People's Democracy

Trinamul Congress Launches Violent Attacks On Nandigram

B Prasant

THE ‘liberated area’ at Nandigram Block I continues to be a zone where the Trinamul Congress and its lackeys on the right and the extreme left, boss around with armed might. Very recently, visits to the area revealed that those kisans who had come out of their hutments to sow seeds of cereals and vegetables as seasonal rain poured down causing cheers all round were attacked and prevented from doing their sowing work.

As soon as the kisans had come onto the fields for work, especially in various parts of Nandigram Block I, especially at Sonachura, armed hooligans sneaked out of their hideouts, mostly houses of local Trinamul toughs, attacked them at gunpoint, brutally beat them up, and forced them to leave, robbing them of the meagre bagfuls of seeds the poor kisans carried.

We note that the Sonachura area is controlled by Maoists alone and they have a subterranean strife with the Trinamul Congress over control of the location. Nonetheless, these criminal elements are united when it comes to attacking the CPI(M) and the Left Front leadership and workers as well as sympathisers.

Everything that is done, a CPI(M) worker of the area told us, is being orchestrated in the name of the save agricultural committee. The real villains of the piece, however, are the Trinamul Congress, the Maoists, and the Naxalites.

CPI(M) WORKER KILLED

Earlier, CPI(M) worker Bapan Patra (25) had his abdomen ripped apart with dozens of large-calibre bullets from automatic weapons at the small and quiet Pankhai hamlet at Nandigram on July 29, a day the Trinamul Congress-Maoists-Naxalite assassins had chosen to launch a multi-pronged and surprise attack on CPI(M) workers and on CPI(M) offices at Nandigram Block I.

Comrade Bapan was working in the fields when he was sprayed with bullets from the rear and side. Comrade Bapan died on the spot before any help could arrive; and his young blood spread a widening pool of crimson over the green of the field. Clearly, the sweeping win by the CPI(M) and the Left Front at the Haldia civic polls had made the Bengal opposition worthies desperate and panic-struck.

The murderers also shot at and critically injured and on the same afternoon, another CPI(M) worker and a poor farmer, Arun Das (29) near the Tekhali bridge beyond the west border of which the writ of the ‘save agricultural committee’ runs albeit over smaller, and yet smaller areas as the rural populace gradually start to stand united en masse against the raiders who are dubbed ‘freedom fighters’ by the Trinamul-Naxalite leaders of the locality, and by a section of the media, making a travesty of history and politics.

‘CLASS ENEMY’

Comrade Arun belonged to a very poor kisan family. He would supplement his income as a khet mazdoor by collecting and selling fresh juice of palm fruits to support the family. The family lives in a small dilapidated hutment. Comrade Arun died a painful death in a hospital having his vital organs ripped apart earlier during the attack launched on him. This is the ‘class enemy’ the Maoists-Naxalites subsequently claimed to have ‘successfully eliminated’ and with glee.

The entire malicious episode and those preceding it, calls to mind the 1970s in Bengal, when poor kisans and adhiyaars (sharecroppers without barga rights) would be similarly joyfully ‘eliminated’ by the Naxalites while jotdars and zamindars as well as the urban elite would be touchingly spared of any trouble. As then, no mention is made of these gruesome murders of the innocent in the corporate media, print, and audio-visual, local, regional, or national.

PARTY OFFICE ATTACKED, LOOTED

The Trinamul-Maoists-Naxalites then turned their violent might right onto the Nandigram zonal unit office of the CPI(M) soon after the Nandigram populace had bravely taken out a large victory procession celebrating the Haldia civic poll triumph. Party workers and sympathisers were milling about the office and the small courtyard in front of it and exchanging greetings when suddenly jeep-borne miscreants swooped in, firing indiscriminately again from automatic weapons.

More than 200 CPI(M) workers who were in and out of the office somehow made well their escape just before the goons, gun blasting away entered the office, overcoming the police line, and ransacked the office, looting all the way. On the way back, they lifted several bicycles and stole a motorcycle that belonged to the zonal office.

They also kidnapped three CPI(M) workers on the way back: nothing has been heard about the ultimate fate of these comrades as this report is filed. Biman Basu, state secretary of the Bengal unit of the CPI(M) has strongly condemned the resurrection of unprovoked violence at Nandigram yet again by the Trinamul-Maoists-Naxalite combination.

JYOTI BASU CONDEMNS ATTACK

CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Jyoti Basu has strongly condemned the violence by the Trinamul-Maoist-Naxalite outfits at Nandigram. The Imam of Jama Masjid, Syed Ahmad Bukhari who paid a courtesy call on Jyoti Basu at the latter’s residence condemned all attempts to disrupt communal harmony and amity at Nandigram and elsewhere in Bengal by anti-development forces.

Mamata Banerjee made a shocking statement following the Nandigram imbroglio. She said in so many words that the police and the CPI(M) were ‘engaged in warfare against everybody except the CPI(M) there’, and added, in a desperate attempt to compete with Jamaat leader Siddiqullah Chaudhuri’s line of rousing communal passions of the violent kind, that the CPI(M) had deliberately chosen the ‘jumma’ day to launch attacks on members of a certain community at Nandigram. She even threatened ‘all-out terror-tactics’ if this state-of-affairs continued at Nandigram,’ not elaborating her cryptic and sinister declaration any further.