Fresh violence erupts in Nandigram
Statesman News Service
KOLKATA, Feb. 19: After remaining calm for three months, fresh violence broke out in Nandigram following a series of clashes between supporters of the CPI-M and Bhumi Ucched Protirodh Committee (BUPC) at several villages since last night. Twenty one persons were injured in these clashes, police said.
Police said, trouble broke out after armed CPI-M cadres attacked a BUPC member, Mr Paritosh Das at his residence at Keyakhali village around 9 p.m. yesterday and ransacked seven other houses belonging to BUPC members. In a counter attack, BUPC supporters beat up 14 CPI-M supporters and allegedly looted their houses at Keyakhali and Satengabari villages.
"The state government should immediately stop this clash or we will be forced to take to the streets," Miss Mamata Banerjee, Trinamul Congress chief said. "CPI-M has chosen this time as we cannot hold rallies or demonstrate as Madhyamik examination is on," she said.
The CPI-M cadres allegedly looted houses belonging to BUPC supporters at Keyakhali and Soifullarchowk villages this morning, triggering tension in the area. A total 33 persons were arrested in connection with the incident, police said. The clash took place despite the presence of Central Reserve Police Force jawans in the areas.
Sheikh Samad, a BUPC leader, alleged CPI-M cadres attacked Mr Paritosh Das, a resident of Keyakhali, last night after he returned home from Tamluk. Mr Das was stabbed in the waist with sharp-edged weapon and beaten up with rods by CPI-M cadres. His house was ransacked and looted allegedly by the CPI-M cadres. Local people rushed Mr Das to Tamluk hospital in a critical condition. Twenty three stitches were administered to Mr Das's head, Mr Samad said.
Six BUPC members ~ Mr Manas Karan, Mr Gurupada Shit, Mr Gurupada Baik, Mr Sukumar Kabar and Mr Swapan Barik ~ were beaten up and their houses were ransacked and then looted by the CPI-M cadres this morning, despite strong police vigil in the area this morning, alleged Sheikh Sufiyan, a BUPC leader. The injured were rushed to Nandigram block hospital. Policemen led by Mr Debashis Chakraborty, officer-in-charge of Nandigram police station are patrolling villages to thwart further violence.
Both BUPC and CPI-M lodged complaints against each other.
Mr Ashoke Guriya, secretariat member of the CPI-M Midnapore East district, alleged BUPC cadres had gathered at Keyakhali and attacked houses of CPI-M cadres.
"A total 11 CPI-M supporters were beaten up and their houses were looted by the BUPC," Mr Guriya alleged. He said the BUPC has planned to recapture Nandigram ahead of the panchayat polls. "We have submitted a memorandum to the Nandigram police station demanding immediate arrest of those who triggered the violence last night," Mr Guriya said.
A senior district police officer said, the efforts to normalise Nandigram before the panchayat polls could receive a set back by such unprovoked attack on BUPC members by the CPI-M cadres.
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=6&theme=&usrsess=1&id=191610
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Want porno, condoms and liquor? Go to CPM office.
Cadres ransack CPM office, beat up leaders
Statesman News Service
DURGAPUR, Feb. 18: CPI-M cadres who were denied jobs in local factories ransacked a party office, beat up leaders and later locked them up in a shop in the Sagarbhanga area today.
The district party leadership has called for an internal probe after pornographic CDs, condoms and liquor bottles were seized from the CPI-M office.
According to reports, a large number of youths, mostly activists and supporters of the CPI-M, assembled in front of the local committee office in the Namo Sagarbhanga area around 8.30 a.m. today. They urged CPI-M leaders, sitting inside the office, to facilitate their absorption in a private iron and steel unit. When leaders ~ Mr Badal Ghosh, Mr Naren Ghosh, Mr Nemai Bauri and Mr Gour Bauri ~ reportedly told them that the party office was not an employment exchange and they were helpless to sort out their crisis, the enraged youths dragged the leaders out of the office and beat them up. Two of them, Mr Gour Bauri and Mr Nemai Bauri, however, managed to escape.
The youths later locked up the other two leaders inside a grocery shop for more than two hours. Meanwhile, a mob raided the CPI-M office and found 12 empty foreign liquor bottles, several packets of condoms and pornographic CDs. Mr Badal Ghosh and Mr Naren Ghosh were later rescued by police.
The district party leadership, however, will conduct an independent inquiry into the incident.
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=191365
Statesman News Service
DURGAPUR, Feb. 18: CPI-M cadres who were denied jobs in local factories ransacked a party office, beat up leaders and later locked them up in a shop in the Sagarbhanga area today.
The district party leadership has called for an internal probe after pornographic CDs, condoms and liquor bottles were seized from the CPI-M office.
According to reports, a large number of youths, mostly activists and supporters of the CPI-M, assembled in front of the local committee office in the Namo Sagarbhanga area around 8.30 a.m. today. They urged CPI-M leaders, sitting inside the office, to facilitate their absorption in a private iron and steel unit. When leaders ~ Mr Badal Ghosh, Mr Naren Ghosh, Mr Nemai Bauri and Mr Gour Bauri ~ reportedly told them that the party office was not an employment exchange and they were helpless to sort out their crisis, the enraged youths dragged the leaders out of the office and beat them up. Two of them, Mr Gour Bauri and Mr Nemai Bauri, however, managed to escape.
The youths later locked up the other two leaders inside a grocery shop for more than two hours. Meanwhile, a mob raided the CPI-M office and found 12 empty foreign liquor bottles, several packets of condoms and pornographic CDs. Mr Badal Ghosh and Mr Naren Ghosh were later rescued by police.
The district party leadership, however, will conduct an independent inquiry into the incident.
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=191365
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Moral turpitude of CPM cadres
Moral turpitude of CPM cadres
Bottled: Karat’s home show
JOHN MARY (Kolkata, Telegraph)
Thiruvananthapuram, Feb. 14: Red power flowed today in Kerala, not from the gun barrel but from the booze bottle.
A public meeting at the end of the CPM state conference in Kerala was called off midway after drunken sloganeering by a section of the audience.
Among those on the dais was the CPM’s supreme leader Prakash Karat, who hails from the state where the world’s first elected communist government had come to power.
Veterans said they could not recall any communist event — let alone a rally linked to the state conference that enjoys the second-highest rank after the party congress in the events calendar — being cut short because of the “high spirits” of the cadres.
Old-timers in Bengal, too, are sure to be stunned, recalling the decades of campaign against “apasanskriti” (decadence) that targeted popular performers.
Karat had sat down after his speech and chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan had got up when the “moral turpitude” communists officially abhor reared its head. Achuthanandan’s speech was cheered lustily by the rain-soaked revellers in a pit right in front of the dais at Kottayam, 200km from here.
Every exhortation by the chief minister was punctuated by slogan-shouting that drowned his words. But he went on, even ignoring an empty liquor bottle hurled towards the dais. Karat, presumably attributing it to the enthusiasm of the ranks, kept smiling, too.
But Pinarayi Vijayan, the state CPM secretary and Achuthanandan’s rival, let the cat out of the bottle when he took the mike next. “Do you think you can do this at a CPM meeting, such drunken hooliganism?” he asked the crowd. “This is a meeting of the Communist Party. It’s no place for hooligans. By cheering Achuthanandan, you were obstructing his speech.”
Vijayan also chided the Red Volunteers, who enforce discipline at party events, for remaining spectators. “You have a duty to check elements that disrupt orderly conduct.” The volunteers later beat up some of the “hooligans”.
The state secretary dispersed the meeting soon after, saying other leaders would not speak. By then rain had resumed, possibly giving the party a chance to blame a liquid less potent than liquor for the abrupt end.
http://telegraphindia.com/1080215/jsp/frontpage/story_8906043.jsp
Bottled: Karat’s home show
JOHN MARY (Kolkata, Telegraph)
Thiruvananthapuram, Feb. 14: Red power flowed today in Kerala, not from the gun barrel but from the booze bottle.
A public meeting at the end of the CPM state conference in Kerala was called off midway after drunken sloganeering by a section of the audience.
Among those on the dais was the CPM’s supreme leader Prakash Karat, who hails from the state where the world’s first elected communist government had come to power.
Veterans said they could not recall any communist event — let alone a rally linked to the state conference that enjoys the second-highest rank after the party congress in the events calendar — being cut short because of the “high spirits” of the cadres.
Old-timers in Bengal, too, are sure to be stunned, recalling the decades of campaign against “apasanskriti” (decadence) that targeted popular performers.
Karat had sat down after his speech and chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan had got up when the “moral turpitude” communists officially abhor reared its head. Achuthanandan’s speech was cheered lustily by the rain-soaked revellers in a pit right in front of the dais at Kottayam, 200km from here.
Every exhortation by the chief minister was punctuated by slogan-shouting that drowned his words. But he went on, even ignoring an empty liquor bottle hurled towards the dais. Karat, presumably attributing it to the enthusiasm of the ranks, kept smiling, too.
But Pinarayi Vijayan, the state CPM secretary and Achuthanandan’s rival, let the cat out of the bottle when he took the mike next. “Do you think you can do this at a CPM meeting, such drunken hooliganism?” he asked the crowd. “This is a meeting of the Communist Party. It’s no place for hooligans. By cheering Achuthanandan, you were obstructing his speech.”
Vijayan also chided the Red Volunteers, who enforce discipline at party events, for remaining spectators. “You have a duty to check elements that disrupt orderly conduct.” The volunteers later beat up some of the “hooligans”.
The state secretary dispersed the meeting soon after, saying other leaders would not speak. By then rain had resumed, possibly giving the party a chance to blame a liquid less potent than liquor for the abrupt end.
http://telegraphindia.com/1080215/jsp/frontpage/story_8906043.jsp
Nandigram: killing fields of CPM goons and mercenaries
http://bharatam1.googlepages.com/Nandigrambhumiandsportingrifleswith.doc (with pictures)
Nandigram bhumi and sporting rifles with .315 cartridges
BS Raghavan who had served in the West Bengal Government bureaucracy wonders, in a typical process of delaying tactics to bury the gravest immorality committed in independent, swarajya Bharatam, ‘who did, what?’ http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/14guest.htm
I have the privilege of presenting below an account by another serious bureaucrat, D. Bandhopadhyay. Read on…
Yes, Syed Ali Mujtaba (see article below). The people of Nandigram who suffered the atrocities of CPM goons had a faith. A faith in the punyabhumi which made their living worthwile. Hence the name, Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh.
No falsehoods paraded by Noam Chosmky’s of the world or Sitaram Yechury’s fraudulent pieces in Peoples’ Democracy can justify the immorality that is CPM.
What should be done? Ban the CPM, to start with and later, all the associates of this goon party in the so-called Left Front who are acquiescing in the mass-murders perpetrated by CPM.
Rifle with .315 in. caliber cartridges is said to be a sporting rifle and described as a product of the Indian Ordnance Factory. http://www.gunaccessory.com/IOF/315rifle.htm
The use of .315 cartridges is a proof that CPM hired goons created the killing fields of Nandigram.
That such rifles were used by the CPM hired goons is clear and emphatic. It is also emphatic that such rifles are NOT used by the police constabulary.
Who acquired and supplied these rifles to the goons who created the killing fields of Nandigram? CPM leadership has to answer this question and explain how they keep an ordnance depot to support the party activities. So much for the sham called peoples’ democracy. It is unfair to expect the West Bengal police to investigate the identity of the hired CPM goons or the sources of their guns and .315 cartridges. This is a job to be done by some agency to be established on the lines of the US FBI with full authority to investigate in any part of Bharatam and outside of Bharatam.
Hopefully, the establishment of such a trans-bharatiya investigating agency should be the first order of business of the next Central Government.
On Dec. 11, 2007 R.K. Sharma, CRPF 190 battalion commandant, said the shells do not belong to the police. 'The government has given permission for use of .315 bullets to those who have firearms license. It needs to be investigated how the ammunition came to Nandigram,' said Sharma, adding that normalcy has returned to Nandigram and people were returning to their homes.
A remarkable and factual account, since January 2007, of the killing fields of Nandigram is provided by D. Bandyopadhyay, an ex-Director of the Asian Development Bank, and ex-Finance Secretary (Revenue), Govt. of India (See article below). In scenes reminiscent of mediaeval barbarism, what happened in these killing fields is explained: “ ‘Revenge’ became the party’s buzz-word. The lost ground had to be regained at any cost. The government and the party fused into one. The bureaucracy and the police were brainwashed to treat the one for the other. Thirty years of one-party rule resulted in the total subversion of the neutrality and impartiality of the bureaucracy and the police. Instead of the “rule of law” they started believing in the “rule of the party”. Both became handy tools of the party bosses’ sinister game-plans to reconquer Nandigram in the same manner as the old zamindars used to fight to gain or regain territory… The State Government does not believe in the rule of law since such a regime of rule of law would go against the interests of the party members who are busy amassing illegal wealth and abusing power for their personal gain and for promoting group interest… deadly weapons like AK-47s and AK-56s, Ichhapore rifles, locally made shotguns and adequate ammunition were stored at vantage points. In this operation three Ministers and several MPs were involved. High explosive bombs started to be manufactured in a couple of places under the guidance of known “ustads” of the underworld. Incidentally, in one of the manufacturing units in Khejury, there was a nasty explosion which killed one of the “ustad” bomb-makers and two of his ‘chelas’ after which this story came out… deadly weapons like AK-47s and AK-56s, Ichhapore rifles, locally made shotguns and adequate ammunition were stored at vantage points. In this operation three Ministers and several MPs were involved. High explosive bombs started to be manufactured in a couple of places under the guidance of known “ustads” of the underworld. Incidentally, in one of the manufacturing units in Khejury, there was a nasty explosion which killed one of the “ustad” bomb-makers and two of his ‘chelas’ after which this story came out… Horrifying stories of gang rape were told by a few surviving victims in Tamluk hospital where they were undergoing treatment. Afroza Bibi, a rape victim stated that on November 11, 2007 when she had come back from the noon namaaz about 30 armed persons entered her house. They first started beating them up with butts of guns. Then Bachhu, Mir Ahshan, Kalu, S.K. Barik and Abdul Rauf raped her consecutively in presence of her second daughter (16) and youngest daughter (14). Other ruffians looked on. Then her two daughters were gangraped in her presence. Thereafter they kidnapped them. Afroza Bibi did not know where they had taken them. She further stated all of them were known persons. Equally horrifying was the experience of Krishna Pramanik (26). She was dragged away from the procession and gangraped publicly in a public field. She lost consciousness. All these stories were video recorded by volunteer medical personnel later on. (Biswaji Ghosh : Dainik Statesman, Kolkata, November 13, 2007, p. 3). I stop narrating any more story of bestiality and barbarity… AND what was the reaction of the Chief Minister Buddha Bhattacharjee ? After the “Reconquest of Nandigram” he held a formal press/media conference at the Writers’ Building. He said : “We paid them back in the same coin … Serves them right.” When a journalist asked him whether he was the Chief Minister of West Bengal or only of the CPI-M, the agitated CM shot back that the journal where the journalist worked had been writing provocative pieces for the last 11 months. In any other State such a paper would have been banned. But he did not do so because “I do not want to soil my hand by killing a stinking mole”. This paper is Bartaman, a well-reputed and well-respected Bengali newspaper with more than half-a-million circulation. Commenting on this outrageous observation of the Chief Minister, Ravindra Kumar, Editor of The Statesman, observed : “Unlike the protections granted to the judiciary and legislatures, the law—anticipating perhaps the quality of rulers we would give ourselves—does not characterise contempt of an administrator or of a Chief Minister as a crime. Mr Bhattacharjee’s comment is not only beneath contempt, but it is ominous.” (The Statesman, Kolkata, November 17, 2007).”
Mainstream, Vol XLV, No 50
Buddha’s Killing Fields of Nandigram !
lundi 3 décembre 2007, par D. Bandyopadhyay
It was a well-planned and equally well-executed bloody operation conducted by the armed marauders of the Communist Party of India- Marxist which started on and around November 5 and is still continuing with lesser intensity. The objective was simple and straightforward. It was to reoccupy several villages whose inhabitants were originally party loyalists who turned hostile to the party after the Haldia Development Authority published the notice regarding acquisition of land in 34 villages in Nandigram for establishing a “chemical hub”. That was on January 3, 2007. When anxious villagers went to a local Gram Panchayat Office to find out whether their homestead and agricultural lands were within the proposed area, the CPI-M Pradhan of the Gram Panchayat called the police to disperse the crowd. The police came. They lathicharged the crowd who refused to budge till they received a cogent reply. Then the police opened fire and retreated. In their panic and haste the police jeep hit a telegraph pole while driving at high speed. It overturned and caught fire. Villagers rescued the policemen from the overturned burning vehicle and allowed them to return to the police station safely. The CPI-M and the government falsely alleged that the violent crowed set fire to the jeep. If the crowd had any evil intention none of the policemen could have escaped serious injury or even death. Nothing happened to them excepting some minor injury due to the accident.
On January 7, 2007, the CPI-M goons attacked several villages in a pincer movement from land and river/canal. One Samanta family whose members owed allegiance to the CPI-M and through whose munificence they amassed huge wealth and among whom there was also an influential CPI-M local leader took the lead. From this CPI-M leader’s house shots were fired killing several innocent villagers who were caught unawares. In their rage villagers surrounded the house, killed the owner and set fire to the building. The loss of an ardent armed gang leader of the party was too hard an insult to swallow for the local party satrap, Lakshman Seth, of Haldia.
After Samanta’s death several families who were active office-bearers of the party and Panchayat left Nandigram out of fear to seek shelter in the neighbouring Khejury area which was and still now remains a CPI-M stronghold. The party and the government initially gave out a false figure of 15 thousand CPI-M active supporters having been driven out of Nandigram. The fact is that no one was driven out at that time. They left out of fright because of their closeness to active CPI-M operators who had been terrorising, intimidating, extorting the local people for their own private gain. There was an open outburst of suppressed public hatred and rage against them. It was expressed verbally without any physical violence. Altogether roughly 250 families fled away, many of them came back at the request of the local leaders and started living unmolested.
At first the Chief Minister denied that there was any notification by the government. Technically he was correct because the advance notice was given by the Haldia Development Authority (HDA) and not by the Land and Land Reforms Department. But that was mere semantics. He blamed the Opposition for creating trouble by spreading false rumours about acquisition. A newspaper published the photocopy of the notification the next day. Then the Chief Minister shifted his ground and stated that the HDA had no authority to publish such a notification. Again he committed an error because it was an advance notice and not a regular notification under the Land Acquisition Act. When he found that all his false statements were getting contradicted by document, he raved and roared saying “tear off that notice”, as if tearing off a copy of the notice would mean a change in the government’s decision to acquire 34,000 acres of land for the chemical hub to be set up by the Salem Group of Indonesia. After a few more farcical motions he announced that the project would be kept on hold for a while. He thought that that would pacify the angry peasants. They saw through the sinister game and got more angry. They organised themselves under the banner of the “Bhumi Uchhched Pratirodh Committee” (Committee for Resistance Against Forcible Eviction—BUPC). Thus began the battle for Nandigram.
Incidentally, Nandigram had been a red bastion for several decades. Way back in the late forties of the last century there was the tebhaga movement for the protection of the rights of sharecroppers. Bhupal Panda of the then united CPI led the movement. He was a legendary leader of the deprived and oppressed cultivators and agricultural labourers. The Left leanings of the inhabitants are more than six decades old. There was no “Opposition” party before the events of January 7, 2007. The CPI-M leadership cried “wolf” where there was none.
The CPI-M leadership started smarting sharply from the utter political humiliation they suffered in Nandigram. “Revenge” became the party’s buzz-word. The lost ground had to be regained at any cost. The government and the party fused into one. The bureaucracy and the police were brainwashed to treat the one for the other. Thirty years of one-party rule resulted in the total subversion of the neutrality and impartiality of the bureaucracy and the police. Instead of the “rule of law” they started believing in the “rule of the party”. Both became handy tools of the party bosses’ sinister game-plans to reconquer Nandigram in the same manner as the old zamindars used to fight to gain or regain territory.
