‘Revisiting Tiananmen Square’: RSS mouthpiece devotes cover story to 1989 massacre of students by Ch

In what could be termed as a psychological warfare between India and China, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological body of the Bharatiya Janata Party, on Thursday recalled the Tiananmen massacre of students at the hands of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in 1989. Tensions are rife between India and China over the Red Dragon’s spiteful advancements along the Line of Actual Control it shares with us, especially at a time when the global focus is on the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, which too broke out in China over five months ago. The Organizer, the magazine brought out by the RSS, used the iconic photograph of Tiananmen Square of a man standing in the path of a column of tanks pushed in by the Communist regime on 4 June 1989 to silence student protests for political freedom. With the title ‘Revisiting Tiananmen Square’, the Sangh mouthpiece cited moves by the Chinese rulers to murder peaceful protesters just for raising voice against the autocratic establishment. “As per the assessment report of top leadership of Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including President Xi Jinping, generated by the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) in April 2020, global anti-China sentiment is at its highest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Though there is no clarity from the Chinese side on this, the report indicates that the tensions are looming large with the Communist regime,” the RSS article read. The piece also attempted to decode the Tiananmen Square event in the present context of territorial tensions, Hong Kong unrest and the Covid-19 outbreak. “Despite all attempts to erase the memory, the Tiananmen Square protest in which thousands of innocents were massacred by the Communist regime of China in June 1989 continues to haunt the Chinese regime. The story in Hong Kong, Tibet or Covid-affected Wuhan is not very different,” it further said. Tiananmen Square is the centre of Beijing’s and China’s political space and also the location where a series of mass murders were carried out by the Maoist Communist regime in China, the RSS mouthpiece observed. “Though (in)famous for the atrocious crushing of the 1989 uprising by students and ordinary citizens, which the CCP prefers to describe as “counter revolutionary riot”, or “political storm” or in a more neutral term like “political turmoil between the Spring and Summer of 1989”, the Square has been the centre of mass killings from the beginning of the so-called revolution,” the Organizer article read.