People's Democracy

Trinamulis Play Dirty Politics With

Dug Up Remains Of CPI(M) Workers

Killed At A Relief Camp

Those had been the stormy times of dark days and darker nights when the CPI(M) workers were at the receiving end of waves of fierce and armed attacks from the Trinamul Congress and their Maoist controllers at Nandigram. It was the end of October. The media was at its last, desperate worst to underwrite the Trinamul Congress chieftain’s detestably loud and hateful proclamation that ‘the Red flag shall forever cease to fly at Nandigram, at Khejuri, and at Haldia.’ 

The Sher Khan Chak relief camp had started to reverberate with ear-splitting explosions during the late evening and night of October 28.  The inmates of the camp, trembling with fearful anticipation of such an attack, were already shaking like leaves when the bombs started to burst. The inmates regrouped, started to retreat to and take shelter in the far side of the camp and then they started to run, wildly, away, as far away as their starvation-diet bodies could take them.  Those who could not, the weak and the handicapped, fell down, had their flesh ripped apart from splinters, and when the smoke cleared, it was found that five of the refugees had embraced martyrs’ deaths.  Those killed were Sunil Bar (42), Gobindo Singh (37), and Charan Garu Das (24), Tapan Manna (34), and Gouraloy Das (25).

The bodies were duly subjected later to the sad and undignified process of post mortem examination, the forensic reports were put in place, cause of the deaths ascertained to have been massive flesh wounds, and then even as the Trinamul Congress roamed around under armed protection of their Maoist bosses in and around Nandigram and parts of Khejuri, the bodies were handed over on October 30 for last rites to the relatives.

Terrible turn of events

A terrible thing happened. The ruthless Maoist-Trinamuli mercenaries would not allow the departed to be put on the pyre at the nearest burning grounds. They kept up a steady and deadly volley from long-range guns at the cortèges, as the sobbing men, women, and children tried to offer their dear departed proper last rites. The cortèges moved desperately from place to place, from the burning grounds near a brick kiln to the one on the way to Gokulnagar. 

In extreme anxiety, and amidst sporadic shootings, the mourners chose a desolate spot on the secluded Baratala-Khejuri Road and hastily lit up five pyres with inadequate amounts of wood at their disposal. The remains were then buried, as per the village customs in Bengal, at the spots where the pyres had been lit. 

GRIM REALITY

This was the background of the grim reality of the buried remains of the five martyrs.  The occasion was recently utilised by the shameless Trinamulis and their explicators in the corporate media — both having come at the end of the tether of the ‘Nandigram line’ — to try to embarrass the CPI(M) and the Left Front government.  ‘The bodies belong to our men, killed by the CPM,’ was Mamatadidi’s claim, loudly posited as usual and as usual given great hype in the media.

Responding to the ghoulish stories being circulated with glee by the all-India audio-visual and print outfits, Shyamal Chakraborty, a central committee member of the CPI(M), stated at the Muzaffar Ahmad Bhavan that the remains of the bodies of the CPI(M) martyrs, dug up with alacrity with inappropriate instruments by the CRPF at the behest of Trinamulis having criminal connections, must be properly exhumed and subjected to forensic examination and DNA ‘finger-printing.’  Striking down the Trinamul Congressites’ claim that the men had been buried in graves, Shyamal Chakraborty said that graves were supposed to contain remains of a body, and not body parts.

TRUTH WILL BE OUT

Shyamal Chakraborty reminded the media that back in 2000 when the ‘Keshpur-Garbeta line’ of the Trinamul Congress grabbed the headlines of the corporate media as a ‘liberation struggle,’ bodies found buried at Pingla were loudly proclaimed to have been the last remains of Trinamul Congress ‘braves’ killed by the CPI(M).  Later forensic examinations following exhumation revealed that the bodies were those of CPI(M) workers martyred at the hands of Trinamul Congress criminals.  ‘The truth,’ Shyamal Chakraborty had no doubt, ‘will come out again, and overwhelm the Trinamul Congress and its media sympathisers yet again with its glare and intensity.'

Elsewhere, the Midnapore east unit of the CPI(M) reported that unclaimed bodies buried for a long period of time on the west bank of the Rupnarayan River, were recently dug up and made away with. The councillor of the concerned ward of the Tamluk Municipality, a Trinamul Congress leader, has since moved out, mysteriously and perhaps conveniently, from the locality.  The district CPI(M) is worried that the disappearance of the bodies might turn out to be another repetition of the Baratala-Khejuri lie.

(B P)