People's Democracy

(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

Vol. XXXI

No. 27

July 08, 2007

TAPASI MALIK’S DEATH AT SINGUR

Politics Of Conspiracy Afoot Again

B Prasant

DEATH of a young girl, of a lively teenager – that too an agonising death – is a tragedy especially when she has to die in an ordeal of the most macabre kind. The young kid was still alive albeit seriously beaten up, when she was put to the torch after being forcefully crammed into a narrow ditch in a field nearby so that she would not be able to struggle even in her last agony to try and come out into the open and cry for help. Nobody wants to die. Young Tapasi Malik of the Bajeymelia village was no exception in this regard. The patch of land where she was found is located within the compound, walled and secure, of the automobile factory coming up at Singur in the Hooghly district of Bengal.

Any event is always explained at the primary level of understanding by finding out who has benefited from the occurrence. A point to which we shall come back later.

What happened during the latter half of December 2006 when an unseasonable cold was sweeping Hooghly and the surrounding districts keeping most but the needy inside their hutments? A slice of local history is in order to set the background to the foulest murder of a young girl.

FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

A small, semi-pucca house, mostly unpainted, where the extended family of the Maliks lives is located at the Dakshinpara locality of the village. The locale is politically dominated by the forces of right reaction, chiefly Trinamul Congress and the BJP. Opposite the Malik house stands a club run by the Trinamul Congress that also houses gangs of criminals as a regular occurrence.

The Malik family as we found out could not be called ardent supporters, far from being workers, of the CPI(M) but they have always detested the strong-arm tactics of the forces of the right and have always voted for the Left Front. The extended family comprised not only Monoranjan, wife Malina, daughter Tapasi, and her brother, but also very many uncles, aunts, cousins, often several times removed, a ‘young’ grandfather’ Debu Malik in his early fifties and a ‘young’ grandmother.

We were told that the family led a quiet unobtrusive life and that they were each of them known for their good behaviour and helpful nature. The only point of clash (verbal not physical) would occur when the young toughs of the Trinamul Congress, drunk and disorderly, casting glad eyes on the Malik women, would forcibly demand subscriptions of thousands of rupees for the save agricultural committee. Monoranjan eked out a living by selling fish from a pavement stall. The family owned not an iota of land, agricultural or otherwise. The goons would swagger back, threatening dire consequences to ‘you bootlickers of the CPI(M).’

TRAGEDY STRIKES

A new turn of event then occurred, filled with premonitions of tragedy. Tapasi had allegedly become friendly with a Trinamul Congress boy from a different community for a year or so, so we heard, and had started meeting him first in secret and then quite openly, causing a huge amount of displeasure in the rather conservative Malik household as they started to be teased regularly by the club toughs over the development. The ire fell of Tapasi who then turned more defiant (expected of a teenager trying to find her ‘independence’ for the first time) and was even seen briefly in a save agricultural committee procession that passed in front of the Malik house, causing embarrassment to the elderly members of the extended family in particular.

On the fateful day, tells Malina, the mother of Tapasi, her daughter woke up unusually early and was seen moving towards a thicket some hundred yards away from her residence. At 6:30 AM, that is to say two hours later, Malina tells us, two ‘unknown persons’ came running, told Malina that ‘your daughter is burning like a fireworks,’ smiled maniacally and disappeared into the nearby area overgrown with bushes and leafy trees.

A completely panic-struck and tearful mother then rushed out, followed up by all her extended family members including Debabrata (“Debu”) Malik. They first ran towards Bosepukur where Tapasi would go in the morning to relieve herself. Then another unknown man appeared and as he ran past, he shouted that TV camera crews were filming a ‘burning body at south Bajeymelia’s Aswathapara locality.’

TV CHANNEL ARRIVES

Arriving at the spot which is inside the automobile factory’s fencing and near a swing door of wire mesh through which the masons and other workmen enter the compound, the Malik family found camera crews of the Kolkata TV channel, concentrative in the task of filming the burning and prone human figure in a narrow ditch with little care to first ascertain whether the person had really died.