AFTER two months of preparation the party and the government decided to strike back. Under the direction of the Police Minister, who was also the Chief Minister, about five battalions of armed policemen were mobilised. In addition, the CPI-M’s own armed cadres and roughs and goondas hired for the purpose were also deployed. The blueprint of the attack was prepared, as reported in the press, in the guest house of the Kolaghat Thermal Power Plant where the IG of Police, DIG of Police and the SP of East Midnapore along with the party bosses were present. The attack was planned on March 13. Reports of impending invasion were reaching a wide circle of public outside Nandigarm. The Governor of the State was at Chennai on March 13. He was informed of the imminent aggression on the peaceful peasantry of Nandigram. It must be put on record that strictly within his constitutional rights of advising and warning the government, the Governor advised utmost restraint to be shown in case of any police action. This was conveyed in no uncertain terms to the State Home Secretary by the Governor’s Secretary by the afternoon of March 13, 2007. These are all matters of record. No attack took place on March 13, 2007. On March 14 morning when the Governor was flying back to Kolkata from Chennai and was practically incommunicado, the operation started at 9.45 am. The armed police of the State and the armed goons of the party started indiscriminate fire on the unarmed children, women and men of Nandigram who were coming out of temples and mosques. Meanwhile roadblocks were set up all along on all the roads to Nandigram. These were manned openly by the CPI-M cadres aided and abetted by the police. Nobody from outside could go to Nandigram in the next 72 hours. So much so, that when the Governor wanted to visit Tamluk hospital on March 15, 2007, his convoy was obstructed by the CPI-M members on the road. When the Governor threatened to walk about 10 km alone leaving behind his convoy, on instructions from Kolkata, his motorcade was allowed to proceed to the hospital only and not beyond it.
There were various estimates regarding the number of persons killed, injured, missing and about the number of women raped and molested. The government obviously tried to suppress the facts. On the other side rumours spread that about hundred persons were killed whose bodies were taken away by the goons for disposal elsewhere. A group of non-partisan social scientists conducted a survey by the census method in 40 per cent of households in the affected villages a month-and-a-half after the event. They followed a strictly statistical methodology. Their findings are given below and in the following page.
Table 1 : Serious Physical Injury in Nandigram on March 14, 2007
Sl. Nature of Injury Male Female Total
1 Bullet injury 41 18 59
2 Rubber Bullet injury 22 15 37
3 Fibre Rod/Baton/Rifle butt injury etc. 108 12 120
4 Tear gas shell burst injury 14 12 26
5 Bomb injury 2 - 2
Total 187 57 244
Thus on March 14, 2007, 244 persons, including 57 women, suffered serious physical injuries ; 348 women suffered sexual atrocities of different kinds, including 11 rape cases ; 14 persons including two women were killed ; and four persons had been missing since March 14, 2007. These figures relate to only 40 per cent of the households in the affected villages.
Table 2 : Severe Atrocities on Women on March 14 and 15
SL.No. Nature of Torture Number
1 Physical Torture 274
2 Modesty Violation 46
3 Sexual Torture 17
4 Rape 11
Total 348
Table 3 : Deaths on March 14, 2007
Male Female Total
12 2 14
Table 4 : Missing since March 14, 2007
Male Female Total
3 1 4
(Source : Sameekshak Samannaya : Nandigram March 14 ; September 2007, Kolkata, p. 13)
On March 15, 2007, the Governor expressed his “cold horror” while condemning the unnecessary and avoidable bloodbath. On the same day on a PIL petition the Calcutta High Court directed the CBI to enquire into the happenings in Nandigram and to submit a report within a week. The CBI found ample evidence of indiscriminate firing from both the police firearms and civilian firearms. They recovered empty shells of 315 sporting rifles. They found out an arsenal at the “Ma Janani” brick kiln in Khejury and arrested 10 goons with illegal firearms. They handed over these culprits to the State Police who released them all after 90 days deliberately without filing any chargesheet. With the presence of the CBI in the region peace was restored. Almost all the culprits fled away. The CBI submitted their preliminary report within seven days in a sealed cover to the High Court. The fact that all the miscreants were CPI-M supporters or hired by them was amply demonstrated by the CBI’s very limited enquiry. But what did the High Court do ?
The High Court initially did nothing. To make the report of the CBI public and to advise them to carry on the investigation, a number of PILs were filed. Instead of throwing out these petitions as not maintainable, the High Court gave a formal hearing which ended in July 2007. Delivering the judgement in the Nandigram killings case on November 16, 2007 the High Court held that the police firing there on March 14, in which 14 people had been killed, was wholly unjustified and violative of Article 21 of the Constitution. The Division Bench, which passed the order, stated that the CBI inquiry into the Nandigram incident would continue and asked the investigating agency to submit a comprehensive report to it (the HC) within a month. The Court rejected all the arguments of the State Government, including its plea for stay on the implementation of the HC’s order. So far so good. But if the order had come prior to the autumn recess of the High Court, perhaps the second wave of the more horrendous bloody events could have been avoided. Meanwhile, on the plea that matters were pending in the High Court the State Government did not take any legal action against the offenders, nor did it initiate any departmental action against any defaulting officer. Not a single arrest was made. The State Government does not believe in the rule of law since such a regime of rule of law would go against the interests of the party members who are busy amassing illegal wealth and abusing power for their personal gain and for promoting group interest. Though delayed, even in their darkest hour, this judgement came as a great morale booster for the suffering peasantry of Nandigram.
THE long silence of the judiciary emboldened the party leadership. They had been carrying on probing attacks from the Khejury side since mid-April onwards. But instead of being cowed down, the members of the BUPC stiffened their resistance. The party and its government could not tolerate such impudence from the unarmed organised peasantry who were their loyalists for so many decades. The failure to “reconquer” Nandigram was hurting the prestige and the image of the party leadership. From late September onwards party leaders at all levels started planning a bloody offensive to recapture Nandigram. It should be stated here that there were no “Opposition” parties in this area before the disturbance started. It was a people’s uprising. Other parties were trying to ride on the surf. They did not create the surf.
A six-stage blueprint was prepared which was finalised again in a meeting of senior police officers in the same guest house of Kolaghat Thermal Plant. First, an intensive propaganda blitz of disinformation and misinformation was launched. They said falsely that 15,000 (which later on was scaled down to 3500) of their supporters had been driven out. The party found that calling the Jamait-e-Ulema-e-Hind as a communal force could adversely affect its Muslim vote-bank, so they dropped its name. They brought in the Maoists instead. That was because it would be a music to the ears of Government of India, particularly the Ministry of Home Affairs. The State Government’s open anti-Maoist stand helped them to come nearer to the GOI. False stories were spread that Maoists and Trinamul Congress workers were organising arms training, building bunkers, gathering deadly weapons, including automatic rifles, mortar, mines etc, though the State Home Secretary in a recent interview stated that the police did not find any evidence of Maoist incursion in the area.
Secondly, large scale mobilisation of known assassins, killers, murderers on payment of money of Rs 12000, for each night of operation and payment of Rs 2 lakhs to the next of kin in case of death for ordinary soldiers started in earnest. A well-known mafia don from the coal region and his gang were also deployed. A group of dacoits of the Salim gang was requisitioned from South 24-Parganas. Outlaws from Garbeta region under the leadership of Tapan Ghosh and Sukur Ali, popularly known as “butchers of Garbeta and Chhoto Angaria”, were brought down from that area. In addition, known roughs and gangsters with their helpers were hired from Bankura, Purulia, West Medinipur and Arambagh of Hooghly. A known ruffian from Baruipur with his villainous followers was hired. Along with money they were provided with free shelter, food and alcohol etc. to keep them happy.
Thirdly, a six-pronged attack programme was chalked out to avoid known points of resistance of the BUPC.
Fourthly, to clear the deck for free and easy operation all police pickets along the Tekhali canal and other sensitive spots were withdrawn and the whole area was cordoned off to prevent ingress or egress of any “outsiders”.
Fifthly, deadly weapons like AK-47s and AK-56s, Ichhapore rifles, locally made shotguns and adequate ammunition were stored at vantage points. In this operation three Ministers and several MPs were involved. High explosive bombs started to be manufactured in a couple of places under the guidance of known “ustads” of the underworld. Incidentally, in one of the manufacturing units in Khejury, there was a nasty explosion which killed one of the “ustad” bomb-makers and two of his ‘chelas’ after which this story came out.
Sixthly, while experienced gang leaders were in charge of different sectors, some of the known CPI-M leaders were deployed as Political Commissars to these sector commanders.
The time given to the “Operation Reconquest” was seventytwo to ninetysix hours.
From around November 3 and 4, 2007, all roads leading to Nandigram were blocked by slogan-shouting CPI-M cadres. TMC leader Mamata Banerjee could go only up to Tamluk which was about 70 km away from Nandigram. Medha Patkar had to return twice, once from Kapasberia and the next time from Kolaghat, which is only an hour’s drive from Calcutta. No mediapersons, excepting one TV channel of their choice, were allowed to go. They are unable to go even now (November 17, 2007). Only one reporter of the Dainik Statesman stayed back as a part of the local population and sent graphic despatches.
WHEN the operation started it could not make any significant incursion due to the resistance of the BUPC volunteers. Then the BUPC made a major tactical error. They decided to take out two processions of their supporters on November 10 morning without any arms (not even with lathis) towards the peripheral villages under “red” occupation. In an absolutely military manner the CPI-M cadres ambushed these two processions from two points killing roughly 100 persons, injuring over 150 and capturing about 800 or so unarmed villagers. They also carried away most of the dead bodies and some wounded persons. Then they lit up a huge community funeral pyre where both the dead and some living injured persons were burnt alive. Their savagery far exceeded any recorded incident of cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages.
Next day on November 11, 2007 the goons put in front the human shield of the captured persons and started moving in. Resisting them would mean killing their own men and women. Resistance leaders decided to withdraw en masse. Armed bandits entered the deserted villages of Sonachura, Gokulnagar and Garh Chakraberia. Reconquest of Nandigram was completed. As a token of conquest they planted red flags all over the area which BJP leader L.K. Advani himself witnessed on his visit to Nandigram. (Ashish Ghosh, Dainik Statesman, November 15, 2007) The stories of savagery that are trickling out are blood-chilling. Since these murderers do not obey any law, they could not care less about the laws of war. Major Aditya Bera (Retd.) settled down in his own village at Gokulnagar after retirement. On the morning of November 10, 2007, he joined hundreds of his co-villagers in a peaceful procession. As the procession approached the point of hidden ambush, the marchers faced intense fire. A bullet hit Major Bera. He had nothing in hand to fight back excepting his courage and loyalty to the nation with which he served for more than three decades as an officer of the Indian Army. He was dragged along and taken to a party operational headquarters for interrogation. Since he was a retired Major they thought he gave the BUPC tactical advice. He had nothing to tell them. Finding him of no operational value, they shot him dead and as a sign of primordial barbarity they beheaded him. Major Bera who earlier in life fought for mother India, died in the hands of villains of uncertain parentage. Kanai Sheet of Sonachura was the father of Khokan Sheet, a well-known leader of the BUPC. Both of them suffered bullet injuries. Khokan could escape. Kanai was not that lucky. He was taken to Khejury, tortured and killed because his son was resisting land acquisition. (Sukumar Mitra : Despatch from Nandigram : Dainik Statesman)
Horrifying stories of gang rape were told by a few surviving victims in Tamluk hospital where they were undergoing treatment. Afroza Bibi, a rape victim stated that on November 11, 2007 when she had come back from the noon namaaz about 30 armed persons entered her house. They first started beating them up with butts of guns. Then Bachhu, Mir Ahshan, Kalu, S.K. Barik and Abdul Rauf raped her consecutively in presence of her second daughter (16) and youngest daughter (14). Other ruffians looked on. Then her two daughters were gangraped in her presence. Thereafter they kidnapped them. Afroza Bibi did not know where they had taken them. She further stated all of them were known persons. Equally horrifying was the experience of Krishna Pramanik (26). She was dragged away from the procession and gangraped publicly in a public field. She lost consciousness. All these stories were video recorded by volunteer medical personnel later on. (Biswaji Ghosh : Dainik Statesman, Kolkata, November 13, 2007, p. 3)
I stop narrating any more story of bestiality and barbarity.
AND what was the reaction of the Chief Minister Buddha Bhattacharjee ? After the “Reconquest of Nandigram” he held a formal press/media conference at the Writers’ Building. He said : “We paid them back in the same coin … Serves them right.” When a journalist asked him whether he was the Chief Minister of West Bengal or only of the CPI-M, the agitated CM shot back that the journal where the journalist worked had been writing provocative pieces for the last 11 months. In any other State such a paper would have been banned. But he did not do so because “I do not want to soil my hand by killing a stinking mole”. This paper is Bartaman, a well-reputed and well-respected Bengali newspaper with more than half-a-million circulation. Commenting on this outrageous observation of the Chief Minister, Ravindra Kumar, Editor of The Statesman, observed : “Unlike the protections granted to the judiciary and legislatures, the law—anticipating perhaps the quality of rulers we would give ourselves—does not characterise contempt of an administrator or of a Chief Minister as a crime. Mr Bhattacharjee’s comment is not only beneath contempt, but it is ominous.” (The Statesman, Kolkata, November 17, 2007)
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Governor of West Bengal, a noble soul, issued a statement on the happenings of Nandigram on November 9, 2007 to discharge his constitutional duty as a Governor “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the law”. He observed, inter alia, “ … But the manner in which the ‘recapture’ of Nandigram villages is being attempted is totally unlawful and unacceptable. I find it equally unacceptable that while Nandigram has been ingressed with ease by armed people on the one hand, political and non-political persons trying to reach it had been violently obstructed. Some of them were bearing relief articles for the homeless. The treatment meted to Smt Medha Patkar and other associates of hers last evening (November 8, 2007) was against all norms of civilised political behaviour.” He advised the State Government to take certain immediate steps. “These include (i) immediate return of the ingressers ; (ii) the giving of urgent relief to the displaced persons in Nandigram ; and (iii) the facilitation of their return to their homes. I have also asked the administration to remove the new unauthorised manmade blocks at entry points to (here he mentions names of four different roads) … Let me conclude by saying : Enough is enough. Peace and security should be restored without any delay.”
That was November 9. Full-blooded operations with primordial bestiality and cruelty continued for another 48 hours, that is, till November 11, 2007. Even today sporadic killings and mayhem are continuing in the presence of the CRPF and the State Police. Obviously the threat of pulling the rug by the CPI-M has totally paralysed and incapacitated the UPA Government at the Centre. As a result, they are unable to issue appropriate directive under Article 355 of the Constitution to restore the rule of law in Nandigram and elsewhere in West Bengal after such a severe indictment of the State Government by the Governor and the Calcutta High Court.
The author was the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministries of Finance (Revenue) and Rural Development, and the Executive Director, Asian Development Bank, Manila.
http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article464.html
Outsiders' hand in Nandigram firing confirmed
9 Dec 2007, 0101 hrs IST , TNN
NANDIGRAM: CBI investigators probing the Nandigram firing on March 14 have identified at least 27 outsiders in khaki who moved with the police force to break the barricade that the Trinamul Congress-led Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee supporters had put up in the villages.
Investigators got the lead from the video footage of the carnage recorded by none other than the police and cross-checked it with on-the-spot interrogation of more than 50 villagers and two police officers present on the day of the firing.
CBI officers then summoned villagers, owing allegiance to both the parties — CPM and BUPC, and questioned them with video footage on display. The process helped them to spot the men in khaki — a little different from police uniform difficult to differentiate from a distance. These men, according to CBI, were heavily armed and moving with the police. The footage showed that these men, unlike the police, had no shoes.
It was evident from the footage that while the police posted on Bhangabera Bridge was busy asking villagers to make way for the police, these "cops" sneaked into the crowd with batons and started chasing them. According to the CBI, this was enough provocation for the crowd to turn violent. Angry villagers then started pelting stones at the police.
In the melee, these men chased some of the BUPC supporters with fire arms. Locals reportedly identified them as CPM workers. CBI officers have recorded their version and verified their presence in the procession from the footage. Their statements corroborated the video recording of the incident by and large. Investigators have reasons to believe that these outsiders on khaki sparked the violence.
Four CBI teams on Saturday visited Sonachura, Adhikaripara and Gokulnagar villages in Nandigram. A team met Sushil Das Adhikari whose brother Salil Das Adhikari sustained bullet injuries on March 14. Sushil was also with the procession. Both brothers were present at the Gokulnagar’s Malpara where BUPC supporters had assembled.
The CBI team is now looking for men in khaki. It has interrogated a few local CPM activists who reportedly refused to identify them. They claimed that some CPM supporters of Sonachura and Bhangabera villages were present with the police as they were forced to join and guide them. But they denied the charge that these men were carrying firearms and chased away BUPC supporters.
CBI officers on Saturday recovered more charred bones and fire arms — a .303 rifle and an improvised gun from the Talpati Canal. They said the charred bones along with those found at the five graves at Khejuri might have a connection with the March 14 carnage.
That explains why the team has also collected a detail list of the missing persons since March 14. While the CBI did its bit, a CID team under IG (I) D P Tarenia visited the dreaded spot at Bamanchak village on Saturday from where the charred remains were recovered only the other day. Family members of Bacchan Garudas, Srimanta Das and Sunil Bar killed in a blast on October 27 at Sherkhanchawk, claimed that the bones were those of their relatives and asked the police to hand them over.
Within a day after the state government ordered the CID inquiry into the mystery graves, the police rounded up 15 people including a CPM local committee member on charges of rioting and attempt to murder.
http://tinyurl.com/3d44ps
Bullets found in Jantiboni
Express news service
Posted online: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 12:00:00
Updated: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 01:35:10
Kolkata, December 11 Several bullets and bullet cases were found lying scattered in a paddy field in Nandigram today. Interestingly, the bullets were discovered in the same area — Jantiboni near Parulbari village in Maheshpur — where a grave was found yesterday.
“Locals harvesting paddy in the fields spotted the bullets and alerted us. The bullets are of .303 rifles. We will hand them over to the local police soon,” said Deputy Inspector General Alok Raj, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF).
Digging of the grave is yet to begin as no magistrate visited the spot today.
Superintendent of Police (East Midnapore) S S Panda said the police had already sought permission from the magistrate at Haldia to dig the grave. The digging can start only after obtaining permission from the magistrate.
Preliminary reports suggested that the grave was freshly dug.
Meanwhile, Nandigram police arrested two persons today. Joydev Paik, a Bhumi Uchhed Partirodh Committee (BUPC) supporter, was arrested from Sonachura.
Locals alleged that Paik sheltered Maoists at his house during the movement in Nandigram. Gopal Jana, a CPM supporter, was arrested from Keyakhali in Nandigram Block (II) today.
CPM cadres had raided Keyakhali and destroyed several huts there in October.
A Nandigram police officer said the two were arrested with the help of the CRPF personnel in the area.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Bullets-found-in-Jantiboni/249389/
Kolkata, Telegraph, Issue Date: Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Used bullets found near ‘graveyard’
OUR BUREAU
The bullets found on Tuesday. (Jahangir Badsa)
Nandigram/Calcutta, Dec. 11: The CRPF today found spent .315-calibre cartridges and torn cardboard boxes marked “Pune” in Parulbari village a day after two suspected graves were spotted there.
Assistant commandant A.K. Upadhyay said 23 “rimmed cartridges” were found during a raid in the area and were handed over to police for investigation.
The boxes suggest that the cartridges were manufactured at the Kirkee ordnance factory in Pune. But neither the police nor the paramilitary uses .315-calibre cartridges, a police officer said.
Those with licensed .315 rifles can buy the bullets from authorised gun shops and ordnance factory outlets.
Parulbari is on the fringes of Maheshpur, which had witnessed heavy gun battles between CPM and Bhoomi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee activists from October 28 to November 6.
The CPM took control of Jambari village, a kilometre from where the cartridges were found, on November 6. The next day, the cadres recaptured Parulbari and Maheshpur.
“It appears that either the Pratirodh Committee or the CPM or both had these bullets. The police never opened fire in this area,” an officer said.
Home secretary Prasad Ranjan Ray said the CID would dig up the graves found yesterday in the presence of an executive magistrate. He had an hour-long meeting with chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and chief secretary A.K. Deb on Nandigram.
Many villagers whose family members have gone missing during the land war came to Parulbari today, hoping to find their bodies.
Among them were Dilip Maity and Sukdeb Singha, who had cycled nearly 20km from Southkhali village.
Sukdeb’s elder brother Balaram, 28, and Dilip’s elder brother Bhagirath, 30, went missing from the Pratirodh Committee rally that was fired at on November 10.
