People's Democracy

IX shots from a revolver shattered the calm that had returned to the Pingla area of Midnapore when Tapan Das, secretary of the CPI(M)’s Pingla local committee, and his wife were left critically injured and profusely bleeding, late on January 31 evening, in the isolated Daspara locality where Tapan has his small dwelling place. Tapan's wife identified the attackers as notorious Trinamul hoodlums whose reign of terror in the area was successfully brought to a stop some three months back following a mass resistance to such outside, armed interloping.

Lying at the Midnapore Sadr Hospital, Tapan Das' wife Kajol spoke to INN about the murderous assault. She said a group of men wearing dark clothes, their faces covered in blue-green chadars, asked her to fetch her husband Tapan since they "had an urgent matter to discuss with him on the condition of the roads leading to the Pingla maidan." It was in that maidan where chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya was to address a public meeting on February 1.

An unsuspecting Kajol called her husband out. What followed was a terrifying nightmare as the assailants engaged Tapan in small talk, and then proceeded to whip out guns and shoot him in the face.

A panic-struck Kajol, despairing of her husband's death, threw herself on Tapan and shielded him with outspread arms. Never pausing to have a second thought, the desperadoes calmly shot Kajol in the palm of her hand. Kajol would not let go. In a bind, and fearful of popular wrath now that gunshots had echoed across the countryside, the killers climbed onto their two-wheelers and roared away.

Tapan who was under deep sedation had had one side of his lower jaw completely shattered. Kajol had lacerating, open wounds on both her palms, and was yet to recover from the shock of that frightful evening.

CPI(M) state secretary Anil Biswas strongly condemned the attack on Tapan Das and his wife, and said the reprehensible incident showed the political bankruptcy of the Trinamul Congress and its cohorts.

One recalls how Trinamul Congress supremo, Ms Mamata Banerjee, had declared Pingla a "war zone" prior to the Panskura byelection and how squads of heavily-armed motorcycle gangs were brought in from other parts of the state and from South Bihar to terrorise the people into deserting their hearth and home. Later, Ms Banerjee had chortled in glee that by killing dozens of CPI(M) workers in Pingla and elsewhere in Midnapore, she had been able to create a situation where a Trinamul Congress win was a certainty.

The recent unearthing of grisly skeletal remains of CPI(M) workers from the Pingla area has underlined the kind of ferocity and hatred with which professional assassins in the pay of the Trinamul Congress carefully orchestrated the killings.

But when they persisted with the terror tactics after the polls, the local population chose not to die a coward's death. The massive inflow of people into the Pingla area, determined to reclaim what had been theirs and theirs alone, made the armed assassins run away.

That had been some months back. Now with the ground sliding away from under her feet in Pingla as in the rest of Midnapore district, Ms Mamata Banerjee has realised the rapidly diminishing prospect of getting a repeat of her ill-famous "Panskura line." The premeditated and murderous assault on Tapan Das was no doubt a desperate move of a despairing political outfit that has started to lose ground in the state as the assembly polls approach.