Where had the camera crew come from?
How could they reach the exact spot so quickly after the body had been dragged from Bosepukur to Aswathapara?
Why were they, as the local people revealed, well prepared for fixing stationary camera angles taking shots of a scene as if they had known what would be the lie of the land, both literally and figuratively.

By the time, the first light had broken through the cloud cover, SUCI and Naxalite leaders appeared on the scene, and as Malina pointed out, they dragged her away, and started to tell her repeatedly to say to all authorities and all the villagers that:

Tapasi was killed by the night guards who patrol the perimeter of the automobile factory at night who are “all CPI(M) killers”
These men had dragged Tapasi inside the compound and had set her on fire (the issue of rape was not even mentioned at this stage)

We note here that the night guards’ duty ends at 4:00 AM but Malina was to tell the authorities and the police that on that day the CPI(M) conspired to keep the killer night guards at the sight until the evil deed was done

DIVIDED OVER SUICIDE OR MURDER

The police arrived and a different drama was allowed to take place. The Naxalite-SUCI leadership started to shout slogans that Tapasi having committed suicide in anguish at the slow pace in which the save agricultural committee’s movement was taking place and that she was depressed because her family had lost a lot of land. They then telephoned the opposition parties to say that an issue had at last been found with which to berate the CPI(M) and rejuvenate the flagging movement at Singur.

Joydeb Santra, a Trinamul Congress activist, shouted out that he had seen Tapasi proceed towards Bosepukur and that she was carrying a can of kerosene. He also said that for some days Tapasi had been in a very irritable mood with sounds of her having differences over some personal matters reaching out to the part of the house where he lived. He was immediately heckled and chased away by the Naxalite-SUCI groups who had now been joined by local Trinamul Congress goons.

The CID, a state institution started enquiries but when the opposition demanded that the case be handed over to the CBI, Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee immediately complied. The CBI sat over the case after a perfunctory visit to the spot. They even leaked to the media that they suspected the father and brother of the late Tapasi as being in some way or other connected with the murder and that the duo would be subjected to polygraph tests.

There was a huge noise made in the corridors of North Block up in Delhi when a large number of national networks carried the news. There was again a period of silence prevailing in the CBI offices at Salt Lake and Delhi. As the acting state secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M) Benoy Konar said, a conspiracy had been hatched during the period when the CBI was dormant about enquiring into this affair.

CBI GOES INTO OVERDRIVE

The CBI suddenly started to pick up CPI(M) leaders as well as Bajeymelia villagers, including Joydeb Santra, and villagers who were CPI(M) sympathisers like Subodh Koley, Mahadeb Santra, and Dilip Malik. Much more important, the CBI in its wisdom chose to go in for long and harsh interrogations at their Salt Lake offices. Among the two-dozen-odd people picked up were the CPI(M) leaders Suhrid Dutta, and Dibakar Das, both senior CPI(M) zonal committee-level leaders, Suhrid Dutta being the zonal secretary. Also picked up was Tapasi’s relative Debu Malik. They were grilled for hours together at Salt Lake, and Suhrid Dutta was taken into custody on the charge of complicity in the murder of Tapasi Malik. Dibakar Das was released. Debu Malik was taken to Delhi, and he perhaps succumbed to what is generally known in interrogation parlance as having been put at the receiving end of a harsh third-degree grilling.

One may recall the countless times the CBI had distorted the procedure of investigation in very many cases, and / or has controlled the pace at which the cases would proceed. We shall cite two examples.

First, let us recall the Haren Pandya (former home minister of Gujarat) murder case of March 2003. Pandya was sternly opposed to chief minister Narendra Modi. Pandya’s wife has recently told the media that the CBI would not take her interview knowing well that she had important evidence about who had organised the murder.

Second, the CBI had once claimed to the media that the mid-nineties Hawala-Jain case was ready for prosecution. Many years had passed by. Nothing has been done in the case. The prime minister recently told the parliament that there are 8219 cases pending with the CBI and that of them 245 cases are kept hanging fire for no less than 20 years or more. It is known that most of the cases have political implications.

As Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, commenting on the Tapasi Malik murder case has said, one has to wait and see how things twist and turn in the days to come. Elsewhere a very successful bandh was organised under the aegis of the CPI(M) at Singur protesting the arrest of the senior CPI(M) leader Suhrid Dutta.

WHO BENEFITS?

Who could possibly benefit from the gruesome murder of a young girl? As we have repeatedly stressed in these columns, the Trinamul Congress-Naxalite-SUCI-Maoists right-left alliance has long been trying in a desperate fashion, covertly and otherwise, to sabotage all efforts of the Bengal Left Front to go on the path of pro-people industrialisation while enhancing the agricultural base. The enemies of progress chose Singur, and then Nandigram when the Singur affair started to lose its sting despite imported help from outside of the state.

The Maliks did not own land. No one knew the name of Tapasi as a leader of the save agriculture committee. It is clear that if anyone connected even remotely with the 'save agriculture committee' is even attacked or assaulted; the damage that will be done will be done to the CPI(M) and the Left Front. We have no doubt that the story that CPI(M) had Tapasi killed would not hold water in the subsequent stages of the development of the CBI case.

At Singur itself, as we found out, nearly everybody other than the local and imported Trinamul-Naxalite-Maoists agrees that whether it had been a case of homicide or suicide, the CPI(M) could not have been involved. The fact that the unfortunate young woman, unconscious from beating she had received was dragged inside the automobile factory premises is another pointer to the conspiracy of associating the incident with the coming up of the factory.

It is important to note the day of the killing. Mamata Banerjee’s so-called ‘fasting’ had failed to attract the attention even as a piece of weird show. She waited for something to happen to rejuvenate the Singur fracas. We note how the Trinamul Congress wrangled over the Naxalites about who would claim the body of the poor woman, almost burnt to a blackened piece of flesh, and bring out a march in Singur itself. The villagers recall the huge shouting match that the Trinamul activists engaged the police with over the body. Apart from the bandh that flopped, the left-right alliance organised various programmes across the state, and thus it is they and not the CPI(M) and the Left Front that stood to benefit from the murder. This should be clear to anybody other than those monomaniacs of the ultra left and the right, to whom every kind of crime happening in Bengal must be somehow be attributed to the CPI(M) and evidence and logic be damned.

ROLE OF CBI

The role of CBI is not beyond question as we have already mentioned above. They have been making selective unofficial and anonymous leaks to members of the media, of the right and the left about the proceedings of the case. They it was who let it be known speaking in complete anonymity that polygraph tests would be done on Tapasi’s father and brother as the blood groups of the dead kid and the father and the brother did not match. Corporate media carried the story as did the alternative and popular media, print and audio-visual.

Now when Debu Malik was first taken into custody and then arrested and a case under Cr Pc 302 slapped on him, a few well-known media houses in the capital were fed the details. The so-called ‘confessionary statement’ of Debu is one such leak. A few newspapers, TV channels, and other forms of print media have also been allowed to say that the leak came from ‘an investigating officer’ of the CBI.

Is not that officer breaking the existing law and regulations? Should not the home ministry have a serious look into it? Nothing is being done. What really took us by surprise was that the language and mode of arguments of the CBI lawyer who argued in the case at the Chandernagore court was almost a replica and repetition of what had been said the day before by the anchor of a particular TV channel. Is this a mere coincidence? Are not these developments clearly orchestrated to malign the CPI(M) and the Left Front at a time when the opposition’s movement at Singur has petered out and that at Nandigram reduced to the level of hit-and-run tactics with the attackers starting to face resistance from the rural populace, even from those who eke out a miserable living at relief camps?

Benoy Konar has identified the arrest of Suhrid Dutta (who contrary to rumours in the Bengali language press, continues to hold the post of the zonal secretary) and others as a conspiracy to malign the CPI(M). The CPI(M) is not maniacal that it would cause a murder to occur just when the automobile factory was about to be up, Benoy Konar pointed out. Such acts would benefit only those who are against industrialisation of every kind.