“We started to run for our lives when the CPM cadres started firing. I didn’t see Bhagirath after that,” said Dilip.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071212/asp/bengal/story_8659103.asp
Body with bullet holes dug out
- Wife of BUPC supporter says shirt belonged to her husband
OUR CORRESPONDENT
Shyamali Pramanick, who identified the body that was dug out as her husband’s, looks at the grave. (Jahangir Badsa)
Nandigram, Dec. 12: A body with two bullet holes was to- day dug out of the suspected grave that had been found in Parulbari village.
A woman, Shyamali Pramanick, saw the decomposed remains and said it was that of her husband’s.
Haren, aged around 37, was a Bhoomi Uchchhed Pra- tirodh Committee supporter. His family said he went missing on November 7 while returning home from the Nandigram block hospital, where his father was being treated for a heart ailment.
Shyamali and her sister-in-law Sephali identified Haren by his blue striped shirt and a talisman around the waist.
“We had received a missing diary about Haren Pramanick. Now we will treat it as a murder case,” said East Midnapore superintendent of police S.S. Panda.
CBI superintendents Sujit Pandey and R.R. Sahay also visited the spot to probe whether the exhumed body had anything to do with the March 14 police firing.
Maheshpur, adjoining Parulbari, and its neighbouring villages had witnessed heavy gun battles between CPM and Pratirodh Committee supporters from October 28 to the first week of November.
Hundreds thronged Parulbari this morning as news that the body would be dug out spread. They were covering their nose to ward off the stench as the body was being pulled out.
After about half an hour of digging, the spades hit something hard and a human skull with tufts of hair could be seen. Further digging revealed a rotting and torn gunny bag, through which a pair of navy blue trousers stuck out. The dead man had his hands tied behind his back.
“One bullet had pierced the abdomen and the other the shoulders,” a police officer said.
As soon as the body was exhumed, committee conveners Sheikh Sufiyan and Abdus Samad claimed that it was Pramanick’s. They called Shyamali and Sephali to identify it.
“I could not recognise the face. But when the dirt was removed from the shirt, I recog-nised it. A close look and I could make out it was him,” Shyamali said, clutching her nine-year-old son Toton and crying .
“We also identified the ghunshi (talisman) my brother wore,” said Sephali.
“My father (Bhushan, 65) lost his will to live after hearing about his only son’s death. He passed away on November 30. We performed his shraadh today before coming here.”
Parulbari is about 2km from Kamalpur, where the Pramanicks live.
The CRPF today found a used 9mm bullet and a spent .315 cartridge from the area. Twenty-three used .315 cartridges were found yesterday.
CM statement
Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will make a statement on the role of the CRPF in Nandigram in the Assembly tomorrow.
CPM leaders had been accusing the force of harassing villagers from the time it arrived in Nandigram.
The CPM state secretariat met this evening to finalise the contents of the statement. The chief minister and the home secretary had earlier lauded the role of the CRPF.
A group of party MPs led by Basudev Acharya will visit Nandigram tomorrow.
http://telegraphindia.com/1071213/asp/bengal/story_8663693.asp
Body recovered from another Nandigram grave
Express news service
Posted online: Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST
KOLKATA, DECEMBER 12
A decomposed body was unearthed on Wednesday from the second grave found by the CRPF in Maheshpur in Nandigram. The wife and neighbours of Haren Pramanik, a 32-year-old resident of Takapura in Nandigram, claimed the body was his.
Pramanik was last seen on November 7, a day after armed CPI(M) cadres started entering Nandigram and engaged in bloody skirmishes with the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC). At least 35 persons had been reported missing during the period.
"We looked everywhere, but failed to trace him. A few people say he was last seen running away from the site of a clash. Today, I and his wife Shyamali identified him," said Swapan Mondol, the victim's neighbour. According to police sources, the body had injury marks on the back and on the shoulders.
The CPI(M) was guarded in its reaction to the discovery. "Let there be more tests. Four or five people are missing there, some are our supporters. Our rivals can claim anything, let the investigation be completed. One must remember that the area was under their control for 11 months," said CPI(M) central committee member Shyamal Chakraborty.
But the Trinamool Congress claimed it was indeed the body of Pramanik. "He was our supporter and was abducted from Maheshpur on the day CPI(M) cadres fired on our rally.
Later, he was murdered and put in a grave in the middle of a paddy field. His father died days after he went missing. It is because of the strict CRPF vigil and our mass support that the truth is coming out. This validates our claim," said Sisir Adhikary, TMC leader and MLA from Contai.
The grave was discovered by locals working at the paddy field on December 10. They informed CRPF men, who then cordoned off the area. Following the discovery, a huge cache of bullets, both live and used, were also unearthed from near the grave.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/249785.html
Cartridge shells, ammunition packs found in Nandigram
Dec 11, 2007, 17:53 GMT
Kolkata, Dec 11 (IANS) Several cartridge shells and ammunition were recovered from Nandigram Tuesday, a day after a new burial mound was found in the violence-torn West Bengal area.
The police said about 25 empty shells of .315 bullets and four packets of the ammunition, each containing 10 cartridges, were recovered from near the burial mounds at Parulbari near Nandigram. The ammunition had the markings of a Pune factory.
'The empty cartridges were recovered by Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel. A gun battle had occurred in the same area a few days ago. But we can't confirm if the ammunition was used during the 'recapture' of Nandigram by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) cadres last month,' East Midnapore police superintendent S.S. Panda told IANS.
'We have informed the Haldia Chief Judicial Magistrate about the new grave found Monday,' Panda said.
Meanwhile, West Bengal Home Secretary Prasad Ranjan Roy ordered a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) inquiry into the new burial mound.
Earlier, five burial mounds were found on the side of a road at Khejuri, near Nandigram, from which charred skeletal remains were unearthed.
The charred bones were later sent to the State Forensic Science Laboratory for tests.
Meanwhile, local villagers alleged the cartridge shells were left behind by armed CPI-M cadres who entered Nandigram through Parulbari area Nov 7 and launched a fierce attack on rival Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC) activists.
R.K. Sharma, CRPF 190 battalion commandant, said the shells do not belong to the police. 'The government has given permission for use of .315 bullets to those who have firearms license. It needs to be investigated how the ammunition came to Nandigram,' said Sharma, adding that normalcy has returned to Nandigram and people were returning to their homes.
CRPF personnel are patrolling all the violence-hit areas, he said.
Nandigram, about 150 km from here in East Midnapore district, flared up over proposed land acquisition for a special economic zone (SEZ), including a chemical hub - a plan that was scrapped by the state government later in the face of stiff resistance.
Thirty-five people have died in violence in Nandigram since January this year. A fresh bout of violence broke out in November after ruling CPI-M cadres allegedly recaptured their lost bases in the area by launching a massive onslaught on the rival anti-land acquisition BUPC.
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/india/news/article_1380275.php/Cartridge_shells_ammunition_packs_found_in_Nandigram
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:58:00 PM
Permission to reprint or copy this article or photo must be obtained from www.3dsyndication.com.
Dissidents in CPI(M) helping find more graves in Nandigram
Gyan Varma
NEW DELHI: After the recovery of several human bones and seven graves in Nandigram, the men in uniform are now being helped by CPI(M) dissidents to uncover more graves. Explosives, live bombs and weapons have also been seized in the past few days.
“We have so far uncovered seven graves, but there is a strong possibility there could be many more. What we have found could be the tip of the iceberg,” said a senior official involved in the operations in Nandigram.
The officer added that since the paramilitary force was new to the area and did not know the terrain, it was relying on CPI(M) dissidents to locate new graves and recover weapons.
“We have no option but to rely on the inputs given by them. This is not our job but we are doing it considering the extent of the problem,” said the officer, adding that they have prepared a list of people who have gone missing after the violence.
“The list was prepared on the basis of complaints made by people. We gave the list to local police since it is not our job to find missing people,” he added.
The paramilitary force has also recovered 44kg of IEDs.
v_gyan@dnaindia.net
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1138930
Nandigram Scars- A question of faith
A lot has been written on the 'intra-proletariat struggle' being witnessed at Nandigram, some 90 miles from the eastern metropolis of Kolkata. Some described it as a clash between the agrarian forces and those who favor industrialization. Others said it was a revolt against the dictatorship of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that rules West Bengal for the last four decades.
Many others blame it on the Opposition in West Bengal particularly the Trinamool Congress that attempted to cash on the discontentment of the people of Nandigram. Notwithstanding, the Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's apology.
The general summary is that Nandigram essentially was a people's war, a faithless commotion with no religious overtones. Those who look for the religious angle there are the reactionary elements and such voices should be marginalized.
However, according to the BJP the majority of the victims of the clashes in Nandigram were those belonging to the Muslim minority community. The BJP for the first time has come out to speak in favor of the oppressed Muslim community since it sees in Nandigram an opportunity to break the CPM stronghold in West Bengal.
It is pertinent to recall, that the Nandigram fracas has its genesis in the West Bengal Government's decision to create a Special Economic Zone there with an eye on getting foreign investment and industrial development. It decided to permit an Indonesian firm to build a chemicals plant across the Haldia River from the Haldia port, in Nandigram. On the grounds that the SEZ in Nandigram would create about 100,000 direct and indirect jobs and a lot of people would be benefited by this project. Little did the CPM realize that by trying to replicate the Chinese model of a SEZ, wherein the Government forcibly evicted the people from their lands, at a price determined by the Government, it would become the bugbear for the State Government.
The landowners of Nandigram, who are mostly Hindus, grudgingly seemed to have accepted the deal, but the local Muslim people who were dependent on the land as sharecroppers opposed the idea of the SEZ. They argued that as they did not own the land they would be displaced without any compensation being paid to them. This created a rift between the CPM and the local people. The CPM cadres forcibly tried to clear up the area but those residing there resisted such moves.
In walked the Opposition leader Mamata Bannerjee, who saw this controversy as an opportunity to embarrass the CPM Government. She brought her own supporters along with the Maoists guerrillas with guns to fight the CPM Government thus igniting the turf war in Nandigram.
On 14 March 2007, the CPM Government sent the police to Nandigram to clear the place. The local unarmed people with the women and children in the frontlines blocked the road and resisted the police. Acting in the most fascist manner the police opened fire at the mob and over a dozen people were killed in that incident. However, the local people managed to keep the CPM cadres at bay and refused to let them enter Nandigram.
According to independent investigations, the bullets used in Nandigram during the March 14 conflict were not the standard ones normally used by the West Bengal police force. Giving rise to the conclusion that the CPM cadres had disguised themselves as the police and fired on the unarmed local people resisting them. These findings greatly agitated the locals who expelled the CPM supporters with the backing of the Maoists and forced them to live in relief camps.
After the violence of March 14, the Government announced that the land acquisition proposal for the SEZ had been shelved. However, even after that the tension in Nandigram failed to subside on the ground. The CPM was hell bent on clearing the area of the Maoists and Trinamool cadres. But there was no let up in the resistance against any such moves.
The CPM finally planned "Operation Take Back" to reclaim Nandigram. They sent truck loads of their cadres to overpower the protesters and reclaim the land. Brutal violence and clashes followed but in the end the CPM cadres managed to get into Nandigram. Announcing victoriously that they had committed the same kind of violence that the Modi Government had indulged in Gujarat. Including arson, looting, killings, and mothers raped in front of their daughters, daughters in front of others et al. The horror tales too terrifying to tell.
Sadly, at the end of the day, the victim of the Nandigram controversy is the landless poor labourer. These share croppers or the proletariat belong to the minority Muslim community. Be that as it may, however, Nandigram cannot be compared with Gujarat where the oppressed belonged to the Muslim community and the perpetrators were of the Hindu faith.
In the case of Nandigram it was the CPM cadres that were in the forefront of the oppression and many among them belonged to the Muslim faith as well. But, there is little doubt that the majority who suffered in Nandigram were those belonging to the Muslim minority community.
The horror tales of Nandigram against the Muslim community were so inflaming that it brought the Muslim youth of Kolkata to the streets to vent their anger. The incense of Taslima Nasreen was always there round the corner. This was aggravated by the CPM Government's complicity in the Rizwan murder case.
Whether the fury which spilled on the streets of Kolkata was the work of the vandals or the Jacobins that would unseat the CPM Government can be debated. But one thing is certain: those furious people did have a faith!
Syed Ali Mujtaba, INFA
http://www.centralchronicle.com/20071213/1312302.htm
Nandigram bhumi and sporting rifles with .315 cartridges
BS Raghavan who had served in the West Bengal Government bureaucracy wonders, in a typical process of delaying tactics to bury the gravest immorality committed in independent, swarajya Bharatam, ‘who did, what?’ http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/nov/14guest.htm
I have the privilege of presenting below an account by another serious bureaucrat, D. Bandhopadhyay. Read on…
Yes, Syed Ali Mujtaba (see article below). The people of Nandigram who suffered the atrocities of CPM goons had a faith. A faith in the punyabhumi which made their living worthwile. Hence the name, Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh.
No falsehoods paraded by Noam Chosmky’s of the world or Sitaram Yechury’s fraudulent pieces in Peoples’ Democracy can justify the immorality that is CPM.
What should be done? Ban the CPM, to start with and later, all the associates of this goon party in the so-called Left Front who are acquiescing in the mass-murders perpetrated by CPM.
Rifle with .315 in. caliber cartridges is said to be a sporting rifle and described as a product of the Indian Ordnance Factory. http://www.gunaccessory.com/IOF/315rifle.htm
The use of .315 cartridges is a proof that CPM hired goons created the killing fields of Nandigram.
That such rifles were used by the CPM hired goons is clear and emphatic. It is also emphatic that such rifles are NOT used by the police constabulary.
Who acquired and supplied these rifles to the goons who created the killing fields of Nandigram? CPM leadership has to answer this question and explain how they keep an ordnance depot to support the party activities. So much for the sham called peoples’ democracy. It is unfair to expect the West Bengal police to investigate the identity of the hired CPM goons or the sources of their guns and .315 cartridges. This is a job to be done by some agency to be established on the lines of the US FBI with full authority to investigate in any part of Bharatam and outside of Bharatam.
Hopefully, the establishment of such a trans-bharatiya investigating agency should be the first order of business of the next Central Government.
On Dec. 11, 2007 R.K. Sharma, CRPF 190 battalion commandant, said the shells do not belong to the police. 'The government has given permission for use of .315 bullets to those who have firearms license. It needs to be investigated how the ammunition came to Nandigram,' said Sharma, adding that normalcy has returned to Nandigram and people were returning to their homes.
A remarkable and factual account, since January 2007, of the killing fields of Nandigram is provided by D. Bandyopadhyay, an ex-Director of the Asian Development Bank, and ex-Finance Secretary (Revenue), Govt. of India (See article below). In scenes reminiscent of mediaeval barbarism, what happened in these killing fields is explained: “ ‘Revenge’ became the party’s buzz-word. The lost ground had to be regained at any cost. The government and the party fused into one. The bureaucracy and the police were brainwashed to treat the one for the other. Thirty years of one-party rule resulted in the total subversion of the neutrality and impartiality of the bureaucracy and the police. Instead of the “rule of law” they started believing in the “rule of the party”. Both became handy tools of the party bosses’ sinister game-plans to reconquer Nandigram in the same manner as the old zamindars used to fight to gain or regain territory… The State Government does not believe in the rule of law since such a regime of rule of law would go against the interests of the party members who are busy amassing illegal wealth and abusing power for their personal gain and for promoting group interest… deadly weapons like AK-47s and AK-56s, Ichhapore rifles, locally made shotguns and adequate ammunition were stored at vantage points. In this operation three Ministers and several MPs were involved. High explosive bombs started to be manufactured in a couple of places under the guidance of known “ustads” of the underworld. Incidentally, in one of the manufacturing units in Khejury, there was a nasty explosion which killed one of the “ustad” bomb-makers and two of his ‘chelas’ after which this story came out… deadly weapons like AK-47s and AK-56s, Ichhapore rifles, locally made shotguns and adequate ammunition were stored at vantage points. In this operation three Ministers and several MPs were involved. High explosive bombs started to be manufactured in a couple of places under the guidance of known “ustads” of the underworld. Incidentally, in one of the manufacturing units in Khejury, there was a nasty explosion which killed one of the “ustad” bomb-makers and two of his ‘chelas’ after which this story came out… Horrifying stories of gang rape were told by a few surviving victims in Tamluk hospital where they were undergoing treatment. Afroza Bibi, a rape victim stated that on November 11, 2007 when she had come back from the noon namaaz about 30 armed persons entered her house. They first started beating them up with butts of guns. Then Bachhu, Mir Ahshan, Kalu, S.K. Barik and Abdul Rauf raped her consecutively in presence of her second daughter (16) and youngest daughter (14). Other ruffians looked on. Then her two daughters were gangraped in her presence. Thereafter they kidnapped them. Afroza Bibi did not know where they had taken them. She further stated all of them were known persons. Equally horrifying was the experience of Krishna Pramanik (26). She was dragged away from the procession and gangraped publicly in a public field. She lost consciousness. All these stories were video recorded by volunteer medical personnel later on. (Biswaji Ghosh : Dainik Statesman, Kolkata, November 13, 2007, p. 3). I stop narrating any more story of bestiality and barbarity… AND what was the reaction of the Chief Minister Buddha Bhattacharjee ? After the “Reconquest of Nandigram” he held a formal press/media conference at the Writers’ Building. He said : “We paid them back in the same coin … Serves them right.” When a journalist asked him whether he was the Chief Minister of West Bengal or only of the CPI-M, the agitated CM shot back that the journal where the journalist worked had been writing provocative pieces for the last 11 months. In any other State such a paper would have been banned. But he did not do so because “I do not want to soil my hand by killing a stinking mole”. This paper is Bartaman, a well-reputed and well-respected Bengali newspaper with more than half-a-million circulation. Commenting on this outrageous observation of the Chief Minister, Ravindra Kumar, Editor of The Statesman, observed : “Unlike the protections granted to the judiciary and legislatures, the law—anticipating perhaps the quality of rulers we would give ourselves—does not characterise contempt of an administrator or of a Chief Minister as a crime. Mr Bhattacharjee’s comment is not only beneath contempt, but it is ominous.” (The Statesman, Kolkata, November 17, 2007).”
Mainstream, Vol XLV, No 50
Buddha’s Killing Fields of Nandigram !
lundi 3 décembre 2007, par D. Bandyopadhyay
It was a well-planned and equally well-executed bloody operation conducted by the armed marauders of the Communist Party of India- Marxist which started on and around November 5 and is still continuing with lesser intensity. The objective was simple and straightforward. It was to reoccupy several villages whose inhabitants were originally party loyalists who turned hostile to the party after the Haldia Development Authority published the notice regarding acquisition of land in 34 villages in Nandigram for establishing a “chemical hub”. That was on January 3, 2007. When anxious villagers went to a local Gram Panchayat Office to find out whether their homestead and agricultural lands were within the proposed area, the CPI-M Pradhan of the Gram Panchayat called the police to disperse the crowd. The police came. They lathicharged the crowd who refused to budge till they received a cogent reply. Then the police opened fire and retreated. In their panic and haste the police jeep hit a telegraph pole while driving at high speed. It overturned and caught fire. Villagers rescued the policemen from the overturned burning vehicle and allowed them to return to the police station safely. The CPI-M and the government falsely alleged that the violent crowed set fire to the jeep. If the crowd had any evil intention none of the policemen could have escaped serious injury or even death. Nothing happened to them excepting some minor injury due to the accident.
On January 7, 2007, the CPI-M goons attacked several villages in a pincer movement from land and river/canal. One Samanta family whose members owed allegiance to the CPI-M and through whose munificence they amassed huge wealth and among whom there was also an influential CPI-M local leader took the lead. From this CPI-M leader’s house shots were fired killing several innocent villagers who were caught unawares. In their rage villagers surrounded the house, killed the owner and set fire to the building. The loss of an ardent armed gang leader of the party was too hard an insult to swallow for the local party satrap, Lakshman Seth, of Haldia.
After Samanta’s death several families who were active office-bearers of the party and Panchayat left Nandigram out of fear to seek shelter in the neighbouring Khejury area which was and still now remains a CPI-M stronghold. The party and the government initially gave out a false figure of 15 thousand CPI-M active supporters having been driven out of Nandigram. The fact is that no one was driven out at that time. They left out of fright because of their closeness to active CPI-M operators who had been terrorising, intimidating, extorting the local people for their own private gain. There was an open outburst of suppressed public hatred and rage against them. It was expressed verbally without any physical violence. Altogether roughly 250 families fled away, many of them came back at the request of the local leaders and started living unmolested.
