RADHABALLAV Mondal and his brother Gopiballav, both poor farmers, and both active workers of the Kisan Sabha were hacked to death at Balarampur village in Birbhum district by a group of jotdars who enjoy the political patronage of the Trinamul Congress.

The shocking event occurred on the morning of July 29 when the two brothers were out ploughing a small slice of land in a remote corner of the village. Without warning, a group of seven armed men appeared from behind a bamboo grove, struck the Mondal brothers hard with blunt weapons, and then inflicted mortal injuries using spears and hatchets. A police hunt is on for the attackers who are all members of a group of jotdars who enjoy the support of the Trinamul Congress in the area.

About the same time that the attack on the Mondal brothers was being carried out, another assault was mounted at the Mongolkot area of Burdwan district also by another group of jotdars who, too, enjoyed the backing of the Trinamul Congress. The victims were all khet mazdoors who had just completed a successful negotiation with some landowners about the fixation of a proper rate of wages for them.

On the way back, the poor kisans were pounced upon by knife-wielding assassins and in the dastardly incident that followed, Jagabandhu Konar died on the spot while other khet mazdoors including Kalpana Majhi, Manasa Majhi, Chand Majhi, Baneswar Majhi, and Basudev Majhi received grievous injuries. The police have arrested thirteen miscreants all of whom have strong links with the Trinamul Congress and are themselves jotdars of ill repute.

In another incident, SFI workers at the Ghatal College in Midnapore were seriously injured when attacked by goondas in the pay and protection of the Trinamul Congress over the resistance put up against encroachment by outsiders inside the college while the admission to the degree classes was going on. Those injured include Ashis Mukherjee, Salim Mohammad, Chinmoy Pal, and Prakash Chakravarty.

In a late night attack, dozen-odd criminals in the pay of the Trinamul Congress tore apart the small, one-room Lenin Pathagar (or library) at a village under the Shyampur panchayat area in rural Howrah.

The library was set up back in 1983 by the villagers themselves to afford the rural people a chance to access books and periodicals. The library gradually emerged as a meeting place for the village folk in the evenings, and was soon being regarded by the Congress and the Trinamul Congress as a "den of communists."

Targeted for some time, the library was finally set upon during the night of July 30 and the insane deed left the building razed to the ground, the books either put to the torch or torn apart and thrown into the rain-swollen paddy fields that surround the Lenin library on three sides.

The villagers have come out as one to condemn the noxious deed and have vowed to rebuild the Lenin Pathagar as quickly as possible. It is recalled that some time ago, the Trinamul Congress goons had burnt down another library, at Balpai in Hooghly and that this library too got restored soon enough through the will of the mass of the people of the area.

A self-critical tone pervaded the speeches of the CPI (M) leadership as they remembered comrade Muzaffar Ahmad, a pioneer of the communist movement in the country on his 113th birth anniversary. Party workers familiarly knew comrade Muzaffar Ahmad as "Kakababu."

Addressing the central meeting held as usual at the Mahajati Sadan in the northern suburbs of Kolkata, veteran CPI (M) leader, Jyoti Basu said that the good work done by the CPI (M) must not ever be weighed down by any form of recalcitrance and deviation, in however small a measure. The importance of mass contact must be realised all the while and every now and then, "and we must pause and think whether we have become dissociated from the people even by the smallest measure."

"Communists," iterated Jyoti Basu, "can only have the interest of the masses in mind as they go about their tasks of bringing about changes of a fundamental nature in the exploitative set up that we find ourselves in." This, added Basu, was something that "one finds easier to utter as a declaration of intent than acting accordingly in the ambience of challenge of the evolving reality."

Pointing to the innate unwelcome fallouts of staying in office in "what has been a bourgeois social system that strikes compromise with the remnants of feudalism," Basu said that one needed to "fight in a conscious manner against all forms of deviation, within and without."

In his address, state secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI (M), Anil Biswas noted the need to consolidate the party by seeking constantly to augment the ideological foundation and said that to this end the party programme adopted at the special congress at Thiruvananthapuram should be used as the instrument-of-choice.

There was need also, said Biswas, to strive against the influence that would befall the party in times of globalisation and its social impact. No compromise should be brooked in the fight against the negative aspects of the bourgeois politics in a parliamentary set up.

However, Biswas stressed, "not every evil affecting the party should be laid at the door of continuing in office for a fairly long period and at a stretch." The communists must find out every form of deviation affecting them and consciously fight against all such tendencies.

Party committees must stress the need to function in a joint and united manner, avoiding all kinds of individualist initiatives of thought and action, said Anil Biswas. Communists must take a firm stance against all attempts to glorify a person above the party, and corrective measures should be quickly launched. There was no room for procrastination here, cautioned the CPI(M) leader. Individualism, he iterated, inevitably led to deviationist trends.

Taking pride in the fact that the CPI (M) "provides a rare instance where a political organisation stands firmly united politically and ideologically, " Biswas fulminated against every form of factionalism and asked the party workers to fight against this wherever they found such shameful perversion to subsist.

Polit Bureau member of the CPI (M) Biman Basu who presided over the meeting urged upon the party workers to recall all the while the glorious heritage the CPI (M) represented and said that the struggle that the pioneers like comrade Kakababu had begun must be carried forward by the successive generations of communist workers. Biman Basu recalled the saying of comrade Muzaffar Ahmad that the party was more important than a personal acquaintance or a friend, and he called for a sharpening of the ideological struggle to make the party, and the Left Front, stronger than ever before.

The meeting which began with garlanding of comrade Kakababu’s portrait by the CPI (M) leadership also saw the giving away of the Muzaffar Ahmad memorial book awards to the veteran communist leader, Hiren Mukherjee, artiste Somnath Hoare, and economist Dr Madhura Swaminathan for their outstanding published works.

The day also witnessed homage being paid to the memory of comrade Muzaffar Ahmad at the Muzaffar Ahmad Bhavan and the Ganashakti Bhavan in Kolkata in the morning. We recieved news of commemoration of comrade Kakababu’s birth anniversary from all the districts of the state as the party remembers the pioneer.

The BJP-led union government has, in a recent order, chosen to renege on the existing order that requires that at least 10 per cent, of foodgrain, sugar, and urea, should be in jute packaging both in transit and in storage.

By diluting the existing legislation, the union government has thrust upon more than 40 lakh of jute growers and more than 2.5 lakh of jute mill workers a terrible uncertainty as far as their livelihood is concerned.

Since most jute mills of the country and by far the largest stretches of jute growing areas happen to be concentrated in Bengal, it is the state economy of Bengal, that would suffer the worst.

The CITU and AIKS state committees of West Bengal have condemned the dilution of the law and called upon the farmers and workers of the Bengal to "combat this onslaught through united struggle."

The pressure being brought upon the NDA regime by the corporate houses that lobby for synthetic packaging material against the eco-friendly jute blends, is being suitably utilised by the former to put economic and financial pressure both on the people of Bengal and on the Left Front government of the state.

In the meanwhile, the prices of Hessian material, especially B-Twill, has started sliding in the inevitable aftermath of the union government’s decision to dilute the existing packaging order. If during the coming season, cash crops are not packed in jute in adequate quantities, the scenario for farmers and workers look fearfully bleak and alarming.