People's Democracy

B Prasant

THE third unit of the Bakreswar thermal power plant in Birbhum district was lit up by former Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu on February 11 evening. Basu had been instrumental in making the power plant a reality in the face of heavy odds.

Dedicating the third unit to the nation, Basu said the Bakreswar unit represented the symbol of self-reliance and pride for the people of West Bengal without whose spontaneous support the plant would not have seen the light of the day.

Explaining the policy of joint sector initiative, Jyoti Basu declared that it was possible to go in for import of superior technology from abroad in order to make projects viable. This was a far cry from the way in which the BJP-run union government allows the concept of national self-reliance itself to get diluted by inviting foreign investors to run riot in the domestic sector.

Jyoti Basu pointed out that the foundation stone for Bakreswar had been laid as far back as 1988. Since then it had been an uphill struggle all the way for the people of the state. They have been witness to the nakedly antithetical attitude of the successive Congress and BJP-led union governments and the ceaseless campaign of lie initiated by a section of the media against the viability of the project.

Explaining the nature and extent of popular participation, Jyoti Basu said that besides donating blood to raise funds, the people engaged themselves in voluntary work at the site for long hours and for quite a length of time. Kisans of the area came forward to give up land-holdings for the infrastructure of the project to be suitably laid out. The Left Front government was successful in getting ahead with the project without imposing any additional of tax burden on the people of Bengal.

Later, addressing a mass meeting at Suri in Birbhum, Jyoti Basu expressed confidence that no mahajot would be able to defeat the Left Front in the coming assembly polls, even if such an alliance of opportunism ultimately took shape.

Basu said the Trinamul Congress-BJP combine’s cry for use of article 356 in Bengal was because of their fear that, given the mood of the people who are fed up with the Trinamul Congress chief’s tantrums, the combine will come a very poor second in free and fair polls.

Basu pointed out how the frequency of the visit by BJP-nominated "fact-finding teams" to this state was indicative of a conspiracy. Out of a total of 440 police stations the state has, only a few areas under three or four police stations are disturbed, and that too because of the Trinamul-BJP themselves. He warned that such visits would finally prove counter-productive to the opposition’s own electoral prospects.

Addressing another large rally at Ranigunj in the coal belt of the western part of Burdwan district, Basu said the success of the Left Front here in West Bengal and of the Left Democratic Front in Kerala was an important factor in the building up a third alternative at the national level. He said the people look to these Left-led governments (as they do to the Left Front government of Tripura) as a source of hope for democratic governance in a national political scenario where communalism, casteism and separatism have raised their ugly heads.

Basu’s advice to the CPI(M) workers was that they must remain with the people through rain and shine, and never take recourse to lies and falsehoods in any circumstance while explaining the CPI(M)’s stand on the evolving realties.

Basu was also trenchantly critical, as always, of the various anti-people policies being carried out by the BJP-run union government.

In the meantime, addressing a huge gathering at Raidighi in South 24 Parganas district, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya said that no amount of terror would succeed in Bengal which possesses a firmly-rooted democratic tradition. He was speaking at a meeting convened to condole the dastardly murder of the CPI(M)’s South 24 Parganas district committee member, Comrade Kalipada Haldar, who had been brutally killed on January 11 this year by goons in the pay of the Trinamul Congress-BJP alliance.

Bhattacharya said the politics of murder and mayhem, being revived in the state by the forces of reaction, had earlier been tried by the Congress under the stewardship of Siddhartha Shankar Ray. The failure of the earlier experiment had, apparently, not made the present perpetrators of violence to stay away from the dangerous path of political violence. Bhattacharya said the people will respond to these misdeeds in the appropriate manner, come the Vidhan Sabha polls.

Comrade Kalipada, the chief minister said, had been actively engaged in vesting the ceiling-surplus land in the government for subsequent redistribution among the rural poor. This had apparently made the forces of reaction, including rich peasants and jotdars, desperate enough to decide on killing Comrade Haldar.

But if these elements had hoped for a halt in the process of redistributive land reforms in the area by their heinous deed, they were sadly mistaken. Comrade Kalipada Haldar’s comrades are carrying out his unfinished task in a most comprehensive manner even as the murderers languish in jail, awaiting verdict.

The people have nothing but a burning hatred for the political outfits that conspired to kill Comrade Kalipada, said Bhattacharya adding that the killings would be responded to not by counter-violence but by strengthening the democratic movement at the grass-roots level.

