People's Democracy

Trinamul Congress And

The Art Of ‘Body Politics’

The goons of the Trinamul Congress now-a-days continuously dig up bodies laboriously albeit surreptitiously at Nandigram in the wake of the returning normalcy at that centre of merciless attacks on the rural people by the Trinamulis and the Maoists. Bodies, rotting and putrefacted, are dug up and then re-buried, and then, dug up, again.  Accusing fingers are pointed at the CPI(M), and the charge is murder.  The CRPF nods its approval. The state police are handed over the cases and the bodies.  The process goes on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.  The end-result is void.

What is the purpose of this whole grave-diggers’ business? The answer blows in the freshening breeze of Nandigram, where people again breathe the air that is free from the polluting presence of the right-left combination of murders and killers who were out to ensure that the Red Flag would never fly at Nandigram and the surrounding localities.

Investors had come and stood forth, political investors of the right, the far right, and the far left.  Advisors and well-wishers — indigenous and otherwise — had stepped in solicitously to help along the ‘cause,’ united in the avowed aim of wiping the CPI(M) off the face of Nandigram. Their methods differed, from shooting-to-kill-to-knife-stabbing-to-razor- slashing-to-burning-people-alive.

Nothing worked in the end.  The various outfits had then chipped in, with the odd horrified, chilly statement and the grand, sweeping gesture.  ‘Fasts-unto-death’ had been undertaken — and then broken off midway, goal unachieved. Lies were sprouted endlessly in the corporate media. The avowed aim, as we said, was simply to kill off the CPI(M)’s political existence in and around Nandigram — and then to move onto pastures anew, reinvigorated with the same ‘tactical line.’  The Maoists even had a name for it: ‘struggle to liberate the motherland.’  No wonder with slogans as densely stupid as that, these anarchists are relegated to the role of professional killers — and little else, beyond being in the payroll of the forces of reaction.

‘LINE’ COMES TO NAUGHT

Thus, with the end game in operation for the ‘Nandigram line,’ the desperadoes are at present constrained to play up the macabre and the grisly lie.  Bodies are continuously ‘found’ -- nothing surprising, as a large number of people do lie buried at Nandigram in the graveyards, and in the gore-é garibas that are the last resting place of the poor. The causes of death are natural. Do not the right-left opportunists know this?  Certainly they do. 

But then again, there is this empty, terrifying feeling haunting them, all the while, even as their backer-uppers grill them relentlessly as to what had gone wrong with the oh-so-innovative game plan— and the dreaded thought rises up: shall they have to come to grips with the awesome reality that Nandigram is normal again?  Can they allow this to happen just when they have started to hone the art of ‘body politics? 

Thus, the digging goes on relentlessly, at night, in the darkness, by men with faces swathed in wraps.  Bodies are ‘found’ from fresh spots (like the most recent instance at Maheshpur) in various stages of decomposition. Wives and children are forced to renege on their statements that the bodies do not belong to their husbands and fathers, or that their husbands and fathers, bless their kisan hearts, are alive and well. The CRPF ‘takes up’ the cases, large amounts of noises are made, and then-- woe! -- the cases are handed over to the state police’s criminal investigation department under the law of the land, and it is found even at the preliminary stage that flaws in the arguments about foul play are enough to have the cases dismissed. 

The bodies are sent back to their former resting places. Fresh searches go on for more bodies, and the Trinamuli goons must feel more-than-a-tad confused by now whether they are professional killers or professional grave-diggers.  Mamata Banerjee in the meanwhile has held her silence — a record? — for a whole week now.

(B P)