At first the Chief Minister denied that there was any notification by the government. Technically he was correct because the advance notice was given by the Haldia Development Authority (HDA) and not by the Land and Land Reforms Department. But that was mere semantics. He blamed the Opposition for creating trouble by spreading false rumours about acquisition. A newspaper published the photocopy of the notification the next day. Then the Chief Minister shifted his ground and stated that the HDA had no authority to publish such a notification. Again he committed an error because it was an advance notice and not a regular notification under the Land Acquisition Act. When he found that all his false statements were getting contradicted by document, he raved and roared saying “tear off that notice”, as if tearing off a copy of the notice would mean a change in the government’s decision to acquire 34,000 acres of land for the chemical hub to be set up by the Salem Group of Indonesia. After a few more farcical motions he announced that the project would be kept on hold for a while. He thought that that would pacify the angry peasants. They saw through the sinister game and got more angry. They organised themselves under the banner of the “Bhumi Uchhched Pratirodh Committee” (Committee for Resistance Against Forcible Eviction—BUPC). Thus began the battle for Nandigram.
Incidentally, Nandigram had been a red bastion for several decades. Way back in the late forties of the last century there was the tebhaga movement for the protection of the rights of sharecroppers. Bhupal Panda of the then united CPI led the movement. He was a legendary leader of the deprived and oppressed cultivators and agricultural labourers. The Left leanings of the inhabitants are more than six decades old. There was no “Opposition” party before the events of January 7, 2007. The CPI-M leadership cried “wolf” where there was none.
The CPI-M leadership started smarting sharply from the utter political humiliation they suffered in Nandigram. “Revenge” became the party’s buzz-word. The lost ground had to be regained at any cost. The government and the party fused into one. The bureaucracy and the police were brainwashed to treat the one for the other. Thirty years of one-party rule resulted in the total subversion of the neutrality and impartiality of the bureaucracy and the police. Instead of the “rule of law” they started believing in the “rule of the party”. Both became handy tools of the party bosses’ sinister game-plans to reconquer Nandigram in the same manner as the old zamindars used to fight to gain or regain territory.
AFTER two months of preparation the party and the government decided to strike back. Under the direction of the Police Minister, who was also the Chief Minister, about five battalions of armed policemen were mobilised. In addition, the CPI-M’s own armed cadres and roughs and goondas hired for the purpose were also deployed. The blueprint of the attack was prepared, as reported in the press, in the guest house of the Kolaghat Thermal Power Plant where the IG of Police, DIG of Police and the SP of East Midnapore along with the party bosses were present. The attack was planned on March 13. Reports of impending invasion were reaching a wide circle of public outside Nandigarm. The Governor of the State was at Chennai on March 13. He was informed of the imminent aggression on the peaceful peasantry of Nandigram. It must be put on record that strictly within his constitutional rights of advising and warning the government, the Governor advised utmost restraint to be shown in case of any police action. This was conveyed in no uncertain terms to the State Home Secretary by the Governor’s Secretary by the afternoon of March 13, 2007. These are all matters of record. No attack took place on March 13, 2007. On March 14 morning when the Governor was flying back to Kolkata from Chennai and was practically incommunicado, the operation started at 9.45 am. The armed police of the State and the armed goons of the party started indiscriminate fire on the unarmed children, women and men of Nandigram who were coming out of temples and mosques. Meanwhile roadblocks were set up all along on all the roads to Nandigram. These were manned openly by the CPI-M cadres aided and abetted by the police. Nobody from outside could go to Nandigram in the next 72 hours. So much so, that when the Governor wanted to visit Tamluk hospital on March 15, 2007, his convoy was obstructed by the CPI-M members on the road. When the Governor threatened to walk about 10 km alone leaving behind his convoy, on instructions from Kolkata, his motorcade was allowed to proceed to the hospital only and not beyond it.
There were various estimates regarding the number of persons killed, injured, missing and about the number of women raped and molested. The government obviously tried to suppress the facts. On the other side rumours spread that about hundred persons were killed whose bodies were taken away by the goons for disposal elsewhere. A group of non-partisan social scientists conducted a survey by the census method in 40 per cent of households in the affected villages a month-and-a-half after the event. They followed a strictly statistical methodology. Their findings are given below and in the following page.
Table 1 : Serious Physical Injury in Nandigram on March 14, 2007
Sl. Nature of Injury Male Female Total
1 Bullet injury 41 18 59
2 Rubber Bullet injury 22 15 37
3 Fibre Rod/Baton/Rifle butt injury etc. 108 12 120
4 Tear gas shell burst injury 14 12 26
5 Bomb injury 2 - 2
Total 187 57 244
Thus on March 14, 2007, 244 persons, including 57 women, suffered serious physical injuries ; 348 women suffered sexual atrocities of different kinds, including 11 rape cases ; 14 persons including two women were killed ; and four persons had been missing since March 14, 2007. These figures relate to only 40 per cent of the households in the affected villages.
Table 2 : Severe Atrocities on Women on March 14 and 15
SL.No. Nature of Torture Number
1 Physical Torture 274
2 Modesty Violation 46
3 Sexual Torture 17
4 Rape 11
Total 348
Table 3 : Deaths on March 14, 2007
Male Female Total
12 2 14
Table 4 : Missing since March 14, 2007
Male Female Total
3 1 4
(Source : Sameekshak Samannaya : Nandigram March 14 ; September 2007, Kolkata, p. 13)
On March 15, 2007, the Governor expressed his “cold horror” while condemning the unnecessary and avoidable bloodbath. On the same day on a PIL petition the Calcutta High Court directed the CBI to enquire into the happenings in Nandigram and to submit a report within a week. The CBI found ample evidence of indiscriminate firing from both the police firearms and civilian firearms. They recovered empty shells of 315 sporting rifles. They found out an arsenal at the “Ma Janani” brick kiln in Khejury and arrested 10 goons with illegal firearms. They handed over these culprits to the State Police who released them all after 90 days deliberately without filing any chargesheet. With the presence of the CBI in the region peace was restored. Almost all the culprits fled away. The CBI submitted their preliminary report within seven days in a sealed cover to the High Court. The fact that all the miscreants were CPI-M supporters or hired by them was amply demonstrated by the CBI’s very limited enquiry. But what did the High Court do ?
The High Court initially did nothing. To make the report of the CBI public and to advise them to carry on the investigation, a number of PILs were filed. Instead of throwing out these petitions as not maintainable, the High Court gave a formal hearing which ended in July 2007. Delivering the judgement in the Nandigram killings case on November 16, 2007 the High Court held that the police firing there on March 14, in which 14 people had been killed, was wholly unjustified and violative of Article 21 of the Constitution. The Division Bench, which passed the order, stated that the CBI inquiry into the Nandigram incident would continue and asked the investigating agency to submit a comprehensive report to it (the HC) within a month. The Court rejected all the arguments of the State Government, including its plea for stay on the implementation of the HC’s order. So far so good. But if the order had come prior to the autumn recess of the High Court, perhaps the second wave of the more horrendous bloody events could have been avoided. Meanwhile, on the plea that matters were pending in the High Court the State Government did not take any legal action against the offenders, nor did it initiate any departmental action against any defaulting officer. Not a single arrest was made. The State Government does not believe in the rule of law since such a regime of rule of law would go against the interests of the party members who are busy amassing illegal wealth and abusing power for their personal gain and for promoting group interest. Though delayed, even in their darkest hour, this judgement came as a great morale booster for the suffering peasantry of Nandigram.
THE long silence of the judiciary emboldened the party leadership. They had been carrying on probing attacks from the Khejury side since mid-April onwards. But instead of being cowed down, the members of the BUPC stiffened their resistance. The party and its government could not tolerate such impudence from the unarmed organised peasantry who were their loyalists for so many decades. The failure to “reconquer” Nandigram was hurting the prestige and the image of the party leadership. From late September onwards party leaders at all levels started planning a bloody offensive to recapture Nandigram. It should be stated here that there were no “Opposition” parties in this area before the disturbance started. It was a people’s uprising. Other parties were trying to ride on the surf. They did not create the surf.
A six-stage blueprint was prepared which was finalised again in a meeting of senior police officers in the same guest house of Kolaghat Thermal Plant. First, an intensive propaganda blitz of disinformation and misinformation was launched. They said falsely that 15,000 (which later on was scaled down to 3500) of their supporters had been driven out. The party found that calling the Jamait-e-Ulema-e-Hind as a communal force could adversely affect its Muslim vote-bank, so they dropped its name. They brought in the Maoists instead. That was because it would be a music to the ears of Government of India, particularly the Ministry of Home Affairs. The State Government’s open anti-Maoist stand helped them to come nearer to the GOI. False stories were spread that Maoists and Trinamul Congress workers were organising arms training, building bunkers, gathering deadly weapons, including automatic rifles, mortar, mines etc, though the State Home Secretary in a recent interview stated that the police did not find any evidence of Maoist incursion in the area.
Secondly, large scale mobilisation of known assassins, killers, murderers on payment of money of Rs 12000, for each night of operation and payment of Rs 2 lakhs to the next of kin in case of death for ordinary soldiers started in earnest. A well-known mafia don from the coal region and his gang were also deployed. A group of dacoits of the Salim gang was requisitioned from South 24-Parganas. Outlaws from Garbeta region under the leadership of Tapan Ghosh and Sukur Ali, popularly known as “butchers of Garbeta and Chhoto Angaria”, were brought down from that area. In addition, known roughs and gangsters with their helpers were hired from Bankura, Purulia, West Medinipur and Arambagh of Hooghly. A known ruffian from Baruipur with his villainous followers was hired. Along with money they were provided with free shelter, food and alcohol etc. to keep them happy.
Thirdly, a six-pronged attack programme was chalked out to avoid known points of resistance of the BUPC.
Fourthly, to clear the deck for free and easy operation all police pickets along the Tekhali canal and other sensitive spots were withdrawn and the whole area was cordoned off to prevent ingress or egress of any “outsiders”.
Fifthly, deadly weapons like AK-47s and AK-56s, Ichhapore rifles, locally made shotguns and adequate ammunition were stored at vantage points. In this operation three Ministers and several MPs were involved. High explosive bombs started to be manufactured in a couple of places under the guidance of known “ustads” of the underworld. Incidentally, in one of the manufacturing units in Khejury, there was a nasty explosion which killed one of the “ustad” bomb-makers and two of his ‘chelas’ after which this story came out.
Sixthly, while experienced gang leaders were in charge of different sectors, some of the known CPI-M leaders were deployed as Political Commissars to these sector commanders.
The time given to the “Operation Reconquest” was seventytwo to ninetysix hours.
From around November 3 and 4, 2007, all roads leading to Nandigram were blocked by slogan-shouting CPI-M cadres. TMC leader Mamata Banerjee could go only up to Tamluk which was about 70 km away from Nandigram. Medha Patkar had to return twice, once from Kapasberia and the next time from Kolaghat, which is only an hour’s drive from Calcutta. No mediapersons, excepting one TV channel of their choice, were allowed to go. They are unable to go even now (November 17, 2007). Only one reporter of the Dainik Statesman stayed back as a part of the local population and sent graphic despatches.
WHEN the operation started it could not make any significant incursion due to the resistance of the BUPC volunteers. Then the BUPC made a major tactical error. They decided to take out two processions of their supporters on November 10 morning without any arms (not even with lathis) towards the peripheral villages under “red” occupation. In an absolutely military manner the CPI-M cadres ambushed these two processions from two points killing roughly 100 persons, injuring over 150 and capturing about 800 or so unarmed villagers. They also carried away most of the dead bodies and some wounded persons. Then they lit up a huge community funeral pyre where both the dead and some living injured persons were burnt alive. Their savagery far exceeded any recorded incident of cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages.
Next day on November 11, 2007 the goons put in front the human shield of the captured persons and started moving in. Resisting them would mean killing their own men and women. Resistance leaders decided to withdraw en masse. Armed bandits entered the deserted villages of Sonachura, Gokulnagar and Garh Chakraberia. Reconquest of Nandigram was completed. As a token of conquest they planted red flags all over the area which BJP leader L.K. Advani himself witnessed on his visit to Nandigram. (Ashish Ghosh, Dainik Statesman, November 15, 2007) The stories of savagery that are trickling out are blood-chilling. Since these murderers do not obey any law, they could not care less about the laws of war. Major Aditya Bera (Retd.) settled down in his own village at Gokulnagar after retirement. On the morning of November 10, 2007, he joined hundreds of his co-villagers in a peaceful procession. As the procession approached the point of hidden ambush, the marchers faced intense fire. A bullet hit Major Bera. He had nothing in hand to fight back excepting his courage and loyalty to the nation with which he served for more than three decades as an officer of the Indian Army. He was dragged along and taken to a party operational headquarters for interrogation. Since he was a retired Major they thought he gave the BUPC tactical advice. He had nothing to tell them. Finding him of no operational value, they shot him dead and as a sign of primordial barbarity they beheaded him. Major Bera who earlier in life fought for mother India, died in the hands of villains of uncertain parentage. Kanai Sheet of Sonachura was the father of Khokan Sheet, a well-known leader of the BUPC. Both of them suffered bullet injuries. Khokan could escape. Kanai was not that lucky. He was taken to Khejury, tortured and killed because his son was resisting land acquisition. (Sukumar Mitra : Despatch from Nandigram : Dainik Statesman)
Horrifying stories of gang rape were told by a few surviving victims in Tamluk hospital where they were undergoing treatment. Afroza Bibi, a rape victim stated that on November 11, 2007 when she had come back from the noon namaaz about 30 armed persons entered her house. They first started beating them up with butts of guns. Then Bachhu, Mir Ahshan, Kalu, S.K. Barik and Abdul Rauf raped her consecutively in presence of her second daughter (16) and youngest daughter (14). Other ruffians looked on. Then her two daughters were gangraped in her presence. Thereafter they kidnapped them. Afroza Bibi did not know where they had taken them. She further stated all of them were known persons. Equally horrifying was the experience of Krishna Pramanik (26). She was dragged away from the procession and gangraped publicly in a public field. She lost consciousness. All these stories were video recorded by volunteer medical personnel later on. (Biswaji Ghosh : Dainik Statesman, Kolkata, November 13, 2007, p. 3)
I stop narrating any more story of bestiality and barbarity.
AND what was the reaction of the Chief Minister Buddha Bhattacharjee ? After the “Reconquest of Nandigram” he held a formal press/media conference at the Writers’ Building. He said : “We paid them back in the same coin … Serves them right.” When a journalist asked him whether he was the Chief Minister of West Bengal or only of the CPI-M, the agitated CM shot back that the journal where the journalist worked had been writing provocative pieces for the last 11 months. In any other State such a paper would have been banned. But he did not do so because “I do not want to soil my hand by killing a stinking mole”. This paper is Bartaman, a well-reputed and well-respected Bengali newspaper with more than half-a-million circulation. Commenting on this outrageous observation of the Chief Minister, Ravindra Kumar, Editor of The Statesman, observed : “Unlike the protections granted to the judiciary and legislatures, the law—anticipating perhaps the quality of rulers we would give ourselves—does not characterise contempt of an administrator or of a Chief Minister as a crime. Mr Bhattacharjee’s comment is not only beneath contempt, but it is ominous.” (The Statesman, Kolkata, November 17, 2007)
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Governor of West Bengal, a noble soul, issued a statement on the happenings of Nandigram on November 9, 2007 to discharge his constitutional duty as a Governor “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the law”. He observed, inter alia, “ … But the manner in which the ‘recapture’ of Nandigram villages is being attempted is totally unlawful and unacceptable. I find it equally unacceptable that while Nandigram has been ingressed with ease by armed people on the one hand, political and non-political persons trying to reach it had been violently obstructed. Some of them were bearing relief articles for the homeless. The treatment meted to Smt Medha Patkar and other associates of hers last evening (November 8, 2007) was against all norms of civilised political behaviour.” He advised the State Government to take certain immediate steps. “These include (i) immediate return of the ingressers ; (ii) the giving of urgent relief to the displaced persons in Nandigram ; and (iii) the facilitation of their return to their homes. I have also asked the administration to remove the new unauthorised manmade blocks at entry points to (here he mentions names of four different roads) … Let me conclude by saying : Enough is enough. Peace and security should be restored without any delay.”
That was November 9. Full-blooded operations with primordial bestiality and cruelty continued for another 48 hours, that is, till November 11, 2007. Even today sporadic killings and mayhem are continuing in the presence of the CRPF and the State Police. Obviously the threat of pulling the rug by the CPI-M has totally paralysed and incapacitated the UPA Government at the Centre. As a result, they are unable to issue appropriate directive under Article 355 of the Constitution to restore the rule of law in Nandigram and elsewhere in West Bengal after such a severe indictment of the State Government by the Governor and the Calcutta High Court.
The author was the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministries of Finance (Revenue) and Rural Development, and the Executive Director, Asian Development Bank, Manila.
http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article464.html
Outsiders' hand in Nandigram firing confirmed
9 Dec 2007, 0101 hrs IST , TNN
NANDIGRAM: CBI investigators probing the Nandigram firing on March 14 have identified at least 27 outsiders in khaki who moved with the police force to break the barricade that the Trinamul Congress-led Bhumi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee supporters had put up in the villages.
Investigators got the lead from the video footage of the carnage recorded by none other than the police and cross-checked it with on-the-spot interrogation of more than 50 villagers and two police officers present on the day of the firing.
CBI officers then summoned villagers, owing allegiance to both the parties — CPM and BUPC, and questioned them with video footage on display. The process helped them to spot the men in khaki — a little different from police uniform difficult to differentiate from a distance. These men, according to CBI, were heavily armed and moving with the police. The footage showed that these men, unlike the police, had no shoes.
It was evident from the footage that while the police posted on Bhangabera Bridge was busy asking villagers to make way for the police, these "cops" sneaked into the crowd with batons and started chasing them. According to the CBI, this was enough provocation for the crowd to turn violent. Angry villagers then started pelting stones at the police.
In the melee, these men chased some of the BUPC supporters with fire arms. Locals reportedly identified them as CPM workers. CBI officers have recorded their version and verified their presence in the procession from the footage. Their statements corroborated the video recording of the incident by and large. Investigators have reasons to believe that these outsiders on khaki sparked the violence.
Four CBI teams on Saturday visited Sonachura, Adhikaripara and Gokulnagar villages in Nandigram. A team met Sushil Das Adhikari whose brother Salil Das Adhikari sustained bullet injuries on March 14. Sushil was also with the procession. Both brothers were present at the Gokulnagar’s Malpara where BUPC supporters had assembled.
The CBI team is now looking for men in khaki. It has interrogated a few local CPM activists who reportedly refused to identify them. They claimed that some CPM supporters of Sonachura and Bhangabera villages were present with the police as they were forced to join and guide them. But they denied the charge that these men were carrying firearms and chased away BUPC supporters.
CBI officers on Saturday recovered more charred bones and fire arms — a .303 rifle and an improvised gun from the Talpati Canal. They said the charred bones along with those found at the five graves at Khejuri might have a connection with the March 14 carnage.
That explains why the team has also collected a detail list of the missing persons since March 14. While the CBI did its bit, a CID team under IG (I) D P Tarenia visited the dreaded spot at Bamanchak village on Saturday from where the charred remains were recovered only the other day. Family members of Bacchan Garudas, Srimanta Das and Sunil Bar killed in a blast on October 27 at Sherkhanchawk, claimed that the bones were those of their relatives and asked the police to hand them over.
Within a day after the state government ordered the CID inquiry into the mystery graves, the police rounded up 15 people including a CPM local committee member on charges of rioting and attempt to murder.
http://tinyurl.com/3d44ps
Bullets found in Jantiboni
Express news service
Posted online: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 12:00:00
Updated: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 01:35:10
Kolkata, December 11 Several bullets and bullet cases were found lying scattered in a paddy field in Nandigram today. Interestingly, the bullets were discovered in the same area — Jantiboni near Parulbari village in Maheshpur — where a grave was found yesterday.
“Locals harvesting paddy in the fields spotted the bullets and alerted us. The bullets are of .303 rifles. We will hand them over to the local police soon,” said Deputy Inspector General Alok Raj, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF).
Digging of the grave is yet to begin as no magistrate visited the spot today.