EVEN as GNLF leader Subhas Ghising was declared to be out of danger following the extraction of grenade fragments from his neck and shoulders, a bandh was organised in the hill areas of the Darjeeling district. A protest march was taken out in the township of Siliguri by the CPI(M)’s Darjeeling district committee which called for an immediate end to the attempts to revive violence in the hills by forces of reaction and divisiveness.

Speaking to the media from his bed at the Siliguri nursing home, Subhas Ghising himself pleaded for restraint and said that he wholeheartedly wanted peace to prevail in the hills.

A special investigating team was constituted by the Left Front government to look into the attack made on Ghising’s life. The team comprised top officers of the Intelligence Branch, Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and central Subsidiary Intelligence Branch. Several police officers of Darjeeling district were included in the team.

As already reported by INN, pointers lead to the militant Gorkha Liberation Organisation (GLO) (and its chief, and former Ghising aide Chhatre Subba) for having plotted the armed assault. According to Havildar B B Tamang, the police escort who not merely dragged Ghising to safety in the face of intense fire from semi-automatic guns, but managed to shoot and kill the marksman who was sniping away at the GNLF leader, the slain militant was heavily armed, wore battle fatigues and had a cellular phone strapped to his back. He appeared to be from the north east hill region.

Subsequently, the state police officials told INN at Darjeeling town that two persons (one of them a woman) were taken into custody on the basis of the Caller Identity system of the incoming menu of the slain militant’s mobile phone.

Mystery surrounds the leakage of the GNLF leader’s route to Darjeeling from Siliguri, despite the diversionary tactics adopted. One police official told INN that the fear of an insider doing the dirty work of disseminating vital information is always on the cards unless otherwise proved. The GLO under Subba had broken with Ghising’s GNLF a few months back and repeatedly issued warnings that if Ghising did not mount a separatist movement for Darjeeling to be declared a state, he would "finish off" the GNLF supremo. Subba has close links with the ULFA and with the NSCN (Muivah group) of Nagaland.

There is, of course, no mystery about the Trinamul Congress chief’s verdict on the sad incident. In a statement, Ms Mamata Banerjee observed that the incident was a handiwork of the CPI(M), and called for a CBI inquiry (again!).

Characteristically, the Trinamul leader appeared unfazed later when confronted by newspersons with an embarrassing development that took place early on February 13 morning at Arambagh in Hooghly district.

In a surprise raid, the state police nabbed Choudhury Rafiqul-Islam and Biswajit Pal, two notorious history-sheeters. What transpired on their interrogation makes intriguing reading. Confronted with plenty of evidence, both Rafiq and Pal confessed that they had been employed by the Trinamul Congress to organise mayhem at Chamkaitala in Midnapore and at Arambagh and Goghat in Hooghly.

After getting leads on others from the interrogation, the police arrested several other miscreants, all of whom are bandits and all have affiliation with the Trinamul Congress. They were apparently supplied with sophisticated weapons and asked to create terror in areas where the CPI(M) and the Left enjoyed a secure popular support. Further investigations are on the way and may well embarrass Ms Banerjee and her lieutenants further.

And if the Trinamul is so deep in its nexus with the underworld, can the Pradesh Congress be far behind? When a fearsome anti-social, with a long history of misdeeds, Mohammed Jahangir alias "Mogul" was gunned down in a dark alley in the Metiaburz locality of Kolkata, Pradesh Congress leaders fell over each other in claiming that the dead criminal had been a "district secretary of their party."

A LONG and winding procession was taken out along the thoroughfares of Kolkata on February 12 evening to express empathy with the victims of the earthquake in Gujarat. The marchers were led by chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. The largest number of the marchers were school-going children of various age-groups who held up placards that said "We Are with Quake Victims."

Besides Bhattacharya, other leaders like Anil Biswas, Biman Basu and Sailen Dasgupta (CPI-M). Nandagopal Bhattacharya and Manjukumar Majumdar (CPI), Naren De (Forward Bloc) and Hashim Abdul Halim, speaker of the Bengal assembly, walked along with the thousands of marchers as the procession went out from the Victoria Memorial to near the Aakashvaani Bhavan where it ended.

The only note of discordance was struck when a handful of Trinamul miscreants sought to provoke the marchers by showering abuse on them near the Maidan area. The marchers, however, ignored these pitiable attempts at creating disturbance and strode past the would-be troublemakers.

