People's Democracy

TMC Goons Brutalise AIDWA Activist

THROUGH a statement issued from New Delhi on July 31, the All India Democratic Women�s Association (AIDWA) has condemned the brutal and continuous violence perpetrated by Trinamul Congress (TMC) members against Smt Anjali Maiti, a leader of the West Bengal unit of AIDWA.

Anjali Maiti is a resident of the village of Uttar Kalamdan in Birbandar village panchayat of Khejuri-1 block in East Medinipur. She is a local leader of the West Bengal Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti, and her husband Balai Maiti is secretary of the local unit of Kisan Sabha. They have a six years old daughter. After the Lok Sabha elections, when TMC won the Tamluk seat which includes Khejuri, Balai Maiti�s life came under threat and like many other CPI(M) workers, he escaped to the subdivisional town of Tamluk, leaving his wife and child behind. His home became a target of the TMC goons who looted the fish from the pond and coconuts from the trees, and prevented agricultural work on the plot of land they possessed. They also kept Anjali under constant surveillance so that she became completely cut off from her husband. They kept on threatening her that unless she gave them the whereabouts of her husband, they would spare neither her nor her child. About a fortnight back, they attacked her house and beat her up brutally after having tied her up. They also crushed her left hand with blunt weapons and then departed, saying that they would come back and teach her a further lesson if she did not produce her husband within seven days. They kept her under vigilance so that she would not be able to communicate with anyone or inform the police at the nearby Heria police station.

Once they came back, she was virtually their prisoner and the subject of their sexual brutality for seven days continuously. If the child uttered even a cry on seeing her mother being thus tortured, they would gag her and threaten to kill her. She could not even move out of her home to get herself medicines. At the end of seven days, a desperate Anjali managed to escape at the dead of night on July 27, walking all the way to Heria and then taking an early morning bus to Tamluk , where she was able to find her husband in a camp where other displaced persons were staying. In spite of her traumatised state, she was brave enough to go and lodge an FIR with the district superintendent of police, Pallabkanti Ghosh, with the help of Ganatantrik Mahila Samiti. At present, she is in the Tamluk district hospital for treatment.

The AIDWA has regretted as most unfortunate the fact that this horrific incident has received no attention from the national print and electronic media, and has been referred to only in a few Bengali papers. 

The AIDWA has demanded that the perpetrators of this kind of politically motivated violence must be arrested immediately and there should be exemplary punishment meted out to the accused. It has urged allthe  democratic forces interested in justice to the victims of violence, and also the media, to speak up on behalf of Anjali Maiti who was brutalised for no other reason but her political affiliation. (INN)