Superintendent of Police (East Midnapore) S S Panda said the police had already sought permission from the magistrate at Haldia to dig the grave. The digging can start only after obtaining permission from the magistrate.
Preliminary reports suggested that the grave was freshly dug.
Meanwhile, Nandigram police arrested two persons today. Joydev Paik, a Bhumi Uchhed Partirodh Committee (BUPC) supporter, was arrested from Sonachura.
Locals alleged that Paik sheltered Maoists at his house during the movement in Nandigram. Gopal Jana, a CPM supporter, was arrested from Keyakhali in Nandigram Block (II) today.
CPM cadres had raided Keyakhali and destroyed several huts there in October.
A Nandigram police officer said the two were arrested with the help of the CRPF personnel in the area.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Bullets-found-in-Jantiboni/249389/
Kolkata, Telegraph, Issue Date: Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Used bullets found near ‘graveyard’
OUR BUREAU
The bullets found on Tuesday. (Jahangir Badsa)
Nandigram/Calcutta, Dec. 11: The CRPF today found spent .315-calibre cartridges and torn cardboard boxes marked “Pune” in Parulbari village a day after two suspected graves were spotted there.
Assistant commandant A.K. Upadhyay said 23 “rimmed cartridges” were found during a raid in the area and were handed over to police for investigation.
The boxes suggest that the cartridges were manufactured at the Kirkee ordnance factory in Pune. But neither the police nor the paramilitary uses .315-calibre cartridges, a police officer said.
Those with licensed .315 rifles can buy the bullets from authorised gun shops and ordnance factory outlets.
Parulbari is on the fringes of Maheshpur, which had witnessed heavy gun battles between CPM and Bhoomi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee activists from October 28 to November 6.
The CPM took control of Jambari village, a kilometre from where the cartridges were found, on November 6. The next day, the cadres recaptured Parulbari and Maheshpur.
“It appears that either the Pratirodh Committee or the CPM or both had these bullets. The police never opened fire in this area,” an officer said.
Home secretary Prasad Ranjan Ray said the CID would dig up the graves found yesterday in the presence of an executive magistrate. He had an hour-long meeting with chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and chief secretary A.K. Deb on Nandigram.
Many villagers whose family members have gone missing during the land war came to Parulbari today, hoping to find their bodies.
Among them were Dilip Maity and Sukdeb Singha, who had cycled nearly 20km from Southkhali village.
Sukdeb’s elder brother Balaram, 28, and Dilip’s elder brother Bhagirath, 30, went missing from the Pratirodh Committee rally that was fired at on November 10.
“We started to run for our lives when the CPM cadres started firing. I didn’t see Bhagirath after that,” said Dilip.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071212/asp/bengal/story_8659103.asp
Body with bullet holes dug out
- Wife of BUPC supporter says shirt belonged to her husband
OUR CORRESPONDENT
Shyamali Pramanick, who identified the body that was dug out as her husband’s, looks at the grave. (Jahangir Badsa)
Nandigram, Dec. 12: A body with two bullet holes was to- day dug out of the suspected grave that had been found in Parulbari village.
A woman, Shyamali Pramanick, saw the decomposed remains and said it was that of her husband’s.
Haren, aged around 37, was a Bhoomi Uchchhed Pra- tirodh Committee supporter. His family said he went missing on November 7 while returning home from the Nandigram block hospital, where his father was being treated for a heart ailment.
Shyamali and her sister-in-law Sephali identified Haren by his blue striped shirt and a talisman around the waist.
“We had received a missing diary about Haren Pramanick. Now we will treat it as a murder case,” said East Midnapore superintendent of police S.S. Panda.
CBI superintendents Sujit Pandey and R.R. Sahay also visited the spot to probe whether the exhumed body had anything to do with the March 14 police firing.
Maheshpur, adjoining Parulbari, and its neighbouring villages had witnessed heavy gun battles between CPM and Pratirodh Committee supporters from October 28 to the first week of November.
Hundreds thronged Parulbari this morning as news that the body would be dug out spread. They were covering their nose to ward off the stench as the body was being pulled out.
After about half an hour of digging, the spades hit something hard and a human skull with tufts of hair could be seen. Further digging revealed a rotting and torn gunny bag, through which a pair of navy blue trousers stuck out. The dead man had his hands tied behind his back.
“One bullet had pierced the abdomen and the other the shoulders,” a police officer said.
As soon as the body was exhumed, committee conveners Sheikh Sufiyan and Abdus Samad claimed that it was Pramanick’s. They called Shyamali and Sephali to identify it.
“I could not recognise the face. But when the dirt was removed from the shirt, I recog-nised it. A close look and I could make out it was him,” Shyamali said, clutching her nine-year-old son Toton and crying .
“We also identified the ghunshi (talisman) my brother wore,” said Sephali.
“My father (Bhushan, 65) lost his will to live after hearing about his only son’s death. He passed away on November 30. We performed his shraadh today before coming here.”
Parulbari is about 2km from Kamalpur, where the Pramanicks live.
The CRPF today found a used 9mm bullet and a spent .315 cartridge from the area. Twenty-three used .315 cartridges were found yesterday.
CM statement
Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will make a statement on the role of the CRPF in Nandigram in the Assembly tomorrow.
CPM leaders had been accusing the force of harassing villagers from the time it arrived in Nandigram.
The CPM state secretariat met this evening to finalise the contents of the statement. The chief minister and the home secretary had earlier lauded the role of the CRPF.
A group of party MPs led by Basudev Acharya will visit Nandigram tomorrow.
http://telegraphindia.com/1071213/asp/bengal/story_8663693.asp
Body recovered from another Nandigram grave
Express news service
Posted online: Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST
KOLKATA, DECEMBER 12
A decomposed body was unearthed on Wednesday from the second grave found by the CRPF in Maheshpur in Nandigram. The wife and neighbours of Haren Pramanik, a 32-year-old resident of Takapura in Nandigram, claimed the body was his.
Pramanik was last seen on November 7, a day after armed CPI(M) cadres started entering Nandigram and engaged in bloody skirmishes with the Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC). At least 35 persons had been reported missing during the period.
"We looked everywhere, but failed to trace him. A few people say he was last seen running away from the site of a clash. Today, I and his wife Shyamali identified him," said Swapan Mondol, the victim's neighbour. According to police sources, the body had injury marks on the back and on the shoulders.
The CPI(M) was guarded in its reaction to the discovery. "Let there be more tests. Four or five people are missing there, some are our supporters. Our rivals can claim anything, let the investigation be completed. One must remember that the area was under their control for 11 months," said CPI(M) central committee member Shyamal Chakraborty.
But the Trinamool Congress claimed it was indeed the body of Pramanik. "He was our supporter and was abducted from Maheshpur on the day CPI(M) cadres fired on our rally.
Later, he was murdered and put in a grave in the middle of a paddy field. His father died days after he went missing. It is because of the strict CRPF vigil and our mass support that the truth is coming out. This validates our claim," said Sisir Adhikary, TMC leader and MLA from Contai.
The grave was discovered by locals working at the paddy field on December 10. They informed CRPF men, who then cordoned off the area. Following the discovery, a huge cache of bullets, both live and used, were also unearthed from near the grave.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/249785.html
Cartridge shells, ammunition packs found in Nandigram
Dec 11, 2007, 17:53 GMT
Kolkata, Dec 11 (IANS) Several cartridge shells and ammunition were recovered from Nandigram Tuesday, a day after a new burial mound was found in the violence-torn West Bengal area.
The police said about 25 empty shells of .315 bullets and four packets of the ammunition, each containing 10 cartridges, were recovered from near the burial mounds at Parulbari near Nandigram. The ammunition had the markings of a Pune factory.
'The empty cartridges were recovered by Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel. A gun battle had occurred in the same area a few days ago. But we can't confirm if the ammunition was used during the 'recapture' of Nandigram by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) cadres last month,' East Midnapore police superintendent S.S. Panda told IANS.
'We have informed the Haldia Chief Judicial Magistrate about the new grave found Monday,' Panda said.
Meanwhile, West Bengal Home Secretary Prasad Ranjan Roy ordered a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) inquiry into the new burial mound.
Earlier, five burial mounds were found on the side of a road at Khejuri, near Nandigram, from which charred skeletal remains were unearthed.
The charred bones were later sent to the State Forensic Science Laboratory for tests.
Meanwhile, local villagers alleged the cartridge shells were left behind by armed CPI-M cadres who entered Nandigram through Parulbari area Nov 7 and launched a fierce attack on rival Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC) activists.
R.K. Sharma, CRPF 190 battalion commandant, said the shells do not belong to the police. 'The government has given permission for use of .315 bullets to those who have firearms license. It needs to be investigated how the ammunition came to Nandigram,' said Sharma, adding that normalcy has returned to Nandigram and people were returning to their homes.
CRPF personnel are patrolling all the violence-hit areas, he said.
Nandigram, about 150 km from here in East Midnapore district, flared up over proposed land acquisition for a special economic zone (SEZ), including a chemical hub - a plan that was scrapped by the state government later in the face of stiff resistance.
Thirty-five people have died in violence in Nandigram since January this year. A fresh bout of violence broke out in November after ruling CPI-M cadres allegedly recaptured their lost bases in the area by launching a massive onslaught on the rival anti-land acquisition BUPC.
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/india/news/article_1380275.php/Cartridge_shells_ammunition_packs_found_in_Nandigram
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 11:58:00 PM
Permission to reprint or copy this article or photo must be obtained from www.3dsyndication.com.
Dissidents in CPI(M) helping find more graves in Nandigram
Gyan Varma
NEW DELHI: After the recovery of several human bones and seven graves in Nandigram, the men in uniform are now being helped by CPI(M) dissidents to uncover more graves. Explosives, live bombs and weapons have also been seized in the past few days.
“We have so far uncovered seven graves, but there is a strong possibility there could be many more. What we have found could be the tip of the iceberg,” said a senior official involved in the operations in Nandigram.
The officer added that since the paramilitary force was new to the area and did not know the terrain, it was relying on CPI(M) dissidents to locate new graves and recover weapons.
“We have no option but to rely on the inputs given by them. This is not our job but we are doing it considering the extent of the problem,” said the officer, adding that they have prepared a list of people who have gone missing after the violence.
“The list was prepared on the basis of complaints made by people. We gave the list to local police since it is not our job to find missing people,” he added.
The paramilitary force has also recovered 44kg of IEDs.
v_gyan@dnaindia.net
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1138930
Nandigram Scars- A question of faith
A lot has been written on the 'intra-proletariat struggle' being witnessed at Nandigram, some 90 miles from the eastern metropolis of Kolkata. Some described it as a clash between the agrarian forces and those who favor industrialization. Others said it was a revolt against the dictatorship of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that rules West Bengal for the last four decades.
Many others blame it on the Opposition in West Bengal particularly the Trinamool Congress that attempted to cash on the discontentment of the people of Nandigram. Notwithstanding, the Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's apology.
The general summary is that Nandigram essentially was a people's war, a faithless commotion with no religious overtones. Those who look for the religious angle there are the reactionary elements and such voices should be marginalized.
However, according to the BJP the majority of the victims of the clashes in Nandigram were those belonging to the Muslim minority community. The BJP for the first time has come out to speak in favor of the oppressed Muslim community since it sees in Nandigram an opportunity to break the CPM stronghold in West Bengal.
It is pertinent to recall, that the Nandigram fracas has its genesis in the West Bengal Government's decision to create a Special Economic Zone there with an eye on getting foreign investment and industrial development. It decided to permit an Indonesian firm to build a chemicals plant across the Haldia River from the Haldia port, in Nandigram. On the grounds that the SEZ in Nandigram would create about 100,000 direct and indirect jobs and a lot of people would be benefited by this project. Little did the CPM realize that by trying to replicate the Chinese model of a SEZ, wherein the Government forcibly evicted the people from their lands, at a price determined by the Government, it would become the bugbear for the State Government.
The landowners of Nandigram, who are mostly Hindus, grudgingly seemed to have accepted the deal, but the local Muslim people who were dependent on the land as sharecroppers opposed the idea of the SEZ. They argued that as they did not own the land they would be displaced without any compensation being paid to them. This created a rift between the CPM and the local people. The CPM cadres forcibly tried to clear up the area but those residing there resisted such moves.
In walked the Opposition leader Mamata Bannerjee, who saw this controversy as an opportunity to embarrass the CPM Government. She brought her own supporters along with the Maoists guerrillas with guns to fight the CPM Government thus igniting the turf war in Nandigram.
On 14 March 2007, the CPM Government sent the police to Nandigram to clear the place. The local unarmed people with the women and children in the frontlines blocked the road and resisted the police. Acting in the most fascist manner the police opened fire at the mob and over a dozen people were killed in that incident. However, the local people managed to keep the CPM cadres at bay and refused to let them enter Nandigram.
According to independent investigations, the bullets used in Nandigram during the March 14 conflict were not the standard ones normally used by the West Bengal police force. Giving rise to the conclusion that the CPM cadres had disguised themselves as the police and fired on the unarmed local people resisting them. These findings greatly agitated the locals who expelled the CPM supporters with the backing of the Maoists and forced them to live in relief camps.
After the violence of March 14, the Government announced that the land acquisition proposal for the SEZ had been shelved. However, even after that the tension in Nandigram failed to subside on the ground. The CPM was hell bent on clearing the area of the Maoists and Trinamool cadres. But there was no let up in the resistance against any such moves.
The CPM finally planned "Operation Take Back" to reclaim Nandigram. They sent truck loads of their cadres to overpower the protesters and reclaim the land. Brutal violence and clashes followed but in the end the CPM cadres managed to get into Nandigram. Announcing victoriously that they had committed the same kind of violence that the Modi Government had indulged in Gujarat. Including arson, looting, killings, and mothers raped in front of their daughters, daughters in front of others et al. The horror tales too terrifying to tell.
Sadly, at the end of the day, the victim of the Nandigram controversy is the landless poor labourer. These share croppers or the proletariat belong to the minority Muslim community. Be that as it may, however, Nandigram cannot be compared with Gujarat where the oppressed belonged to the Muslim community and the perpetrators were of the Hindu faith.
In the case of Nandigram it was the CPM cadres that were in the forefront of the oppression and many among them belonged to the Muslim faith as well. But, there is little doubt that the majority who suffered in Nandigram were those belonging to the Muslim minority community.
The horror tales of Nandigram against the Muslim community were so inflaming that it brought the Muslim youth of Kolkata to the streets to vent their anger. The incense of Taslima Nasreen was always there round the corner. This was aggravated by the CPM Government's complicity in the Rizwan murder case.
Whether the fury which spilled on the streets of Kolkata was the work of the vandals or the Jacobins that would unseat the CPM Government can be debated. But one thing is certain: those furious people did have a faith!
Syed Ali Mujtaba, INFA
http://www.centralchronicle.com/20071213/1312302.htm
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Now, RSP tells off big brother CPM
Now, RSP takes on Big Brother
Statesman News Service
KOLKATA, Feb. 13: The RSP today warned the state administration not to act in a manner so that the political agenda of one party of the ruling combine (read the CPI-M ) is fulfilled inflicting suffering on the people. Embarrassing the CPI-M further, RSP supporters marched towards Writers’ Buildings to lodge its protest against police “highhandedness” and firing during a democratic movement at Dinhata on 5 February killing five Forward Bloc activists, while a security personnel succumbed to his injuries sustained during the trouble. The widening rift in the LF over the CPI-M’s “Big Brotherly” attitude towards the junior partners and its monopoly of state power came out into the open when the FB called an unprecedented state bandh on 6 February that evoked widespread response; today, the RSP also held demonstrations during the day outside the offices of the administrative heads in 227 blocks in the state.
Mr Manoj Bhattacharjee, RSP central committee member, said the state police had for some time been behaving in such a way that violated the LF’s declared policy on how the administration was to tackle democratic movements. The Dinhata firing was a glaring example of the breach of that policy.
The RSP not only expressed solidarity with the FB which along with it has become vocal against the way the CPI-M has been running the state administration “unilaterally to suit its political interests”. The two LF constituents have already made it clear that they are opposed to the CPI-M’s policy of industrialisation through farm land acquisition, setting up SEZs and allowing big corporate houses to invest in retail chains that, according to them , would take away the livelihood of thousands of poor people in the state.
Mr Bhattacharya said the day’s agitation was organised to caution the administration not to clamp police-raj on the state.
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=190753
Statesman News Service
KOLKATA, Feb. 13: The RSP today warned the state administration not to act in a manner so that the political agenda of one party of the ruling combine (read the CPI-M ) is fulfilled inflicting suffering on the people. Embarrassing the CPI-M further, RSP supporters marched towards Writers’ Buildings to lodge its protest against police “highhandedness” and firing during a democratic movement at Dinhata on 5 February killing five Forward Bloc activists, while a security personnel succumbed to his injuries sustained during the trouble. The widening rift in the LF over the CPI-M’s “Big Brotherly” attitude towards the junior partners and its monopoly of state power came out into the open when the FB called an unprecedented state bandh on 6 February that evoked widespread response; today, the RSP also held demonstrations during the day outside the offices of the administrative heads in 227 blocks in the state.
Mr Manoj Bhattacharjee, RSP central committee member, said the state police had for some time been behaving in such a way that violated the LF’s declared policy on how the administration was to tackle democratic movements. The Dinhata firing was a glaring example of the breach of that policy.
The RSP not only expressed solidarity with the FB which along with it has become vocal against the way the CPI-M has been running the state administration “unilaterally to suit its political interests”. The two LF constituents have already made it clear that they are opposed to the CPI-M’s policy of industrialisation through farm land acquisition, setting up SEZs and allowing big corporate houses to invest in retail chains that, according to them , would take away the livelihood of thousands of poor people in the state.
Mr Bhattacharya said the day’s agitation was organised to caution the administration not to clamp police-raj on the state.
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=190753
CPM urges cadres to take on NGOs it frowns on
CPM urges cadres to take on NGOs it frowns on
Rajib Chatterjee
KOLKATA, Feb. 13 (Statesman): The message seems clear and borrowed directly from President George W Bush: civil society be damned, you are either with us or against us. For, after targeting human rights organisations for raising their voice against violations by the state and its police in Bengal, the Marxists now have Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in their line of fire. The CPI-M has accused NGOs they don’t approve of accepting foreign funds that are aimed at encouraging “anti-Left activities” in the country and in states where the Communist movement is strong.
In the 28 January edition of its mouthpiece ~ Peoples’ Democracy ~ the CPI-M has demanded an amendment in the law to prohibit “foreign funding for NGOs”. The CPI-M states that “anti-imperialist agencies” use these NGOs to carry out anti-Left and anti-CPI-M propaganda. The CPI-M has claimed that many such NGOs are RSS-run and receiving funds from abroad. Some ultra-left elements are also running civil liberties and human rights organisations “with external links” in order to carry on anti-CPI-M activities in the country, the party stated. What remained unstated was that there are, obviously, good NGOs and bad NGOs; and those willing to do the party’s dirty work when it wants to target or demonise a citizen or a group obviously fall in the former category!
In the article, the CPI-M expressed concern over the number of foreign-funded NGOs in the country. The party said the number of NGOs receiving funds from abroad had been “steadily increasing” and many of these organisations were “intervening in political issues” and were engaged in “anti-Left activities”. The article further reads: “The law should be amended to prohibit foreign funding for NGOs and the so-called social movements which indulge in political activities.” The party informed its members that the matter would come up for discussion during the upcoming nineteenth party congress.
The CPI-M has alleged that “imperialist agencies”, as part of its campaign against organised Left movement in the country, are trying to inject anti-Left ideology among the people through NGOs. The CPI-M has also demanded that the role of the “NGOs which organise people utilising foreign funds” should be “exposed”. The party has instructed its cadres to “counter the activities of the NGOs” which “take anti-Left positions” and attempt to “de-politicise people.”
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=190756
Rajib Chatterjee
KOLKATA, Feb. 13 (Statesman): The message seems clear and borrowed directly from President George W Bush: civil society be damned, you are either with us or against us. For, after targeting human rights organisations for raising their voice against violations by the state and its police in Bengal, the Marxists now have Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in their line of fire. The CPI-M has accused NGOs they don’t approve of accepting foreign funds that are aimed at encouraging “anti-Left activities” in the country and in states where the Communist movement is strong.
