Red terror in Nandigram

by Sunanda Sanyal

Two rounds of the panchayat elections in West Bengal are over but post-election violence continues. During the second round on 14 March, eight people were killed in cold blood. The murder at Basanti, an RSP stronghold, both on election day and the day after, shows the CPI-M is going to brook no opposition. It will use the police and its goons in dealing with its own allies as remorselessly as it flouts democratic institutions. It has slandered the Governor, the sole human face in the government, the Calcutta High Court and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), for example. For lesser mortals, ‘political correctness’ is engendered by the fear of murder and rape. The time for the bhadralok to play the innocent bystander is running out.
It is in this context that the findings of the NHRC assume the finality of the statement that, with the CPI-M government in place, the party’s murder and rape squads shall rule the state henceforth. Unlike the state human rights commission, known for its servility, the NHRC is respected all over India. Its chairman, former Supreme Court Chief Justice S Rajendra Babu, has described the violence at Nandigram as the “worst scars on the face of the nation”. Mr Sitaram Yechury, Mr Basudeb Acharia, Ms Brinda Karat, Mr Mohammad Salim (CPI-M MPs), Mr D Raja and Mr Gurudas Dasgupta (both CPI) have given Mr Babu a protest note. The RSP and Forward Bloc have, however, disagreed. They have begun to pay. Some the details of the NHRC’s findings are, therefore, worth a look.
The NHRC conducted an investigation at Nandigram from 15 November to 20 November 2007. It identified three phases in the Nandigram movement. The first (3 January to 14 March) is marked by police inaction despite regular clashes between the CPI-M and Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee (BUPC). The second (15 March to 30 September 2007) is the aftermath of 14 March, dealt with on the basis of documentary evidence received from Ms Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, People’s Tribunal on Nandigram and Citizen’s Solidarity among others. The third phase, events thereafter, confirms our worst fears of state terrorism under a chief minister who calls rapists and killers at Nandigram “us”, while all else are “them”.
Once the government had announced its decision to acquire land for a special economic zone, the political character of Nandigram changed with a large number of CPI-M cadres switching loyalty. The Trinamul Congress (TMC), which headed the BUPC, was the major gainer. To begin with, police tried to prevent clashes between BUPC and CPI-M goons, but stopped intervening when intervention was necessary. Eventually, the villagers “completely lost faith in the police”. They feared the police would help the CPI-M regain control of Nandigram and locals would lose their land. Notably, the commission found no evidence of Maoists aiding the BUPC. CPI-M supporters may have fled in fear from areas dominated by the BUPC, but the cadres never complained to the police of “impending attacks” by Maoists.
Wherever police registered FIRs against the BUPC, the latter’s supporters suffered heavily. Conversely, there is substance in their complaint of police failure in protecting them against CPI-M violence. For example, the police received information on 4 November that the CPI-M was planning to enter Gokulnagar on 6 November from Khejuri. Police withdrew before the plan was implemented. Once the police was withdrawn, the cadres safely cross-ed the Tekhali bridge. In fact, the police were so completely emasculated that the NHRC team found a “CPI-M flag atop the police bunker at the Tekhali bridge”. No one dared pull it down even after a week. Police wouldn’t record FIRs, doing so only when the NHRC intervened.
The officer-in-charge of Nandigram police station refused to record FIRs unless they were endorsed by a “local CPI-M leader”. General diary entries, the wireless transcript log books (both of Nandigram police station and the district control room) and the FIR register tell another sordid tale. They bristle with “manipulations and insertions, blank columns and pages, exaggerated FIRs, and sloppy investigations”. All these prove the police force’s subservience. The NHRC report drives you inexorably to the conclusion that, with this government in place, the rule of law is impossible.
Take these examples, as recorded by the NHRC. The Nandigram police station’s control room logbook for 10 November was left blank, “at the in-stance of one of the senior officers”. It was as if the day was uneventful, although it witnessed a gruesome assault by the CPI-M cadres on a peaceful BUPC procession. Many BUPC supporters were injured, some died.
Moreover, the CPI-M cadres forcibly herded around 400 of these people, from where the police subsequently ‘rescued’ 11 people (according to the statement of the officer-in-charge, Nandigram police station and circle inspector, Mahisabad). However, none of these events figures in the general diary or wireless transcripts.
The NHRC goes on to give a number of examples of rape victims being dismissed without forensic examination. Take Akhreja Bibi, who was allegedly raped by CPI-M cadres. She suffered severe pain and had a swelling on the upper thigh and on the pelvis. Several other symptoms too indicated rape. But the doctor did not examine her, because she was a “mother after all”. Actually, the NHRC report gives you the impression that West Bengal police will never be fair with the CPI-M in power. They do not have “courage to take action against CPI-M cadres”. You need the “local CPI-M leader…to get any work done by the police”.
Even a week after the vandalism, the district administration did not care to survey the extent of damage to houses. CPI-M cadres claimed to be the owners of the houses that BUPC supporters had left behind. So chances were that the little relief that they provided did not reach the right hands.
More shocking, government doctors acted neither professionally nor fairly. In most cases, injuries were “recorded on small pieces of paper and handed over to the patient” rather than being entered into a medico-legal register.
The NHRC’s interactions with Mr Alok Raj, deputy inspector-general, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), which made a perceptible difference at Nandigram, are revealing. The central force arrived after its recapture. The CPI-M’s motorcycle brigade had already taken over the village, “creating terror in the minds of BUPC supporters”, with the cadres “thrashing, beating and imposing fines” on BUPC workers. Mr Raj informed the commission that the state government wanted the CRPF to leave the actual trouble spot, i.e. the CPI-M-dominated areas, and move to TMC-dominated areas. The intention was to “weaken the TMC’s hold”. Mr Raj refused.

