. It was only after the Red Guards started attacking the Communist Party members that Mao called in the Red Army to put down the marauding Red Guards. But by then, a million Chinese were already dead.
Communism continues to be a source of terror in India
Mao’s brand of Communism was adopted by subsequent Chinese leaders, including the current Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, under whose leadership, persecution of minorities have continued unabated. Uyghur Muslim minorities in the Chinese province of Xinjiang have been subjected to unspeakable atrocities under the auspices of Xi Jinping. They have been forcibly sent to detention centres that are described as “re-education camps” and “training centres” by the Communist leaders. They are separated from their families and dissuaded from following religious practices.
Communism remains an enduring threat, not just for the people of China, but for the Indians too. In India, the Communist Party of India(Maoists) carried out terror activities in the form of Naxal attacks in some parts of the rural India. The Communist Party of India(Maoists) draws its ideological inspiration from the Chinese Communist Party.
The CPI (Maoists) is a designated terror organisation by the Indian Government under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act since 2009. Recently, a US report published in 2019 ranked CPI(M) as the 6th deadliest terror outfit in the world. The report blamed the Communist Party of India (Maoist) for the killing of 311 people in 2018 and involvement in over 177 terror incidents in the same year. Although the party is losing its strength, it is still a force to reckon with and the Indian government is taking measures to annihilate them.
Congress signed an MoU with CCP in 2008
The absence of Mao Zedong’s name from the list of dictators tweeted by Rahul Gandhi is also instructive of the Congress party’s close ties with the Chinese Communist Party. It is worth noting that Congress had signed an MoU with the CCP during the UPA 1 regime to consult on ‘important issues’.
In 2008, the Congress party and the Communist Party of China (CPC) had signed a deal in Beijing for exchanging high-level information and co-operation between them. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) also provided the two parties with the “opportunity to consult each other on important bilateral, regional and international developments”.
Interestingly, the MoU was signed by the then Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi and on the Chinese side, it was signed by none other than Xi Jinping himself, who was then the Chinese vice-president and standing committee member of the CPC’s politburo. The MoU was signed in the presence of his mother and party president Sonia Gandhi.
It is also pertinent to note that Rahul Gandhi allegedly had a secret meeting with Chinese ministers during his Kailash Mansarovar visit in September 2018. While addressing a town hall meeting titled Reimagining India in Bhubaneswar in January 2019, Rahul Gandhi revealed that he had met Chinese ministers during his visit to Kailash Mansarovar.
Furthermore, it has also been observed that Congress and Rahul Gandhi have been studiously mealy-mouthed about criticising China and the Chinese Communist Party. Perhaps, the alleged closeness between Congress and the CCP is the reason why Rahul Gandhi has consciously refrained from including Mao Zedong in the list of dictators he tweeted earlier today?
