People's Democracy

Trinamul And Maoist Hooligans From

 Outside Organising Assaults On Singur Villagers

B Prasant

ARMED hooligans have been identified by Singur villagers as the culprits who are organising assaults on those of the kisans and landowners who had accepted the LF government proposal for land acquisition for an automobile factory there.

The hooligans belong mostly to the Maoists and various shades of Naxalites along with activists of the Trinamul Congress and the SUCI. These lumpen elements have been lying low in Singur villages under protection of local Trinamul Congress chiefs and have come out to organise attack on villagers and on the police in order to create chaos.

Their antics, violent and dangerous, could not deter the villagers from coming out in their thousands in the task of demarcation and fencing of the land acquired. A section of the corporate media has been constrained to depict the acts of commission of these hooligans-on-hire as they threw bombs and acid bulbs on the villagers, and slashed and hacked at the police personnel on duty to maintain order by enforcing Section 144.

Of the 48 people arrested by the police, 47 were outsiders. Included in their ranks were Maoists from a Kolkata college and a university. There were SUCI activists from south 24 Parganas, and Trinamul Congress goons from Howrah and Barrackpore.

These worthies had earlier ransacked houses of CPI(M) supporters and of those who had handed over land plots to the state LF government, accepting the handsome compensation fixed. Crops were destroyed, paddy set on fire, and sackfuls of vegetables, ready for the market, were destroyed.

Left Front chairman Biman Basu has condemned the acts and asked the police to continue to show restraint in the face of even dire provocation. A bunch of self-proclaimed environmentalists led by Medha Patkar chose to come to Singur on the sly recently in an ambulance posing as patients; they were spotted quickly enough by the local people, and were asked to go away.

Speaking to the audio-visual media, Patkar later compared the Left Front government with the Modi-led Gujarat state government. She would not comment on the ransacking of the assembly house by Trinamul Congress MLAs.

The bonhomie between Trinamul Congress and BJP was evident when BJP president Rajnath Singh said in Kolkata that he would not like the automobile factory at Singur to come up at all. The Trinamul Congress chieftain chimed in to say, despite the ground reality being otherwise, that she would continue to build up ‘people’s resistance at Singur’ against the land acquisition and the setting up of the factory.