JIRANIA MASSACRE 

KILLERS EMERGED FROM CONGRESS POLL SQUAD 

IN a major demonstration of its gang-up with a militant outfit, the Congress-INPT combine carried out a barbaric attack on innocent people at Dusmanta Narayanpara, Bankimnagar GP of Jirania, West Tripura, on the 54th Republic Day. The attack claimed the lives of 11 CPI(M) activists, supporters and their family members including women and children, and grievously injured 6 others. It will be noted that NLFT extremists had already threatened to unleash violence on the day.

On the same day, NLFT extremists butchered another CPI(M) activist at Gungiya Sardarpara under Amarpur subdivision, South Tripura. The total toll of extremist attacks in Tripura since the announcement of the assembly poll schedule on January 11 till date has thus reached 23. Of these, 21 were CPI(M) activists and supporters, one was an activist of the democratic teachers movement and one was a former extremist who had surrendered and returned to the democratic mainstream.

The dastardly attack at Dusmanta Narayanpara was the direct act of a poll campaign squad of the Congress party. The carnage reminded one of the pre-planned genocide of about 100 innocent non-tribal people including women and children in the span of a few days during the run-up to the 1988 assembly polls in Tripura. The 1988 massacre was carried out by extremists of the erstwhile TNV, led by the same Bijoy Hrangkhawl who currently heads the INPT, as a part of his secret deal with the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and his party, and was designed to dislodge the Left Front government. With the state assembly polls now slated for next month, the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress party has struck an alliance with the same Hrangkhawl and his INPT, in a bid to replicate the game her late husband had played 15 years ago.

At about 8.00 p m on January 26, under the cover of a power cut, hooded gunmen came out of a Congress party’s poll campaign squad and a nearby rubber garden at the same time and entered Dusmanta Narayanpara, a thinly populated cluster of 11 houses. They were reportedly dressed in paramilitary uniform and armed with AK series rifles. Carefully avoiding the houses of 3 Congress supporters, these gunmen targeted the houses of 8 CPI(M) activists and opened fire at random, killing on the spot the CPI(M)’s Madhusudhan Goswami and Harekrishna Sutradhar as well as the 6 years old son and 3 years old daughter of another CPI(M) activist Santosh Shil. The attack left 13 others grievously injured. Later on, 7 more out of these 13, whom party activists had rushed to G B Hospital at Agartala, succumbed to injuries. The utmost effort of the physicians and the hectic activities of party leaders and activists to arrange for medicines and blood transfusion failed to save their lives. The victims included party activist Sankar Sutradhar, Prankrishna Shil (a 60 years old activist of the democratic mass movement), and 3 women aged 15 to 50. Eyewitness accounts at Dusmanta Narayanpara said that a branded Muslim miscreant and close aide of Congress candidate Dipak Nag and a notorious hardcore NLFT extremist were the kinpins of the carnage.

In another incident near Amarpur on the same night, NLFT extremists and INPT miscreants brutally killed with blunt and sharp weapons a CPI(M) activist, Comrade Kantarai Reang (45), in his house.

Vehemently condemning the January 26 incidents of extremist carnage, CPI(M) spokesman and state secretariat member Gautam Das said at a press conference in the party’s state headquarters on January 27 afternoon that the affected Dusmanta Narayanpara families as well as Comrade Kantarai Reang were being threatened with death for the past few days for their involvement with the CPI(M) poll campaign. He also informed that Nakshatra Jamatia, CPI(M) candidate in Ampinagar, is also being threatened against contesting.

Das said according to local people, Dipak Nag (Congress candidate at Majlishpur in Jirania) and Nagendra Jamatia (INPT candidate at Ampinagar in Amarpur) are responsible for this barbaric extremist carnage. He said the Congress president Sonia Gandhi is answerable to the country for the massacre of innocent villagers, being carried out as part of a cruel conspiracy to deprive the state of free and fair polls. It is the heinous alliance of this party with the INPT, the political mask of outlawed extremist outfit NLFT, that is responsible for this conspiracy.

The CPI(M) has urged the state government to institute a high level inquiry into the Dusmanta Narayanpara inhabitants’ serious allegation that gunmen in black hoods, emerging from the midst of a Congress electioneering squad, were the perpetrators of the January 26 incident.

On January 27 afternoon, Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar met the union home minister L K Advani in Delhi to demand immediate dispatch of adequate security forces to tackle the tremendous threat to free and fair polls in the state. On the same day, Lok Sabha member from West Tripura, Khagen Das, met the state’s chief electoral officer on behalf of the Left Front and put forward some specific demands in connection with the people’s right to exercise their franchise. The demands include all-out measures to defend democracy from anti-national forces masquerading in a democratic garb. He vehemently protested against a desperate and unprecedented infringement upon the jurisdiction of electoral authorities by Dipak Roy, the Congress candidate of 4-Barjala in West Tripura. In a letter to the district election officer dated January 24, Roy had demanded that all the polling personnel mentioned in the list enclosed therewith be appointed in his constituency.  

On January 27, from morning till night, thousands of peace-loving people of Tripura staged roaring protest demonstrations statewide, at the call of the Left Front, in vehement condemnation of the pogrom plotted by motivated political parties that are hand in globe with the extremists. They articulated their anger and anguish at the barbarity being perpetrated. Yet, these atrocities are only steeling the people’s resolve to trounce in the next month’s elections the masterminds of such mindless massacres.

On the other hand, even traditional Congress supporters are seething with a rage over the miserable degeneration of this party. Incidentally, egged on by Congress candidate Dipak Nag, Congress activists threw stones and opened fire at a protest mach of CPI(M) leaders and activists at Jirania on January 27 morning. Prompt police intervention averted any serious mishap. (INN)