In the 28 January edition of its mouthpiece ~ Peoples’ Democracy ~ the CPI-M has demanded an amendment in the law to prohibit “foreign funding for NGOs”. The CPI-M states that “anti-imperialist agencies” use these NGOs to carry out anti-Left and anti-CPI-M propaganda. The CPI-M has claimed that many such NGOs are RSS-run and receiving funds from abroad. Some ultra-left elements are also running civil liberties and human rights organisations “with external links” in order to carry on anti-CPI-M activities in the country, the party stated. What remained unstated was that there are, obviously, good NGOs and bad NGOs; and those willing to do the party’s dirty work when it wants to target or demonise a citizen or a group obviously fall in the former category!
In the article, the CPI-M expressed concern over the number of foreign-funded NGOs in the country. The party said the number of NGOs receiving funds from abroad had been “steadily increasing” and many of these organisations were “intervening in political issues” and were engaged in “anti-Left activities”. The article further reads: “The law should be amended to prohibit foreign funding for NGOs and the so-called social movements which indulge in political activities.” The party informed its members that the matter would come up for discussion during the upcoming nineteenth party congress.
The CPI-M has alleged that “imperialist agencies”, as part of its campaign against organised Left movement in the country, are trying to inject anti-Left ideology among the people through NGOs. The CPI-M has also demanded that the role of the “NGOs which organise people utilising foreign funds” should be “exposed”. The party has instructed its cadres to “counter the activities of the NGOs” which “take anti-Left positions” and attempt to “de-politicise people.”
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=1&theme=&usrsess=1&id=190756
Mayhem at Dinhata -- CPM betrays disciples
Mayhem at Dinhata by D. Bandhopadhyaya (Statesman, Feb. 14, 2008)
On 5 February, police fired on a group of Forward Bloc demonstrators at Dinhata in Cooch Behar district of West Bengal.
Five persons were killed on the spot and a dozen others were seriously injured. They did not wage war against the state. They did not storm the Winter Palace. They did not try to pull down any “Bastille” at Dinhata. They were not armed revolutionaries trying to seize power through the barrel of gun. In fact, they were unarmed. The lone policeman who died was not hit by any bullet. He was injured in stone-throwing.
These demonstrators were demanding proper implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, for “enhancement of livelihood security of the poor and destitute households”.
It was reported that against a target of 100 days employment guaranteed by the law, mandays generated in Cooch Behar was around eight in a year. That apart, there were allegations galore regarding widespread leakage of NREGA funds. They were asking for what was legally due which was being systematically denied to them. Prima facie, their action was constitutional, legal and legitimate.
On 6 February, the Central Employment Guarantee Council constituted under Section 10 of the NREGA met at Krishi Bhawan, New Delhi, for reviewing implementation of the Act. As a member I attended it. The Union minister for rural development in his opening remarks mentioned that strong lobbies had developed in different parts of the country to scuttle the programme. He also hinted that vested interests wanted the programme to fail as it might hurt their economic and financial interests. He did not elaborate. But the heart rending episode at Dinhata clearly substantiated what he had said.
Cooch Behar is noted for tobacco cultivation. It is a labour-intensive crop. The NREGA, if properly implemented, would have enhanced the wage rates in the market. Unless the wages offered by tobacco cultivators were higher than the notified minimum wages, labour would not be available on call in adequate numbers and at the appropriate time. Hence there would be a built-in intention for the land owners to see that the programme was not implemented so that they could get labour cheap and in proper numbers when required. As such, there is nothing to be surprised at the dismal performance of the NREGA in Cooch Behar.
This tragic episode had brought into fore the fact that the poor in India in distant corners of the country accepted and internationalised this programme as their own. They were demanding its proper and effective administration which would give them a slightly better income and livelihood. Obviously, such a demand would be treated as inimical to the interests of the “kulak” lobby which was eager to get cheap labour for maximising profit.
We are talking about Dinhata where lives were lost for a totally legal demand. But the story is the same for the whole of West Bengal. At the meeting of the council referred to, data was circulated by the ministry of rural development. Dr Santosh Merhotra, adviser (RD), Planning Commission, made a composite comparative table giving state-wise prevailing market rates of wages, the NREGA wage rates and employment provided in percentage.
The table makes a dismal and despairing reading. West Bengal ranks fourth from the bottom in implementing the NREGA. Even states like Chhattisgarh (44.6 per cent), Jharkhand (32.6 per cent) and Uttarakhand (27.4 per cent) are better performers. It is way behind Tamil Nadu (61.1 per cent), Maharashtra (55.9 per cent), Rajasthan (52.5 per cent) and Punjab (41.7 per cent). Is it due to administrative inefficiency? Or is there anything more serious in the class character of the CPI-M?
West Bengal’s performance deteriorated from 14.3 per cent in 2006-07 to 11.8 per cent in 2007-08 (December). There is a degree of consistency in its non-performance. The CPI-M is now dominated by the middle and upper peasantry in the rural areas. It is not in their class interest to implement the NREGA properly which would push up wages from Rs 44.58 (per male worker) and Rs 32.35 (per female worker) to anywhere near Rs 70 per day which would drastically reduce the profit margin for them. The same class interest which prevented bestowing of title to the land that the share-croppers tilled and creating alternative institutional credit structure for the poor peasantry was behind this non-performance.
The ruling CPI-M is, perhaps, not aware of people’s wrath against them. The party is suffering from the syndrome of, in the words of Fred Halliday “enduring inability of those with power and wealth to comprehend the depth of hostility to them and the ability of history to surprise”. Otherwise, there would not have been this outburst from a Left Front partner of 30 years’ standing.
Professor Randhir Singh (formerly of Delhi University) used the term “secondary illiterate” in respect of the present crop of leadership of the CPI-M in West Bengal. By this term he meant “those who had the benefit of literacy once and come to know a few things. Know them to be true, but now gone illiterate, have forgotten whatever they once knew”.
He continues: “CPM leaders no longer speak in the language of socialism or class politics, not even when bourgeois ideologues or TV anchors get provocatively aggressive. And on rare occasions they refer to Marxism, only vulgarise it. Here is a gem of vulgarisation from Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee: ‘From agriculture to industry, from villages to cities, this is civilisation. We Marxists never deny this aim. We too want this to happen’.”
Bravo Mr Bhattacharjee for outdoing Marx in Marxism. It only reminds one of Hans Mangus Enzsberger’s moving short poem: Karl Heinrich Marx:
“I see you betrayed/ by your disciples/ only your enemies/ remained what they were.”
(The author was secretary to the Government of India, ministries of finance (revenue) and rural development and executive director, Asian Development Bank, Manila)
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=190778
On 5 February, police fired on a group of Forward Bloc demonstrators at Dinhata in Cooch Behar district of West Bengal.
Five persons were killed on the spot and a dozen others were seriously injured. They did not wage war against the state. They did not storm the Winter Palace. They did not try to pull down any “Bastille” at Dinhata. They were not armed revolutionaries trying to seize power through the barrel of gun. In fact, they were unarmed. The lone policeman who died was not hit by any bullet. He was injured in stone-throwing.
These demonstrators were demanding proper implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, for “enhancement of livelihood security of the poor and destitute households”.
It was reported that against a target of 100 days employment guaranteed by the law, mandays generated in Cooch Behar was around eight in a year. That apart, there were allegations galore regarding widespread leakage of NREGA funds. They were asking for what was legally due which was being systematically denied to them. Prima facie, their action was constitutional, legal and legitimate.
On 6 February, the Central Employment Guarantee Council constituted under Section 10 of the NREGA met at Krishi Bhawan, New Delhi, for reviewing implementation of the Act. As a member I attended it. The Union minister for rural development in his opening remarks mentioned that strong lobbies had developed in different parts of the country to scuttle the programme. He also hinted that vested interests wanted the programme to fail as it might hurt their economic and financial interests. He did not elaborate. But the heart rending episode at Dinhata clearly substantiated what he had said.
Cooch Behar is noted for tobacco cultivation. It is a labour-intensive crop. The NREGA, if properly implemented, would have enhanced the wage rates in the market. Unless the wages offered by tobacco cultivators were higher than the notified minimum wages, labour would not be available on call in adequate numbers and at the appropriate time. Hence there would be a built-in intention for the land owners to see that the programme was not implemented so that they could get labour cheap and in proper numbers when required. As such, there is nothing to be surprised at the dismal performance of the NREGA in Cooch Behar.
This tragic episode had brought into fore the fact that the poor in India in distant corners of the country accepted and internationalised this programme as their own. They were demanding its proper and effective administration which would give them a slightly better income and livelihood. Obviously, such a demand would be treated as inimical to the interests of the “kulak” lobby which was eager to get cheap labour for maximising profit.
We are talking about Dinhata where lives were lost for a totally legal demand. But the story is the same for the whole of West Bengal. At the meeting of the council referred to, data was circulated by the ministry of rural development. Dr Santosh Merhotra, adviser (RD), Planning Commission, made a composite comparative table giving state-wise prevailing market rates of wages, the NREGA wage rates and employment provided in percentage.
The table makes a dismal and despairing reading. West Bengal ranks fourth from the bottom in implementing the NREGA. Even states like Chhattisgarh (44.6 per cent), Jharkhand (32.6 per cent) and Uttarakhand (27.4 per cent) are better performers. It is way behind Tamil Nadu (61.1 per cent), Maharashtra (55.9 per cent), Rajasthan (52.5 per cent) and Punjab (41.7 per cent). Is it due to administrative inefficiency? Or is there anything more serious in the class character of the CPI-M?
West Bengal’s performance deteriorated from 14.3 per cent in 2006-07 to 11.8 per cent in 2007-08 (December). There is a degree of consistency in its non-performance. The CPI-M is now dominated by the middle and upper peasantry in the rural areas. It is not in their class interest to implement the NREGA properly which would push up wages from Rs 44.58 (per male worker) and Rs 32.35 (per female worker) to anywhere near Rs 70 per day which would drastically reduce the profit margin for them. The same class interest which prevented bestowing of title to the land that the share-croppers tilled and creating alternative institutional credit structure for the poor peasantry was behind this non-performance.
The ruling CPI-M is, perhaps, not aware of people’s wrath against them. The party is suffering from the syndrome of, in the words of Fred Halliday “enduring inability of those with power and wealth to comprehend the depth of hostility to them and the ability of history to surprise”. Otherwise, there would not have been this outburst from a Left Front partner of 30 years’ standing.
Professor Randhir Singh (formerly of Delhi University) used the term “secondary illiterate” in respect of the present crop of leadership of the CPI-M in West Bengal. By this term he meant “those who had the benefit of literacy once and come to know a few things. Know them to be true, but now gone illiterate, have forgotten whatever they once knew”.
He continues: “CPM leaders no longer speak in the language of socialism or class politics, not even when bourgeois ideologues or TV anchors get provocatively aggressive. And on rare occasions they refer to Marxism, only vulgarise it. Here is a gem of vulgarisation from Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee: ‘From agriculture to industry, from villages to cities, this is civilisation. We Marxists never deny this aim. We too want this to happen’.”
Bravo Mr Bhattacharjee for outdoing Marx in Marxism. It only reminds one of Hans Mangus Enzsberger’s moving short poem: Karl Heinrich Marx:
“I see you betrayed/ by your disciples/ only your enemies/ remained what they were.”
(The author was secretary to the Government of India, ministries of finance (revenue) and rural development and executive director, Asian Development Bank, Manila)
http://thestatesman.org/page.news.php?clid=4&theme=&usrsess=1&id=190778
Monday, February 11, 2008
CPM in choppy waters after pogrom in Nandigram
The CPM in choppy waters
Amulya Ganguli
11 February, 2008
When the CPM found itself in 2004 in a position to dictate terms to the ruling alliance at the Centre, it must have presumed that its prospects will get even better. But the opposite has happened. Although the Marxists can claim credit for their success in bullying the Manmohan Singh government into toeing their line on economic and foreign policies, as they have boasted in the party’s political resolution, much of it would sound unreal to those who have kept a tab on the CPM’s, and the Left Front’s, travails.
Yet, as the political resolution says, it is undeniable that the Marxists have been able to stall economic reforms by preventing any forward movement on insurance, banking and pension fund, disinvestment, FDI in the retail sector and, above all, the nuclear deal. Since the list is impressive, it would have been logical to expect the comrades to build on their success in having fought the so-called neo-liberal tendencies and the government’s alleged surrender to “imperialist” machinations.
But even internal assessments are said to have warned the comrades about a fall in Lok Sabha seats. Why this gloomy forecast at atime of seeming success? The CPM’s weakest point is none other than its supposedly impregnable bastion of West Bengal. The root cause of the party’s decline can be traced to this very invulnerability, for herein lay the seeds of its hubristic mistakes in Singur and Nandigram.
Having lorded over the state for three decades, the CPM had come to believe that it could brush aside any obstacle. This overweening confidence was boosted by its success in the 2006 Assembly poll, in which it decimated the opposition where in so far as seats won were concerned, but not in the matter of voting percentages. The mandate convinced Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya that he could push through his industrialisation programme without caring for the resistance put up by Mamata Banerjee, who, to be fair, has always blindly opposed whatever the Marxists had done or proposed to do. But why the tide of public opinion should have turned against the Marxists after 30 years of “dictatorial” rule is not something which
Bhattacharya could have anticipated. However, there were significant pointers. First, the chief minister had limited support in his own party about his pro-capitalist ventures and virtually none at all among his Left Front partners, such as the CPI, the RSP and the Forward Bloc. Secondly, even after the chief minister was able to convince a reasonably large number of his party men of the necessity of his new initiatives, he did not care to take the trouble of trying to persuade the partners also.
What is worse, his Stalinist instincts apparently told him that having secured the approval of his own party, he could bulldoze his way through the other obstacles. But, for once, these characteristic tactics of Big Brother could no longer work because the CPM was overturning its own ideology by courting the private sector, the long designated class enemy. What Deng Xiaoping could do in a regimented state could not be done in a free-wheeling society, where socialists of various hues have long had a field day.
The CPM’s heresies gave the little brothers the opportunity to get their own back for all the humiliations which they had suffered since 1977. As long as they were being browbeaten over Marxist ploys — control of trade unions, appointment of fellow travellers in various positions, etc — they had make do with whatever concessions the CPM gave them. But Big Brother’s deviation from dogma gave them the opportunity to unfurl the red flag in an attempt to hold on to their little pockets of support. Ideology was something which these parties thought they could conveniently exploit.
But even this may not be full explanation. What seems to have also happened is that the smaller parties had begun to sense the loss of the CPM’s earlier standing among both the ordinary people and the intelligentsia. As much was evident from the outbreak of what was known as the ration riots over the diversion of foodgrain from ration shops to the open market by unscrupulous traders acting in collusion with the Marxist apparatchiki.
Then came the Rizwanur Rahman episode, where a young Muslim technocrat from a lower middle class family committed “suicide” following the intervention of the top brass of the police over his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Hindu businessman. It became starkly evident from this tragedy how the professionalism of the police had been eroded by political interference.And these links became all the more apparent when the chief minister refused to remove the police commissioner of Kolkata until the patriarch of the party, Jyoti Basu, called for it. It was the Rizwanur affair which made the Left intelligentsia take to the streets in an unprecedented gesture of protest against a Leftist government. But it was over Nandigram that their fury knew no bounds, for it was a clear case of a Gujarat-style pogrom with the police being asked to look away while the armed cadre violently “recaptured” Nandigram by evicting the opponents of the CPM, who had earlier evicted CPM sympathisers. Hence, Bhattacharya’s tart observation that the Trinamool Congress, the Maoists, the Socialist Unity Centre and others in Nandigram had been paid back in their own coin. While the Left intellectuals may have been genuinely horrified by the CPM’s eye-for-an-eye tactics, they should have remembered that these were the very same methods which the commissars had used to root out the support bases of Trinamool Congress and others in areas like Keshpur, Chhoto Angaria and elsewhere. But since these clashes were portrayed as ones between the haves and the have-nots, the intellectuals kept mum.
THE FINAL straw for the latter was the unseemly haste with which the Marxists bundled out Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata when a little known Muslim group started a mini-riot. Unlike Nandigram, where the police were silent spectators of lawlessness, the state government’s concern for law and order in Kolkata was so great that it called out the Army. But even as peace was restored, it was evident that the Bengali Marxists’ preference for capitalism went hand in hand with submission to Muslim fundamentalism — just as “development” in Gujarat incorporates Hindu fanaticism.
It isn’t any surprise that Prakash Karat’s stint as general secretary has seen the party slide from the heights of 2004 to the present when, apart from its travails in West Bengal, the factionalism among his comrades in Kerala led to the highly unusual step of both the chief minister, VS Achuthanandan, and party chief, Pinarayi Vijayan, being ousted from the Politburo. They were reinstated following the flak which the party received on the Nandigram issue presumably to present a united face to the outside world. Nandigram also persuaded the CPM to drop its earlier insistence that the Centre should not approach the IAEA on the nuclear deal.
It is these acts of expediency on ideology — in favour of neo-liberalism in West Bengal but against it at the Centre — as well as on tactics, as over the nuclear deal, which may have emboldened parties like the Forward Bloc, which has now decided to contest the panchayat polls in West Bengal and the Assembly elections in Tripura on its own, underlining a rupture which bodes ill for the Left Front. After all, the difference in voting percentages was minuscule in West Bengal in 2006, when the Left’s vote share was 50.2 percent while its opponents secured 49.7 percent. Of the latter figure, the Trinamool Congress and the Congress together won 41.2 percent. Since the CPM’s voting percentage is 36.9, it is obvious that the vote share of the Congress-minded section of the population is higher even in the context of “scientific rigging”.
In fact, this has been the case in virtually all the elections where the Congress, or the Congress and the Trinamool Congress together, have been ahead of the CPM. Hence, the importance of Left unity. Even if the Forward Bloc does not walk out, the Left Front will still be in trouble because, first, many of its Leftist sympathisers are unlikely to vote for it and, secondly, if the Congress and the Trinamool Congress decide to fight the elections together. The CPM may be still seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is growing dimmer.
Source: Tehelka
http://www.morungexpress.com/index.php?news=1408
Amulya Ganguli
11 February, 2008
When the CPM found itself in 2004 in a position to dictate terms to the ruling alliance at the Centre, it must have presumed that its prospects will get even better. But the opposite has happened. Although the Marxists can claim credit for their success in bullying the Manmohan Singh government into toeing their line on economic and foreign policies, as they have boasted in the party’s political resolution, much of it would sound unreal to those who have kept a tab on the CPM’s, and the Left Front’s, travails.
Yet, as the political resolution says, it is undeniable that the Marxists have been able to stall economic reforms by preventing any forward movement on insurance, banking and pension fund, disinvestment, FDI in the retail sector and, above all, the nuclear deal. Since the list is impressive, it would have been logical to expect the comrades to build on their success in having fought the so-called neo-liberal tendencies and the government’s alleged surrender to “imperialist” machinations.
But even internal assessments are said to have warned the comrades about a fall in Lok Sabha seats. Why this gloomy forecast at atime of seeming success? The CPM’s weakest point is none other than its supposedly impregnable bastion of West Bengal. The root cause of the party’s decline can be traced to this very invulnerability, for herein lay the seeds of its hubristic mistakes in Singur and Nandigram.
Having lorded over the state for three decades, the CPM had come to believe that it could brush aside any obstacle. This overweening confidence was boosted by its success in the 2006 Assembly poll, in which it decimated the opposition where in so far as seats won were concerned, but not in the matter of voting percentages. The mandate convinced Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya that he could push through his industrialisation programme without caring for the resistance put up by Mamata Banerjee, who, to be fair, has always blindly opposed whatever the Marxists had done or proposed to do. But why the tide of public opinion should have turned against the Marxists after 30 years of “dictatorial” rule is not something which
Bhattacharya could have anticipated. However, there were significant pointers. First, the chief minister had limited support in his own party about his pro-capitalist ventures and virtually none at all among his Left Front partners, such as the CPI, the RSP and the Forward Bloc. Secondly, even after the chief minister was able to convince a reasonably large number of his party men of the necessity of his new initiatives, he did not care to take the trouble of trying to persuade the partners also.
What is worse, his Stalinist instincts apparently told him that having secured the approval of his own party, he could bulldoze his way through the other obstacles. But, for once, these characteristic tactics of Big Brother could no longer work because the CPM was overturning its own ideology by courting the private sector, the long designated class enemy. What Deng Xiaoping could do in a regimented state could not be done in a free-wheeling society, where socialists of various hues have long had a field day.