(Note: All quotations have been taken from the NHRC report.)

(The writer is former Head of the Department, English, Belur
Ramakrishna Mission College)

See also: http://development-dialogues.blogspot.com/2008/05/nhrc-sends-12-point-recommendation-to-w.html

Two truths & Bengal: A Rhetorical Question Before The People

Source: http://www.thestatesman.net/page.arcview.php?clid=3&id=196321&usrsess=1


By Sunanda Sanyal

“As a young man of twenty-five, KR Narayanan met Gandhiji. Shri Narayanan told Gandhiji,” recalled Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Governor of West Bengal, in his Republic day speech, “it’s easy to distinguish between a truth and an untruth. It is also easy to distinguish between violence and non-violence. But when you have to take your pick from two truths, their relative importance becomes difficult to assess, doesn’t it?” (translated from the Bengali). What are the two truths that West Bengal is faced with today according to Mr Gandhi? They are the competing needs of industry and agriculture. Must we go in for the one at the cost of the other?
That’s a rhetorical question. The Governor takes no sides. But Professor Amartya Sen does. He sides with the state government in its land acquisition policy. However, many in the Opposition would agree with Sen that West Bengal needs industry all the more because in the last 30 years it has been progressively in ruins. What Professor Sen doesn’t seem to realise, though, is that the CPI-M continues to ruin industry by alienating the people. For the vast majority today, industrialisation means land grab and joblessness, while development is state terrorism ~ destruction of hearth and home, murder, arson and rape.

Horrific death

Yet, the horrific death of Rajkumar Bhul and of Tapasi Malik of Singur and subsequently the genocide at Nandigram are not the first of its kind. The CPI-M has made it a rule since 1969, when Jyoti Basu was deputy chief minister of the United Front government. The big difference, however, is that the previous Governors ignored the equally horrific acts committed at Marichjhanpi, Bantala, Dhantala, Chhoto Angaria, Nanoor and so on: the present one dashed for Nandigram ~ and ruined his own case for the vice-presidency of India. Professor Sen may not know all that.
The other thing that Professor Sen may not know is that the CPI-M continues in power by spinning lies. It insists that the CBI is biased against it in the Tapasi Malik rape-and-murder case, at Nandigram it is more sinned against than sinning, the Opposition parties can function because of the “prevailing democratic conditions here”, police have to march into Nandigram to restore the “rule of law”, and so on. Indeed one who is taken care of by the state finance minister as soon as one lands at Netaji Subhas airport may not know what it feels like to be a second class citizen in one’s homeland.
The people’s Governor who weeps with the starving people of the tea gardens does, so he dashed for Tamluk Hospital on the evening of March 14, where the victims of the CPI-M’s police-and-cadre action were being treated. His convoy, like that of Mamata Banerjee, was stopped. With the cadres shouting “Go back”, Mr Gandhi got off the car and threatened to walk down.
When eventually he looked at the victims, “cold horror” ran down his spine. In words that future historians of Bengal will quote, Gandhi said: “Was this spilling of human blood not avoidable? What I advised the government over the last two days, as I received inputs of rising tension in Nandigram, the government knows. It is not my intention to enter into blame-fixing. But I cannot be so casual to the oath I have taken as to restrict my reaction to a pious expression of anguish and outrage. But I also expect the government to do what it thinks is necessary to mitigate the effects of this bitter 14 March,” (The Statesman, 15 March, 2007).
Subhas Chakraborty, transport minister, and Speaker Hashim Abdul Halim went berserk. Ranted the minister in the assembly: “Who the hell is the CBI? The state government’s powers are curtailed from all sides. Sometimes it is the Governor, sometimes it is the courts, sometimes it is the Centre. This cannot go on.” Subhas said the Governor should have held his tongue and trusted the chief minister’s report. The Speaker ruled that the governor had transgressed his constitutional limits. And when the Prime Minister expressed shock and anguish, as Mamata Banerjee paraded before him a number of victims from Nandigram and Singur, Jyoti Basu, buttressed by Binoy Konar, thundered: “The Prime Minister should be more restrained in making remarks. Does he know that our own evictees exceed 1000? And we’re running the government! Isn’t it a shame?”
That is, Basu does not, any more than Subhas, Halim and Konar, consider those whom the CPI-M cadres have thrown out as “our own” evictees. Binoy Konar adds, “We are certainly not sorry for what the police did at Nandigram on March 14.” That he is echoing the party line is clear.
The party’s top brass, including Basu, insists that while the movement at Khammam is democratic, that at Nandigram is not. “The villagers of Nandigram have challenged the authority of the State,” says Konar, ”Police will either enter Nandigram and enforce the rule of law or they will get away, and there will be street fight.”
Surprisingly, Professor Sen does not consider the use of such language to be an invitation to violence, although he is sure the “free regions” created by the Opposition parties testifies to violence. The fact is, the villagers, being mostly former CPI-M cadres, know from experience that the CPI-M government is sending its police force to carry out Konar’s threat of knocking hell out of the villagers’ lives (life hell kore debo).
Konar justifies himself by saying, “After all, you have to trap a tiger before you can make it graze like a cow?” Konar, of the Sainbari notoriety, in which a young man was murdered and his mother was sprayed with his blood, has said, “We do not believe in the politics of murder… Indeed, why should the CPI-M murder Tapasi Malik? Actually, by blaming Tapasi’s murder on the CPI-M, the Opposition parties are trying to prove that the CPI-M is filled with a bunch of bad people (kharap lok)…” No, I, for one, don’t think so. The likes of Binoy Konar have not quite succeeded in crowding out all the good men that used to be there in the CPI-M ~ those, for example, who wouldn’t hanker after an annual visit to America (as Comrade Biman Bose does), or after diwali gifts of whisky and champagne from industrialists like Vijay Malia, Mukesh Ambani et al (as Comrades Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury do).

