People's Democracy

Case Of The ‘Missing’ Trinamul Miscreant

FOR some days now, sections of the corporate media are in desperation to find even isolated instances of Trinamul Congress supporters having been ‘kidnapped and/or made homeless by the CPI(M)’ in and around Nandigram. Having failed to unearth a single instance, the easy recourse has recently been taken to fabrication, something that the corporate media persons under the tutelage of their anti-communist head honchos, have toned down to a fine art, nothing less.

‘MISSING’

Ananda Bazar Patrika of March 31 has indulged itself in such a story involving a ‘missing person.’ According to the story filed ‘from Nandigram,’ Durgapada Maiti, a ‘van-rickshaw puller’ suddenly went missing after March 14 when the fracas occurred at Nandigram. 

The report then packs in a lot of emotional appeal to highlight, not very successfully though, for the artificiality of feelings surface quickly enough, the ‘sad and sorry plight’ of his relatives who fear that the worst has happened, Durgapada has either been kidnapped or killed, or he has died in police firing. 

Neither is of course true. In addition, Durgapada is not the ‘simple and humble rickshaw puller’ he is represented as. Durgapada Maiti of Rainagar at Nandigram went missing not from March 14 but ten days earlier. A Trinamul Congress strongman, an explosives expert, and a bomb-maker, Durgapada went away for an ‘unknown destination’ on March 4 after duly informing his family members that he departs to ‘fulfil an important mission.’ 

DEADLY MISSION

The police who had by now realised what the strongly-built six-footer rickshaw-puller’s ‘mission’ would be like, came to his house, and Durgapada’s wife told them with a straight face that her husband has gone to visit his sister at Southkhali, some distance away. 

In fact, our Durgapada had gone to strengthen the Trinamul Congress ‘local headquarters’ at Keshabpore that had by then been filled with Trinamul Congress ‘strongmen’ from Midnapore east as well as from Hooghly, and even Bankura. The camp was also attended by Maoists. The ‘braves’ had their task cut out. Under Durgapada’s expert tutelage, they were to put together what is known as ‘improvised explosives,’ that is, country-made bombs. 

Sometimes expertise fails. Such was the event deep into the night of March 4 when the entire Keshabpore area trembled with a series of explosions. It has been reported that probably Durgapada was blown apart in the blast that occurred. And that the Maoists, ever adept at such circumstances, whisked away what remained of him to a nearby house of a Trinamul Congress worker on March 5. Others injured may have also suffered the same fate.

SOB STORY

No trace was left of Durgapada, until his ‘resurfacing’ in a sob-story in the columns of the Patrika. What the corporate barons conveniently forget is that lying through the teeth in a shameless fashion would never justify the act of gross violation of the very ‘human rights’ they shout themselves hoarse about, of close to four thousand villagers rendered homeless by the rogues and ruffians of the Trinamul Congress and the Maoists.

A worried Ashok Guria, AIKS leader of Midnapore east recently expressed his alarm over the fact that with summer storms just around the corner, the condition of the ousted people living in the camps would become precarious, even life threatening. Would the Ananda Bazar Patrika care to write a story about their plight, if only for the sake of, as they are quite fond of saying, ‘balancing the picture?’