People's Democracy

Left Front MLAs Team Visits Nandigram

B Prasant

A team comprising twenty-three Left Front members of the Bengal assembly recently visited Nandigram for a full day. The team included five women legislators. They spoke to the villagers irrespective of the political divide to which they belonged. They felicitated the rural folk for taking up the challenge of living as peacefully together as prior to the eleven months’ tyranny of the Maoist-Trinamul combination by the deeds of torture and death, arson and loot, molestation and rape, treachery and deceit.

Women of Nandigram in particular had tales of heart-rending woes to narrate. Those like Saleha Biwi, Saheba Biwi, Kishori Mondal, Maneka Mondal et al who were forcefully ejected from the hutments at places like Satengabari, Burman Para, and Mia Khali narrated the sheer dread they went through at the relief camps, at the relatives’ houses where they were put up for few days – and then again made to be on the run- fright, indeed had never left these vulnerable purdanasheen women who were forced to discard their sensitivity to go through for an endless period, the less-than-human condition that most CPI(M) refugees at Nandigram had to face, always on the run, always trembling with a creeping apprehension of marauding assaults. On return, they found virtually everything gone, and they have since been engaged but with dauntless cheer in rebuilding their lives.

For those like Shefali Makhal, Shahbanu Biwi, Kabita Mondal, Purnā Mondal et al of Keyakhali and Ranichak, who would not move from their homestead plots and hutments, it was a tale of extortion, loot, rape, molestation, abduction, and murder.  Almost every day, and every night, roughnecks of the Trinamul Congress and Maoists would routinely visit their places, force the CPI(M) supporters to feed them and provide them with as much luxurious creature comforts as possible. All rural activities came to a standstill, and the constant smell of gunpowder was heavy in the air.

TORTURE

The minimum amount extracted from the villagers who had the courage to stay back and refuse disdainfully to join the brigandage, was Rs 5,000 – a considerable amount for the kisans and the khet mazdoors.  All the time the goons kept them interned, none would dare go far out from the relative safety of their huts, even to answer calls of nature. Telling about all this made the Nandigram women break down and sob helplessly before the Left Front MLAs who were not able themselves to hold back tears of deep comradeship and sensitive empathy.

There has been no heckling — far from any assault — by the returned refugees on the perpetrators of the deeds of heinous torture. The goons of the Trinamul Congress and their willing or unwilling lackeys are quite able to meander free and careless around Nandigram.  The Trinamul Congress supporters themselves would tell the LF legislators that they found life normal even after the destitute and the poor, the people whom they had made homeless, returned, set up shop, and picked up the pieces of life they had found scattered across the fields and the meadows that once had housed their huts and sheds. 

The Mondal couple, Sheila and Chittaranjan, told the MLAs quite casually that life for them has never left the orbit of normalcy, and confessed a tiny bit sheepishly that while staunch supporters of Mamatadidi, they were also Maoist sympathisers and had acted as their gun-runners, for it had been the Maoists who had remained at the helm of affairs during the great fear that had pervaded every corner of Nandigram for close to a year.

The MLAs saw and with trepidation the tall, fortress like house of a Trinamul Congress subaltern of the locality, a house with large gateways and heavy doors, from where several pairs of thick electric wires lie even now in different directions to end up at far away places where the police and the CRPF later unearthed most of the remote-operated improvised explosive devices or IEDs. Such centres of conspiracy became quite numerous after the Maoists had joined in.

The MLAs spoke to the people of Nandigram of the need to build up on the theme of peace with which the desperadoes had tried and failed to make the CPI(M) supporters unfamiliar.  But what left the legislators wondering with a sense of mounting unease was the familiar tale repeated endlessly by the villagers about Trinamul Congress goons who in their scores and dozens moved about Nandigram in a cavalier manner, and looked menacingly at the CPI(M) supporters on the lonely streets and lonelier pathways, and dropped dark, heavy hints that things would ‘become normal again, just wait for the CRPF to leave and the police to wind up their presence.’