People's Democracy

Big Rally across

Indas Block in Bankura

B Prasant

 

PEOPLE had called for a central rally to lead the hundreds of local level rallies that the Bankura unit of the CPI(M) had called for the entire day of 14 September.  The CPI(M) bowed to the wishes of the masses, and set up such a large central rally at Indas that close-to half-a-lakh of the rural and urban people found the occasion glad to attend. 

 

We found the people’s action admirable, courageous, even daring as the rally had its centre around the zonal office of the CPI(M), and this is important as a mention for, the office had borne the brunt of Maoist-Trinamuli terror, having been ransacked, partially put to the torch, and looted as the brigands mounted assault after assault, occasionally even in the bright of the mid-day.  Nonetheless, that was in the past, and the past in the evolving political situation in the Bengal’s jangal mahal, is another country.

 

The people’s resistance as we witnessed eagerly, hopefully then started to grow with the CPI(M) in the vanguard of the political-organisational drive.  The off-peak of the mass struggle itself bears witness to this massive gathering with simultaneous rallies across the large chunk of land that the Indas block covers.  We have no doubt that when the struggle peaks, the entire red clay earth of the district would be covered in glory of class and mass struggles against the forces of the dark.

 

Elsewhere, we regret to report the cruel doing to death on the same day of a CPI(M) worker comrade Malek Sheikh who at the mid-twenties was in the prime of his youth. The place of occurrence of the murder, heinous and dastardly, comrade Malek was having a lonely sit down at a closed tea shop’s frontage en route to his humble residence at Khalilpur village in the restless Ketugram area of Burdwan. A bunch of rowdies on their drunk way to someplace from a Trinamuli-‘Maoist’ rally of sorts nearby, took full and dismal advantage of the opportunity, and murdered young comrade Malek with condemnable and inhuman brutality.

 

FIRING ON

A BOAT

 

Far away on the Orissa-Midnapore west border, the border line itself thin-to-indistinguishable, porous and easily bridgeable to and fro, thanks to insecure conditions, the ‘Maoist’ lumpens emptied a barrage of bullets on a country-made dinghy that was making its tenuous way across the Subarnarekha river that flows into Orissa, and the aim of the cowardly attack was the CPI(M) leader, Kanai Dutta and members of his family of the Patina village where the ‘Maoists’ had run amuck a day back, and who were passengers of this ancient row-boat. 

 

With alacrity, as the bullets started to fly, Kanai, realising he was the target, jumped into the river, dived underwater, and then came up for breath after some time, and at some distance away.  This saved his life, and those of the passengers.  On clambering back on board, and then disembarking, Kanai found, when he and other fellow travellers had reached the ghat that in the wild brush firing that had occurred, a two-year old child on his mother’s lap on the ghat, had received bullet injuries. The child battles for her life at a medical centre nearby and we are in despair about her recovery.