Supporters of Maoist violence are Fifth Columnists: Congress

In the wake of the killing of 24 EFR jawans by the Maoists in West Bengal, the Congress has asked the civil society to ostracise individuals and organisations providing legitimacy to and "romanticising" such violence and described them as Fifth Columnists.

"All individuals and forces which romanticise such violence and provide legitimacy to the cult of violence should be ostracised by the civil society," party spokesman Manish Tewari told newsmen on Wednesday.

Describing these individuals and organisations as Fifth Columnists (members of a clandestine subversive organisation working within a country to further an invading enemy's military and political aims), Tewari said they should be removed from the mainstream society.

Taking a dig at the Left movement and the Communists, he said history was witness to the fact that gaining power through violence was dangerous be it fascism or Communism. "The world has rejected Communism. There is no one even to cry for this ideology," the Congress leader said, adding it was a "foreign ideology based on violence" which was implanted in the country.

"The nation is facing the consequences of this ideology now in its varied forms," Tewari said.

The spokesman charged the ruling party in West Bengal and Kerala of "institutionalising culture of political violence" in the last 30 years and said Maoists are "Frankenstein monsters of this cult of violence".

Tewari was evasive on the United Porgressive Alliance-I government taking support from the Left, only saying on questions like democratic participation in the government, the then Communist Party of India had split in 1964.

Asked about Left charges that party's ally Trinamool Congress was sympathetic to the Maoists, the spokesman said that the "Left cannot run away from (the charge of) institutionalising political violence..."

To a query about TC chief Mamata Banerjee's demand of a Central probe into the Maoist attack on the EFR jawans, the Congress leader said that the party had nothing to say as it was entirely for the TC to articulate any demand.