Party members

Take for example the “group of party members, sympathisers and well-wishers” who addressed this letter (as reported in a section of the press) to the members of the central committee of the CPI-M. Characterising the party’s decision to promote a non-entity for the position of President of India as a “disturbing development”, it accuses the party of imposing, in league with the Congress, on the “nation a controversial presidential candidate, whose credentials appear to be ordinary if not suspect.” The note adds: “It is really unfortunate that the party has not been able to explain Nandigram to its members, leave alone to the public at large. Was this not a shame on the party?” The letter is unsigned, which proves how helpless the honest believers in Marxist principles are in the face of the kharap lok’s machinations.
The good people include much-respected leftists like Sumit Chakraborty, Editor of Mainstream, Professors Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar et al - and several leaders of the LF like RSP, Forward Block and CPI who seem to realise, if Marxism is basically humanism, then the CPI-M is irretrievably lost, or else its ministers and Speaker would have recognised the only human face in the state government - that of Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who, aware as he is of the influence that Messrs Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechuri have with Sonia Gandhi, refused to run for the Vice-Presidency of India. In these worst of times, it is reassuring to see at least one powerful man unwilling to rub shoulders with the kharap lok. It would have been just as nice to see a Nobel laureate to keep clear of them.

The author is former member, West Bengal Education Commission.