ADDRESSING a large gathering of CPI(M) workers belonging to the Jadavpur zonal unit of the party at Kishore Bharati Stadium in South Kolkata on February 15, state CPI(M) secretary Anil Biswas said the emergence of a stronger Left Front in the wake of the polls would augur well for the ongoing struggle against the policies being pursued by the BJP and its cohorts towards, plunging the country into economic dysfunction and political chaos.

Biswas asserted that the BJP-led government’s agriculture policy has reduced the rate of agricultural production from 3.22 to just 1.75 per cent per annum. At the same time, while there is overproduction in certain food crops, the union government is refusing to increase their procurement. This is discouraging production and encouraging the import of heavily subsidised food crops and cereals from outside.

In Punjab, farmers chose to destroy more than 30,000 metric tonnes of prime quality wheat when they failed to secure viable prices. In Maharashtra, the counter-guarantee given to ENRON meant that the high rate of tax imposed on irrigation facilities including water supply has enormously increased the cost of cultivation across the board.

The rate of industrial growth has staggered to a crawling pace. Biswas also disclosed, quoting figures available with the union government, that the rate of growth in this vital and core sector had slid back by more than five per cent in the space of less than a decade. The number of those unemployed has spiralled up to alarming levels, Biswas added.

In the cyber-savvy administration of Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh, Biswas said the tragic outcome of the policy of liberalisation "has been a spate of suicides by farmers who are not able to make both ends meet under the new economic dispensation."

Juxtaposing to it the achievements of the Left Front government, the CPI(M) leader reminded the party workers how food production in Bengal had increased to an annual growth rate of over 6.8 per cent whereas the national average has fallen far below. The existence of the Left Front government has also ensured the fructification of redistributive land reforms in favour of the rural poor and the landless. In 1970, Biswas stressed, a mere 30 per cent of the cultivable or paibaqi land remained with the poor peasants. In 1998-99, the figure stood at over 70 per cent. The khet mazdoors of Bengal enjoy the highest daily wages in the country.

Chief minister and CPI(M) Polit Bureau member, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, said all attempts at creating a kind of "grand alliance" of the Trinamul Congress, BJP and Pradesh Congress "is bound to end up in failure since mere electoral convenience would not sustain this kind of disparate combination which is driven only by its burning hatred of the Left and has little to offer by way of an alternative programme."

Bhattacharya also said the liberal import regime has already created a panic among indigenous producers. By bringing in rice from Thailand and Taiwan, the Indian kisans are made to face a deepening crisis. The large-sale import of tea from Sri Lanka will mean depression of the prices of Indian tea and adversely affect the production of Indian tea plantations, with concurrent adverse effect on the chia kamans.

The chief minister stated that the BJP regime's policy of prostrating before the US administration "has put the nation's sovereignty on the block while its patronage for majority communalism has ensured the rise of the forces of divisiveness in Indian society."

Enumerating the strides made by the Left Front government in the realm of industrialisation and employment generation, the chief minister called for an intensification of the campaign in the state as the crucial assembly polls are approaching fast.

At the meeting a sum of Rs 1.21 lakh was handed over to Anil Biswas as aid for the quake victims of Gujarat. Biswas told INN that the amount would be handed over to the CPI(M) Polit Bureau for onward transmission to the affected people of Gujarat.

The meeting, presided over by veteran CPI(M) leader Pranab Sen, was also addressed by leaders of the party’s South 24 Parganas district unit.

THE Punjab National Bank (PNB) has decided to close down four of its profit-making branches in Kolkata. These branches are situated at Sankharipara, Satish Mukherjee Road, Selimpore and Mirza Ghalib Street. The PNB’s regional office already communicated to the PNB headquarters its recommendation about an early closure of these branches.

Ironically, all these four branches showed profit during the first half of the year 2000, and also amassed a fair amount of deposits in the same period. The figures alongside are from the PNB's official papers:

The closure of these branches will mean that 54 officers and employees would immediately face unemployment.

In the wake of the BJP-led union government's decision to sale off to the private sector no less than 67 per cent shares of the nationalised banks, a wide range of lay-offs and closures have marked the industry. In Bengal, the past few months have seen the United Bank, the United Commercial Bank and the Indian Bank close down a number of viable branches. And now the PNB joins the list. (INN)