The pus focus of a deep festering abscess

http://www.thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=157812

by Sunanda Sanyal

What’s absolutely the limit to violence on their women that males in Bengal can bear with? What future do those living in Bengal intend for their children? These are two of the many questions that confront us today, following the state terrorism at Singur and Nandigram.
On 18 December, 2006, Tapasi Malik went out, before it got light, to defecate in a field close to her house at Singur. Girls her age have to because the state government has failed to cash in on the centrally-sponsored Nirmal Gram (Clean Village) Project which funds toilets in poor homes. Tapasi was seized by the hands and legs, gagged, and repeatedly raped. She was lifted to a fireplace and thrust into it – headfirst. Well, my description of her death by fire is imaginary but, you can see, the reality must have been as grim, if not grimmer. However, contemporary Bengal failed to sense the searing pain Tapasi had been through – till she died. We in Bengal failed to burst into the kind of rage that the CPI-M takes seriously. And Nandigram happened, as a result!
Dr Sarmistha Roy, who has worked with medical teams at Nandigram, says the women in particular had been shot at the genitalia. A cadre, reported Medha Patkar to the Governor, pressed a rod into a woman’s vagina. Her uterus ruptured. Another woman, Kabita Das (35), was pinned between two sticks, and gang raped. Her husband tried to rescue her, but forced to watch on instead, since the cadres had threatened to dash their six-month-old baby to the ground and stamp it underfoot. The Statesman reported (21 March) that Sahadeb Pramanick (30), a CPI-M cadre from Gangra, was caught on 20 March while sneaking into Sonachura. He admitted to having raped two women, including a 13-year-old, on 14 March. It is also widely reported that police had opened fire near a bridge on March 14, virtually helping the CPI-M cadres to shepherd 17 girls into a deserted house owned by Shankar Samanta, a CPI-M leader. The CBI officials later found bits and pieces of women’s undergarments there, stained with blood. “Villagers had heard women’s shrieks from that house, which the cadres guarded.”
Led by Ganamukti Parishad, this writer visited Tamluk Hospital where he met a farmer’s wife in her twenties. Seeing a man in his mid-seventies, she confided that she was gang raped in the presence of policemen, the cadres tore off her blouse, and bit off her nipples. One of the women she knew had a part of her cheek bitten off. I urged the camera crew of a Bengali TV news channel, shooting around, to record her experience. But she didn’t breathe a word of what she had unburdened to me. I later heard Dola Sen reporting, at the instance of Mamata Banerjee, to Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi that the number of women thus maimed ran into hundreds.
The whole truth, though, will never be out with the CPI-M government, headed by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, in place. And Biman Bose expects people to “forget about Nandigram very soon”. Our insensitivity to Tapasi’s death shows that he might well be right.
Reportedly again, when cadres and police together acting in tandem went on the rampage at Nandigram, a child was seen falling to a cadre’s bullet. A woman rushed to him. They beat her with truncheons. She fled. The cadres beheaded the child, dead or half dead, for the ease of transportation – or for the fun of it. Some they buried and covered with slabs of concrete. They disembowelled the rest, so that the corpses wouldn’t float, stuffed the severed heads and torsos into sacks, drove off in truckloads, and flung them into the canals. Those who ended up in the hospitals had bullets in their heads, stomachs, chests and so on, which proves that the cadres had shot to kill them. The Dainik Statesman has since published photographs of a cadre in police uniform thrashing a villager. A local shop, called Sunny Tailors, sewed the uniforms.
The whole operation was a blitzkrieg – masterminded by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Nirupam Sen – with Laksman Seth, Benoy Konar, Biman Bose and the rest of the party providing logistic support at various levels. Much as Buddhadeb owns up his “constitutional responsibility”, he pleads innocence. Kshiti Goswami, RSP leader, said on TV Buddha had two faces – one of them was a mask. Prasad Ranjan Ray, state home secretary, commented: “We had mobilised forces on the basis of Intelligence reports… of course in the full knowledge of the chief minister.” Unsurprisingly, the most preferred charge against Buddha is that he is a “habitual liar”, a “confirmed liar”.
The Dainik Statesman reports (10 March) that at a meeting of 14 political leaders and police, the District Magistrate of East Midnapore announced that “any resistance to the repair of the bridges and roads at Nandigram would be dealt with according to the law of the land”. On 13 March in another meeting held at the house of Sambhu Maiti (CPI-M), police and cadres together decided on the plan of action for the capture of Sonachura and Nandigram. They fabricated fake number plates for the cars in which to carry off dead bodies, the caps the cadres and their leaders would put on – down to the last detail.
Another report says the CBI found at the Jononi Brickfield, where the cadres had encamped, buntings, bulletins and leaflets of various CPI-M outfits, six police helmets, a Chinese revolver, 500 bullets, 14 country-made firearms, nine modern rifles and two binoculars.
Now given the size of the village, and the time (two to three hours) taken to complete the operation, the whole village, including children, must have witnessed the arson, rape and murder in action. What is to become of them – particularly the children? Small wonder, Bengal’s society today teems with arsonists, rapists and supari killers.
Dr Tapash Bhattacharjee, who frequently visits Nandigram with medical help, says living as they do under the depressing prospect of a perpetual threat of CPI-M attacks, the young men there demand “weapons rather than medicines”. The fear is not baseless, if you keep in mind Benoy Konar’s warning that only the first two of the “five-act play” are over.
Actually the CPI(M)-run state government is the pus focus of a deep social abscess that has festered over the past 30 years. Its brand of politics is an unremitting evil. It splits the entire society into us and them: those who take dictates of Alimuddin Street are us – the rest them. When the farmers of Nandigram, including their cadres, disobeyed the party, Benoy Konar threatened to knock hell out of them (life hell kore debo). Konar, of Sainbari notoriety, in which a young Sain was hacked to death before his mother, had earlier warned that, should Mahasveta Devi, Medha Patkar or Mamata Banerjee dare to visit Nandigram, the women of his party would show their bottoms (pachha). And he was as good as his word. He wouldn’t care if what he said had demeaned Indian womanhood, not to speak of that of his own party. So the villagers of Singur and Nandigram had to pay the price with arson, rape and murder. If the CPI-M has its way, the rest of India will have to in the not too distant future.

(The author is former member, West Bengal Education Commission)