The CPM’s heresies gave the little brothers the opportunity to get their own back for all the humiliations which they had suffered since 1977. As long as they were being browbeaten over Marxist ploys — control of trade unions, appointment of fellow travellers in various positions, etc — they had make do with whatever concessions the CPM gave them. But Big Brother’s deviation from dogma gave them the opportunity to unfurl the red flag in an attempt to hold on to their little pockets of support. Ideology was something which these parties thought they could conveniently exploit.
But even this may not be full explanation. What seems to have also happened is that the smaller parties had begun to sense the loss of the CPM’s earlier standing among both the ordinary people and the intelligentsia. As much was evident from the outbreak of what was known as the ration riots over the diversion of foodgrain from ration shops to the open market by unscrupulous traders acting in collusion with the Marxist apparatchiki.
Then came the Rizwanur Rahman episode, where a young Muslim technocrat from a lower middle class family committed “suicide” following the intervention of the top brass of the police over his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Hindu businessman. It became starkly evident from this tragedy how the professionalism of the police had been eroded by political interference.And these links became all the more apparent when the chief minister refused to remove the police commissioner of Kolkata until the patriarch of the party, Jyoti Basu, called for it. It was the Rizwanur affair which made the Left intelligentsia take to the streets in an unprecedented gesture of protest against a Leftist government. But it was over Nandigram that their fury knew no bounds, for it was a clear case of a Gujarat-style pogrom with the police being asked to look away while the armed cadre violently “recaptured” Nandigram by evicting the opponents of the CPM, who had earlier evicted CPM sympathisers. Hence, Bhattacharya’s tart observation that the Trinamool Congress, the Maoists, the Socialist Unity Centre and others in Nandigram had been paid back in their own coin. While the Left intellectuals may have been genuinely horrified by the CPM’s eye-for-an-eye tactics, they should have remembered that these were the very same methods which the commissars had used to root out the support bases of Trinamool Congress and others in areas like Keshpur, Chhoto Angaria and elsewhere. But since these clashes were portrayed as ones between the haves and the have-nots, the intellectuals kept mum.
THE FINAL straw for the latter was the unseemly haste with which the Marxists bundled out Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata when a little known Muslim group started a mini-riot. Unlike Nandigram, where the police were silent spectators of lawlessness, the state government’s concern for law and order in Kolkata was so great that it called out the Army. But even as peace was restored, it was evident that the Bengali Marxists’ preference for capitalism went hand in hand with submission to Muslim fundamentalism — just as “development” in Gujarat incorporates Hindu fanaticism.
It isn’t any surprise that Prakash Karat’s stint as general secretary has seen the party slide from the heights of 2004 to the present when, apart from its travails in West Bengal, the factionalism among his comrades in Kerala led to the highly unusual step of both the chief minister, VS Achuthanandan, and party chief, Pinarayi Vijayan, being ousted from the Politburo. They were reinstated following the flak which the party received on the Nandigram issue presumably to present a united face to the outside world. Nandigram also persuaded the CPM to drop its earlier insistence that the Centre should not approach the IAEA on the nuclear deal.
It is these acts of expediency on ideology — in favour of neo-liberalism in West Bengal but against it at the Centre — as well as on tactics, as over the nuclear deal, which may have emboldened parties like the Forward Bloc, which has now decided to contest the panchayat polls in West Bengal and the Assembly elections in Tripura on its own, underlining a rupture which bodes ill for the Left Front. After all, the difference in voting percentages was minuscule in West Bengal in 2006, when the Left’s vote share was 50.2 percent while its opponents secured 49.7 percent. Of the latter figure, the Trinamool Congress and the Congress together won 41.2 percent. Since the CPM’s voting percentage is 36.9, it is obvious that the vote share of the Congress-minded section of the population is higher even in the context of “scientific rigging”.
In fact, this has been the case in virtually all the elections where the Congress, or the Congress and the Trinamool Congress together, have been ahead of the CPM. Hence, the importance of Left unity. Even if the Forward Bloc does not walk out, the Left Front will still be in trouble because, first, many of its Leftist sympathisers are unlikely to vote for it and, secondly, if the Congress and the Trinamool Congress decide to fight the elections together. The CPM may be still seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is growing dimmer.
Source: Tehelka
http://www.morungexpress.com/index.php?news=1408
A danger called 'Four-M' nexus (includes CPM) -- B. R. Haran
A DANGER CALLED "FOUR-M" NEXUS! (Feb. 2008)
As the Freedom Movement gained momentum, the British authorities tried to suppress it with increased ruthlessness, arrogance and autocracy. The freedom fighters led by Gandhiji felt that enough is enough and started the "Quit India" movement in 1942, which ultimately led to the Nation attaining Freedom with in five years, also due to the added strength of the meticulous formation of Indian National Army by Nethaji. The Communists conspired against the Freedom Movement and helped the British. A similar type of situation occurred in 1975 when the former Prime Minister Indhra Gandhi declared 'Emergency' purely for selfish reasons and the Nation sprung up in revolution under the able leadership of Jayaprakash Narain, finally leading to the worst drubbing of the Congress party in the 1977 general elections.
As far as our country is concerned, Communism would have died long back, but for the "Nehru Family", which has almost become a permanent liability for our nation. In India there is not much of a difference between Communism (Marxism), Nehruvian Secularism & Socialism. The same useless policy in different names! The true Indian National Congress died long ago with the demise of Sardar Patel and the resignation of Rajaji. Since then, it has been Nehru & Family all the way and the party has been reduced to a family property.
Since the time of Nehru, the leftists have seized the intellectual world and till date they are calling the shots in academicia and media, the two areas, which play a vital role in the fields of education, knowledge and history. They have continued the British-System of education, contributing to the division of society along religious, caste and linguistic lines, resulting in the de-Hinduisation of this great Hindu nation. The Nehru Family's Congress property also turned a blind eye if not yielded to the nefarious designs of the leftist historians, intellectuals and academicians.
After almost three decades, we are in a precarious situation under a double-edged sword, one edge being the foreign headed UPA and the other edge being the Left. With the advent of the UPA government under the stewardship of Sonia, Hindu religion is under severe attack, as evidenced by the Amarnath, Sbarimala, Thirupathi, Guruvayur and Kanchi episodes. Hindu culture & tradition are also facing frontal attack by the anti-Hindu media in the name of 'secularism' with the blessings of UPA government. Evangelization and missionary activities are going on unabatedly with increased vigor aided & abetted by Sonia led & Left supported UPA government. Islamic Terrorism goes literally unnoticed, in a way helped by the UPA government by its soft approach towards terrorism, as evidenced by the frequent terror attacks on our soil. The majority community is divided along caste lines by the policies of vote-bank politics and the country is divided on religious grounds by the minority appeasing and majority ignoring policies.
Even during the NDA regime, 5 to 6 years was too short a time to set right the damages, which had been caused for hundreds of years in general and 50 years of congress rule in particular. Unfortunately, with the advent of the UPA government under the stewardship of Vatican's "Abimana Puthri", things are happening very fast and the Marxists are having a jolly good time enjoying power without responsibility & accountability, along with her. The mission, that is the de-Hinduisation of India, is a common objective for Sonia's Congress & the Left front and hence they enjoy excellent rapport and enact repertoires to the sheer amusement of their bosses, who are out side India. In the process of de-Hinduisation, they have colluded with the minorities and have formed the dangerous "Four-M" nexus called "McCauley-Marxist- Mullah-Missionary-" nexus, which is creating havoc in the country.
The Communists have formed a "Red Corridor" in collusion with the Maoists & Naxalites from Nepal to Andhra Pradesh covering more than 16 States, which has now extended up to Kerala, Karnataka & Tamil Nadu! The UPA-Left combine has deliberately left the naxal menace to grow to unlimited proportions by having a Home Minister assisted by two Ministers of State, whose efficiencies are under question. The Sonia led UPA, even went to the extent of sending a Comrade (SitaramYechury) as an emissary to destabilize the only declared Hindu country (Nepal) in the world, in connivance with Prachanda's Maoists, there by throwing the Hindu Monarch out of power. The mission was successfully completed to the utmost satisfaction of China as well as the Vatican!
In this kind of an anti-Hindu environment, the role of the 'Left Front' clearly exposes the fact that it is anti-National. During the 'Quit India' movement in 1942, the Communists joined with the British and stabbed the Nation at its back. Again now, they are hand in glove with Sonia led UPA, working against the interests of the Nation. At a time when the lousy concept of Communism has failed through out the world including Russia and China, the Comrades in India are able to survive due to the aid & abetment of minorities, as they are united by the common objective of de-Hinduisation of India. We must understand this unholy combination and its nefarious designs and we should also realize that a foreigner, who also has the same objective and can stoop to any level to remain in power, heads this ugly combination of Communists & Minorities.
Bharat stands divided today along the lines of religion, caste & language and the divisions are getting multiplied day by day. The once famous "Unity in Diversity" is being mocked by the planting of "Cross" in the Coins / Currency of India. National Security is in an appalling status. The Harijans are being separated from the Hindu fold at an alarming rate and the cultural & religious splendor of this Great Hindu country is being destroyed. The Hindu regions are demographically reduced from all corners of the country, as evidenced by Christianisation of the North East, Islamisation of J & K, both of Kerala, Islamisation of UP & Maharashtra and the Christianisation of Goa. More than 50% of the Hindus have been converted as "secularists" by the concept of westernization. A major section of the media is encouraging & spreading alien & immoral things like Fashion shows, Modeling, Sex-education & Homo-sexuality, perverted art, etc, etc, etc and the youth are a misguided lot now-a-days!
By the time the Hindus realize, it would be too late, for the nation would have lost its Hindu identity! The "Four-M" Nexus spells not only Danger, but also Destruction & Doom! The forth coming general election in 2009 is a great opportunity for us to throw this UPA-Left combine in to the dustbin of History. Let us do it!
B.R.Haran.
As the Freedom Movement gained momentum, the British authorities tried to suppress it with increased ruthlessness, arrogance and autocracy. The freedom fighters led by Gandhiji felt that enough is enough and started the "Quit India" movement in 1942, which ultimately led to the Nation attaining Freedom with in five years, also due to the added strength of the meticulous formation of Indian National Army by Nethaji. The Communists conspired against the Freedom Movement and helped the British. A similar type of situation occurred in 1975 when the former Prime Minister Indhra Gandhi declared 'Emergency' purely for selfish reasons and the Nation sprung up in revolution under the able leadership of Jayaprakash Narain, finally leading to the worst drubbing of the Congress party in the 1977 general elections.
As far as our country is concerned, Communism would have died long back, but for the "Nehru Family", which has almost become a permanent liability for our nation. In India there is not much of a difference between Communism (Marxism), Nehruvian Secularism & Socialism. The same useless policy in different names! The true Indian National Congress died long ago with the demise of Sardar Patel and the resignation of Rajaji. Since then, it has been Nehru & Family all the way and the party has been reduced to a family property.
Since the time of Nehru, the leftists have seized the intellectual world and till date they are calling the shots in academicia and media, the two areas, which play a vital role in the fields of education, knowledge and history. They have continued the British-System of education, contributing to the division of society along religious, caste and linguistic lines, resulting in the de-Hinduisation of this great Hindu nation. The Nehru Family's Congress property also turned a blind eye if not yielded to the nefarious designs of the leftist historians, intellectuals and academicians.
After almost three decades, we are in a precarious situation under a double-edged sword, one edge being the foreign headed UPA and the other edge being the Left. With the advent of the UPA government under the stewardship of Sonia, Hindu religion is under severe attack, as evidenced by the Amarnath, Sbarimala, Thirupathi, Guruvayur and Kanchi episodes. Hindu culture & tradition are also facing frontal attack by the anti-Hindu media in the name of 'secularism' with the blessings of UPA government. Evangelization and missionary activities are going on unabatedly with increased vigor aided & abetted by Sonia led & Left supported UPA government. Islamic Terrorism goes literally unnoticed, in a way helped by the UPA government by its soft approach towards terrorism, as evidenced by the frequent terror attacks on our soil. The majority community is divided along caste lines by the policies of vote-bank politics and the country is divided on religious grounds by the minority appeasing and majority ignoring policies.
Even during the NDA regime, 5 to 6 years was too short a time to set right the damages, which had been caused for hundreds of years in general and 50 years of congress rule in particular. Unfortunately, with the advent of the UPA government under the stewardship of Vatican's "Abimana Puthri", things are happening very fast and the Marxists are having a jolly good time enjoying power without responsibility & accountability, along with her. The mission, that is the de-Hinduisation of India, is a common objective for Sonia's Congress & the Left front and hence they enjoy excellent rapport and enact repertoires to the sheer amusement of their bosses, who are out side India. In the process of de-Hinduisation, they have colluded with the minorities and have formed the dangerous "Four-M" nexus called "McCauley-Marxist- Mullah-Missionary-" nexus, which is creating havoc in the country.
The Communists have formed a "Red Corridor" in collusion with the Maoists & Naxalites from Nepal to Andhra Pradesh covering more than 16 States, which has now extended up to Kerala, Karnataka & Tamil Nadu! The UPA-Left combine has deliberately left the naxal menace to grow to unlimited proportions by having a Home Minister assisted by two Ministers of State, whose efficiencies are under question. The Sonia led UPA, even went to the extent of sending a Comrade (SitaramYechury) as an emissary to destabilize the only declared Hindu country (Nepal) in the world, in connivance with Prachanda's Maoists, there by throwing the Hindu Monarch out of power. The mission was successfully completed to the utmost satisfaction of China as well as the Vatican!
In this kind of an anti-Hindu environment, the role of the 'Left Front' clearly exposes the fact that it is anti-National. During the 'Quit India' movement in 1942, the Communists joined with the British and stabbed the Nation at its back. Again now, they are hand in glove with Sonia led UPA, working against the interests of the Nation. At a time when the lousy concept of Communism has failed through out the world including Russia and China, the Comrades in India are able to survive due to the aid & abetment of minorities, as they are united by the common objective of de-Hinduisation of India. We must understand this unholy combination and its nefarious designs and we should also realize that a foreigner, who also has the same objective and can stoop to any level to remain in power, heads this ugly combination of Communists & Minorities.
Bharat stands divided today along the lines of religion, caste & language and the divisions are getting multiplied day by day. The once famous "Unity in Diversity" is being mocked by the planting of "Cross" in the Coins / Currency of India. National Security is in an appalling status. The Harijans are being separated from the Hindu fold at an alarming rate and the cultural & religious splendor of this Great Hindu country is being destroyed. The Hindu regions are demographically reduced from all corners of the country, as evidenced by Christianisation of the North East, Islamisation of J & K, both of Kerala, Islamisation of UP & Maharashtra and the Christianisation of Goa. More than 50% of the Hindus have been converted as "secularists" by the concept of westernization. A major section of the media is encouraging & spreading alien & immoral things like Fashion shows, Modeling, Sex-education & Homo-sexuality, perverted art, etc, etc, etc and the youth are a misguided lot now-a-days!
By the time the Hindus realize, it would be too late, for the nation would have lost its Hindu identity! The "Four-M" Nexus spells not only Danger, but also Destruction & Doom! The forth coming general election in 2009 is a great opportunity for us to throw this UPA-Left combine in to the dustbin of History. Let us do it!
B.R.Haran.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
CPM -- crypto-capitalists: VR Krishna Iyer
Socialism is no historic blunder
By V.R. Krishna Iyer (Deccan Chronicle, 11 Feb. 2008)
Socialists of India, unite! You have nothing to lose except a few crypto-capitalist super-pragmatic Marxists. You have a creative crimson destiny to gain and a billion-strong have-not humanity to win. Why then, do you, comrades of Marxian vintage, hug capitalist sorceries? With a plethora of Socialists, Communists, Marxists willing to join the long march to “Purna Swaraj,” our democratic republic can become self-reliant without alien investment. But this prospect is being debased by tycoons, “Westoxicated” investment-operators and nascent neo-Marxist innovators who have surrendered to consumerism. A dangerous class has thus emerged with the dominant doctrine that money is more than man. The dazzle of globalisation, liberalisation, privatisation matters more to them than the rights of women, children, workers and peasants.
Our culture of Swaraj puts humanity above commodity, sober, enlightened values above greedy glamour. Gandhiji once wrote, “In so far as we have made modern materialistic
The hidden agenda of the capitalist North is to capture the resources of India, debunk its socialistic ambition and turn it into a mere marketplace and banana republic. The founding fathers of our Constitution had on the other hand envisioned an economic democracy, a socialistic polity, a people’s sovereignty.
My critique of the Marxist policy-novelty has to be viewed in this background. The CPI(M), which wields state power, participates in elections, sits in the House and tells its cadre to work for a socialist transformation, is destroying its own foundational militancy. India’s human capital can outstrip the monetary investments by the capitalist class which wants to rob labour from the jobless have-nots and the deprived sectors. We want radical humanism and revolutionary patriotism to pool all available talent and bring about a social change for the happiness of the lowliest. Imperialism and unbridled foreign investment have undermined the lot of our poor, devalued our Constitution and sapped the very soul of our Swaraj. It is a mistake to think that socialist transformation is an idle dream, and that MNC big business is the only pragmatic strategy without an alternative.
Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist governments for decades. Capitalists, native and foreign, have had considerable hold over our national economy; and for nearly 20 years the American pressure on our country’s governance has pulverised our noble traditions and social grace. No serious socialist policy has been tried by any state.
My experience as minister, under E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1957, convinced me that people, whichever their party (or even if they do not belong to any party), NGOs and bureaucrats are willing to toil free for community development. Speaking generally, since 1991, the national economy has been noxiously contra-Constitutional and anti-people. On this, let me quote Shashi Tharoor: “India annually gets richer by $200 billion. India’s foreign resources have exceeded $140 billion. Remember, the country had to mortgage its gold in London because the foreign exchange coffers were dry! In the list of the world’s billionaires, 27 of the world’s richest people are Indian, most of them staying in India.
A large portion of the world’s poorest people live in India too and you don’t need to go to Davos to meet them. Our country’s poor live below a poverty line that seems to be drawn just this side of the funeral pyre. 250 million people living in conditions that are a blot on our individual collective conscience is too grave a matter to be lightly dismissed (The Tiger Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, P-6)
I was taken aback when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, reportedly successful as West Bengal chief minister, declared that he was running a capitalist government. He thus ignored the fact that rural West Bengal had developed as a great paradigm with people’s participation and socialistic perspective that were far removed from a feudal society. And I was stunned when the great Jyoti Basu — the Marxist leader who for long had inspired his people and many like me by his leftist, simple genius — strangely reversed gear, jettisoned his party fundamentals and abandoned socialism as impractical.
The Indian Constitution always had a socialist bias and the Planning Commission had been set up to work out a socialistic pattern of society. Banks were nationalised, big hydel and irrigation schemes were set up, land reforms and urban land ceiling laws were enacted, public sector industries were built. These were not capitalistic moves, but socialistic.
After all, Nehru, in the Constituent Assembly had asserted, “We have given the content of democracy in this Resolution and not only the content of democracy but the content, if I may say so, of economic democracy. Well, I stand for Socialism, I hope, India will stand for Socialism and that India will go towards the constitution of a Socialist State.”
Many parties and Parliaments have governed the country. The words “We, the People of India” and “Socialist Secular Democratic” have survived all these years. Every President or minister ever in power, or judge on the bench has taken his or her oath of office pledging to uphold those very words of the Constitution which sustain our Republic. Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee took office after taking the oath to uphold this “Socialist Secular Democratic” state. How can they now betray it after gaining state power? It was perhaps anticipating such future deserters, that Karl Marx in his letter to Engels had written: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”
Please remember the Marxian mandate: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The only hope the Indian masses have is the socio-economic freedom from feudal-colonial submissiveness. Will the Marxists renege on this?
I am aware that a crimson economy will not be born tomorrow.
But I am equally aware that a powerful cooperative movement, a large-scale public sector, a just land ownership with limited ceiling, a nationalisation policy, workers’ organised farm policy and industrial-marketing economy can today become a reality, given the will and the vision. Do you have faith in people’s participation? I have. Corruption has ruined Indian politics. The capitalist alternative is industrialisation, mafia menace, market racket, hospital terrorism, hotel “star wars,” slum slavery and freebooter robbery.
Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer is a former judge of the Supreme Court
http://www.deccan.com/chennaichronicle/Columnists/Columnists.asp?#Socialism is no historic blunder
By V.R. Krishna Iyer (Deccan Chronicle, 11 Feb. 2008)
Socialists of India, unite! You have nothing to lose except a few crypto-capitalist super-pragmatic Marxists. You have a creative crimson destiny to gain and a billion-strong have-not humanity to win. Why then, do you, comrades of Marxian vintage, hug capitalist sorceries? With a plethora of Socialists, Communists, Marxists willing to join the long march to “Purna Swaraj,” our democratic republic can become self-reliant without alien investment. But this prospect is being debased by tycoons, “Westoxicated” investment-operators and nascent neo-Marxist innovators who have surrendered to consumerism. A dangerous class has thus emerged with the dominant doctrine that money is more than man. The dazzle of globalisation, liberalisation, privatisation matters more to them than the rights of women, children, workers and peasants.
Our culture of Swaraj puts humanity above commodity, sober, enlightened values above greedy glamour. Gandhiji once wrote, “In so far as we have made modern materialistic
The hidden agenda of the capitalist North is to capture the resources of India, debunk its socialistic ambition and turn it into a mere marketplace and banana republic. The founding fathers of our Constitution had on the other hand envisioned an economic democracy, a socialistic polity, a people’s sovereignty.
My critique of the Marxist policy-novelty has to be viewed in this background. The CPI(M), which wields state power, participates in elections, sits in the House and tells its cadre to work for a socialist transformation, is destroying its own foundational militancy. India’s human capital can outstrip the monetary investments by the capitalist class which wants to rob labour from the jobless have-nots and the deprived sectors. We want radical humanism and revolutionary patriotism to pool all available talent and bring about a social change for the happiness of the lowliest. Imperialism and unbridled foreign investment have undermined the lot of our poor, devalued our Constitution and sapped the very soul of our Swaraj. It is a mistake to think that socialist transformation is an idle dream, and that MNC big business is the only pragmatic strategy without an alternative.
Kerala and West Bengal have had Marxist governments for decades. Capitalists, native and foreign, have had considerable hold over our national economy; and for nearly 20 years the American pressure on our country’s governance has pulverised our noble traditions and social grace. No serious socialist policy has been tried by any state.
My experience as minister, under E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1957, convinced me that people, whichever their party (or even if they do not belong to any party), NGOs and bureaucrats are willing to toil free for community development. Speaking generally, since 1991, the national economy has been noxiously contra-Constitutional and anti-people. On this, let me quote Shashi Tharoor: “India annually gets richer by $200 billion. India’s foreign resources have exceeded $140 billion. Remember, the country had to mortgage its gold in London because the foreign exchange coffers were dry! In the list of the world’s billionaires, 27 of the world’s richest people are Indian, most of them staying in India.
A large portion of the world’s poorest people live in India too and you don’t need to go to Davos to meet them. Our country’s poor live below a poverty line that seems to be drawn just this side of the funeral pyre. 250 million people living in conditions that are a blot on our individual collective conscience is too grave a matter to be lightly dismissed (The Tiger Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, P-6)
I was taken aback when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, reportedly successful as West Bengal chief minister, declared that he was running a capitalist government. He thus ignored the fact that rural West Bengal had developed as a great paradigm with people’s participation and socialistic perspective that were far removed from a feudal society. And I was stunned when the great Jyoti Basu — the Marxist leader who for long had inspired his people and many like me by his leftist, simple genius — strangely reversed gear, jettisoned his party fundamentals and abandoned socialism as impractical.
The Indian Constitution always had a socialist bias and the Planning Commission had been set up to work out a socialistic pattern of society. Banks were nationalised, big hydel and irrigation schemes were set up, land reforms and urban land ceiling laws were enacted, public sector industries were built. These were not capitalistic moves, but socialistic.
After all, Nehru, in the Constituent Assembly had asserted, “We have given the content of democracy in this Resolution and not only the content of democracy but the content, if I may say so, of economic democracy. Well, I stand for Socialism, I hope, India will stand for Socialism and that India will go towards the constitution of a Socialist State.”
Many parties and Parliaments have governed the country. The words “We, the People of India” and “Socialist Secular Democratic” have survived all these years. Every President or minister ever in power, or judge on the bench has taken his or her oath of office pledging to uphold those very words of the Constitution which sustain our Republic. Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee took office after taking the oath to uphold this “Socialist Secular Democratic” state. How can they now betray it after gaining state power? It was perhaps anticipating such future deserters, that Karl Marx in his letter to Engels had written: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”
Please remember the Marxian mandate: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The only hope the Indian masses have is the socio-economic freedom from feudal-colonial submissiveness. Will the Marxists renege on this?
I am aware that a crimson economy will not be born tomorrow.
But I am equally aware that a powerful cooperative movement, a large-scale public sector, a just land ownership with limited ceiling, a nationalisation policy, workers’ organised farm policy and industrial-marketing economy can today become a reality, given the will and the vision. Do you have faith in people’s participation? I have. Corruption has ruined Indian politics. The capitalist alternative is industrialisation, mafia menace, market racket, hospital terrorism, hotel “star wars,” slum slavery and freebooter robbery.
Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer is a former judge of the Supreme Court
http://www.deccan.com/chennaichronicle/Columnists/Columnists.asp?#Socialism is no historic blunder
CPM to convert West Bengal into a second Singapore
Left Front under severe strain after Singur, Nandigram and Dinhata
10 Feb, 2008, 1305 hrs IST, PTI (Economic Times)
Kolkata: After ruling West Bengal for three decades as a cohesive unit, the CPI(M)-led ruling Left Front's unity is now under a severe strain like never before.
"The future of the Left Front is at stake today because of the events like Singur, Nandigram and the Dinhata killings," Ashok Ghosh, an octogenarian Left leader and state secretary of Forward Bloc, a LF constituent, told PTI.
"The CPI(M) has gone out of its mind in its endeavour to placate big business for which it sacrificed the interests of the poor. Already Singur, Nandigram and Dinhata have endangered the survival of the Left Front," he said.
"We will not allow Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacherjee to turn West Bengal into a second Singapore with monopoly capital of the country and outside," he said.
The resentment of the junior partners -- Forward Bloc, RSP and CPI, particularly by the first two, against 'Big Brother' CPI(M) was finally taken to the people when FB, organised a near total bandh on February six in protest against police firing at Dinhata killing five of its workers a day earlier.
This was the first death of Front supporters in police firing in 30 years of Left rule with the party alleging that it was pre-planned and done at the behest of the CPI(M).
The three partners have together demanded a judicial probe and wanted the officers responsible for the firing to be punished.
The FB, the second largest constituent in the coalition governing the state since 1977, has already decided to fight on its own the panchayat polls due in May this year.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/PoliticsNation/Lefts_under_severe_strain_after_Singur/articleshow/2770919.cms
10 Feb, 2008, 1305 hrs IST, PTI (Economic Times)
Kolkata: After ruling West Bengal for three decades as a cohesive unit, the CPI(M)-led ruling Left Front's unity is now under a severe strain like never before.
"The future of the Left Front is at stake today because of the events like Singur, Nandigram and the Dinhata killings," Ashok Ghosh, an octogenarian Left leader and state secretary of Forward Bloc, a LF constituent, told PTI.
"The CPI(M) has gone out of its mind in its endeavour to placate big business for which it sacrificed the interests of the poor. Already Singur, Nandigram and Dinhata have endangered the survival of the Left Front," he said.
"We will not allow Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacherjee to turn West Bengal into a second Singapore with monopoly capital of the country and outside," he said.
The resentment of the junior partners -- Forward Bloc, RSP and CPI, particularly by the first two, against 'Big Brother' CPI(M) was finally taken to the people when FB, organised a near total bandh on February six in protest against police firing at Dinhata killing five of its workers a day earlier.
This was the first death of Front supporters in police firing in 30 years of Left rule with the party alleging that it was pre-planned and done at the behest of the CPI(M).
The three partners have together demanded a judicial probe and wanted the officers responsible for the firing to be punished.
The FB, the second largest constituent in the coalition governing the state since 1977, has already decided to fight on its own the panchayat polls due in May this year.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/PoliticsNation/Lefts_under_severe_strain_after_Singur/articleshow/2770919.cms
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Marxists are anti-national, anti-hindu
THE DANGEROUS FACES OF MARXIST CULTURAL DESTRUCTION
Dr. Babu Suseelan (Feb. 9, 2008)
DECEPTIVE MARXIST DECONSTRUNCTION
Marxists and their cohorts are relatively clear what they want to achieve in India. They want the destruction of Hindu civilization and establishment of a proletariat Marxist state. For the last seventy five years, Marxists are working hard to realize their misguided and dangerous goals through positive sounding slogans such as “inclusion”, “human rights”, “feminist empowerment”, “classless society”, and “women’s rights”. With these positive sounding words, Marxists call for the destruction, in every possible way to deconstruct Hindu thoughts and bring down the Hindu culture.
The Marxists who gained power in Kerala and West Bengal failed miserably with their utopian economic policies and they were successful only in distributing poverty and unemployment. Cultural Marxists with their destructive and radical objectives are now focused around undermining the Hindu culture that kept India together for thousands of years.
Cultural reconstruction and destruction has become a policy of Marxists in India. This made possible not only through conscious vandalism against Hindu temples, but also with the creation of an actual culture of violence against Hindu cultural institutions.
Marxist plan to change Hindu temple practices, rituals, cultural tradition and management of Hindu temples is based on their false claim that all principles of our existence are historically situated and structured by bourgeois. These traditional Hindu experience and institutional force including the language, symbols, environment, art, music, temple festivals, literature as well as values and ethics stand in the way for Marxist expansion. These systems need to be reconstructed. Marxists want to deconstruct our traditional cultural precedents, ideas, frameworks, beliefs and philosophy. These Marxist deconstructionists claim that our social bonds and value system, culture and spiritual practices, temples, social institutions and education perpetuate bourgeois power. These beliefs and practices that connect people together must be deconstructed or destroyed.
For several years, Marxists in Kerala and West Bengal have been tinkering with our education, revising temple festivals, rituals, and spiritual practices. Their goal is to obliterate our culture and our customs by systematic deconstruction. Marxists have introduced Devasom Bill in Kerala for the takeover of Hindu temples including Guruvayoorappan Temple, Sabarimala Temple and various high income producing Hindu temples. Marxist government has introduced several restrictive ordinances to permanently ban traditional percussion, fireworks and timeline to permanently ban temple festivals and traditional cultural programs. For Hindus, the temple is the abode of God, the focus for all aspects in life of Hindus-religious, spiritual, cultural and social. It is a center where God can be approached and where divine knowledge can be discovered. Marxists are keen on destroying our temples founded on a platform with a devilish mixture of deception, coercion, and propaganda and government power. It represents one of the most deceptive and dangerous cultural destruction plan in India- a fact which most pseudo secularists and political leaders either do not know or choose to ignore.
There is something sick in these destructive plans to loot temple wealth and permanently destroy and exterminate or vanquish our cultural values. These morally aberrant policies have the infinite capacity to inflict harm to Hindu society.
MISGUIDED MARXIST RHETORIC
Now the deadly Marxist government in Kerala has recommended to the Supreme Court to permanently alter sabarimala Temple practices, women’s dress code and temple rituals. These concepts and policies are straight out of the Communist Manifesto wrapped in the rhetoric of women’s rights and equality and freedom. Couched under the phrase “for the common good”, “feminist empowerment” and “freedom for women”, Marxists are trying to erase our spiritual practices, ethics and family values into the handouts of Marxism. If Marxists could persuade women in the name of liberty and empowerment to abandon traditional culture, Marxists reason that this could lead to a deadly blow to Hindu family values.
Marxists embrace today’s feminist movement with a deceptive goal to use women to undermine and destroy the culture by forcing them to abandoning Hindu cultural practices and by not carrying on the critical task of transmitting the culture to the next generation. The Marxist cultural deconstruction is to advance the destruction of women, and families while convincing them they are somehow victims of Hindu social structure. Marxists want to implement perception management techniques relying on the ignorance of gullible Hindus with well-crafted plan. Marxists use deceptive propaganda jargons for a long march through our culture. It is a total Marxist culture war designed to destroy Hindu culture from within. In order to win ‘the heart and mind” of targeted Hindus, Marxists use psychological warfare techniques to induce attitude change, educational reform and propaganda. Thought control methods combined with perception management techniques are used as a powerful form of coercive manipulation. Marxist thought control system tries to replace individual Hindu identity with communist identification.
Marxists have also put radical sex education in schools. It is the best way to destroy traditional sexual morality and weaken the family. Children are urged to deride and ignore parental authority, and percepts of traditional morality.
Worse, the Congress Party headed by Italian catholic Sonia, phony secularists and bogus intellectuals seem to be allies of those Janus faced Marxist forces who would override our spiritual and religious practices. This Marxist plan for the destruction of our culture is a very real threat to our nation, our cultural foundation and social fabric. Anti-Hindu forces from within and without our country continue to try to tell us that these cultural changes are in tune with social transformation around the world. They laugh at us for our traditional, all inclusive and open thought system. These naïve Marxists see a terrible beauty struggling to be born, a beauty that would sweep away our sacred civilization and bring us into a brave Communist world.
SECLECTIVE MARXIST ATTACK ON HINDUS
Marxists have no qualms when attacking Hindus, but they are very sensitive about attacking Islamic and Christian religious and social practices. We rarely hear any words from the Marxists to liberate Muslims and Christians from their rigid, fundamentalist and non-compromising dogmas. Can anyone think of one speech wherein Marxists have expressed a word against Talak, (divorce), polygamy, child marriage and Jihadi terrorism of Muslims as well as coercive religious conversion, and deceptive propaganda of Christians? Where is the outrage from the Marxists when Muslims and Christians want to retain special privileges and religious laws? In fact, Marxists have made an unholy alliance with Muslim and Christian organizations and marshalling their battalions with the help of Jihadi and missionary warriors against unorganized Hindus. The sheer extent to which the Marxists, Jihadis and Christian Missionaries have been responsible for proving funding and logistical support for subversive forces against Hindus makes for chilling reading. They collude in pursuit of their hidden agenda to destroy Hindu civilization. They undertake secretive and often open initiatives in order to organize psychological operations against Hindus. They provide funding, training, literature, logistical support to organize subversive groups in the name of self-help groups, human rights organizations, feminist movement, dalit support groups and anyone who has the “wrong” priorities and anti-Hindu agenda. Money looted from temples is funded for phony psychological research projects in order to assist Marxists, Muslims and Christians for reaching Hindu targets. They work together for slander campaigns against Hindu organizations like RSS, VHP and Bajarang Dal.
LOOKING FORWARD: THINGS WORTH FIGHTING FOR
Political leaders, religious leaders and social activists, along with vast majority of Hindus who believe in ideals of Hindu culture must understand that open war has been declared on Hindutva and the cultural roots of India. Only Hindu spiritual values hold the country together. It is time to stop pretending that all religions are the same. Hindus and Christians, Muslims and the Marxists who adhere to alien dogmas have divergent view of political power, morality of power and the use of power. They resort to force, violence and threats more quickly, and compared with Hindus favor policies of coercion and threats. The unholy alliance recruits “useful idiots’ to influence and indoctrinate gullible Hindus through subtle psychological operations.
Hindus in general are turning away from political power and moving into a self-contained world of introspection, self-blame, denial, avoidance and tolerance. Meanwhile the unholy nexus of Marxists, Christians and Muslims are mired in politics, exercising power, and use of wealth and might. And this state of affairs, long and deep is likely to continue. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, promoting self-interest, as well as fashioning and implementing self-protecting policies, Hindus are inept and fearful.
Among Hindus, there are different perspectives and they differ on problem solutions. It is time for Hindus to expose their insanities and inanities of Marxist extremism and hidden agendas for the deconstruction of Hindu society. If Hindus are outwitted by these dogmatists, they will opt for treachery, perfidy, denial and appeasement, our country will go to ruin in the end. This is a lesson taught by history.
A people strong in their culture and spiritual faith are sure to emerge victories. When people are united and confident of sure victory, they will not be afraid of any formidable enemy.
Hindus should realize that tolerance of the intolerant political dogmas and tolerance of “anything goes” attitude is a mark of degeneration. Our reawakening will start when we identify enemies of our survival and confront their ulterior schemes against our survival and return to our Dharma with strength and valor.
Dr. Babu Suseelan (Feb. 9, 2008)
DECEPTIVE MARXIST DECONSTRUNCTION
Marxists and their cohorts are relatively clear what they want to achieve in India. They want the destruction of Hindu civilization and establishment of a proletariat Marxist state. For the last seventy five years, Marxists are working hard to realize their misguided and dangerous goals through positive sounding slogans such as “inclusion”, “human rights”, “feminist empowerment”, “classless society”, and “women’s rights”. With these positive sounding words, Marxists call for the destruction, in every possible way to deconstruct Hindu thoughts and bring down the Hindu culture.
The Marxists who gained power in Kerala and West Bengal failed miserably with their utopian economic policies and they were successful only in distributing poverty and unemployment. Cultural Marxists with their destructive and radical objectives are now focused around undermining the Hindu culture that kept India together for thousands of years.
Cultural reconstruction and destruction has become a policy of Marxists in India. This made possible not only through conscious vandalism against Hindu temples, but also with the creation of an actual culture of violence against Hindu cultural institutions.
Marxist plan to change Hindu temple practices, rituals, cultural tradition and management of Hindu temples is based on their false claim that all principles of our existence are historically situated and structured by bourgeois. These traditional Hindu experience and institutional force including the language, symbols, environment, art, music, temple festivals, literature as well as values and ethics stand in the way for Marxist expansion. These systems need to be reconstructed. Marxists want to deconstruct our traditional cultural precedents, ideas, frameworks, beliefs and philosophy. These Marxist deconstructionists claim that our social bonds and value system, culture and spiritual practices, temples, social institutions and education perpetuate bourgeois power. These beliefs and practices that connect people together must be deconstructed or destroyed.
For several years, Marxists in Kerala and West Bengal have been tinkering with our education, revising temple festivals, rituals, and spiritual practices. Their goal is to obliterate our culture and our customs by systematic deconstruction. Marxists have introduced Devasom Bill in Kerala for the takeover of Hindu temples including Guruvayoorappan Temple, Sabarimala Temple and various high income producing Hindu temples. Marxist government has introduced several restrictive ordinances to permanently ban traditional percussion, fireworks and timeline to permanently ban temple festivals and traditional cultural programs. For Hindus, the temple is the abode of God, the focus for all aspects in life of Hindus-religious, spiritual, cultural and social. It is a center where God can be approached and where divine knowledge can be discovered. Marxists are keen on destroying our temples founded on a platform with a devilish mixture of deception, coercion, and propaganda and government power. It represents one of the most deceptive and dangerous cultural destruction plan in India- a fact which most pseudo secularists and political leaders either do not know or choose to ignore.
There is something sick in these destructive plans to loot temple wealth and permanently destroy and exterminate or vanquish our cultural values. These morally aberrant policies have the infinite capacity to inflict harm to Hindu society.
MISGUIDED MARXIST RHETORIC
Now the deadly Marxist government in Kerala has recommended to the Supreme Court to permanently alter sabarimala Temple practices, women’s dress code and temple rituals. These concepts and policies are straight out of the Communist Manifesto wrapped in the rhetoric of women’s rights and equality and freedom. Couched under the phrase “for the common good”, “feminist empowerment” and “freedom for women”, Marxists are trying to erase our spiritual practices, ethics and family values into the handouts of Marxism. If Marxists could persuade women in the name of liberty and empowerment to abandon traditional culture, Marxists reason that this could lead to a deadly blow to Hindu family values.
Marxists embrace today’s feminist movement with a deceptive goal to use women to undermine and destroy the culture by forcing them to abandoning Hindu cultural practices and by not carrying on the critical task of transmitting the culture to the next generation. The Marxist cultural deconstruction is to advance the destruction of women, and families while convincing them they are somehow victims of Hindu social structure. Marxists want to implement perception management techniques relying on the ignorance of gullible Hindus with well-crafted plan. Marxists use deceptive propaganda jargons for a long march through our culture. It is a total Marxist culture war designed to destroy Hindu culture from within. In order to win ‘the heart and mind” of targeted Hindus, Marxists use psychological warfare techniques to induce attitude change, educational reform and propaganda. Thought control methods combined with perception management techniques are used as a powerful form of coercive manipulation. Marxist thought control system tries to replace individual Hindu identity with communist identification.
Marxists have also put radical sex education in schools. It is the best way to destroy traditional sexual morality and weaken the family. Children are urged to deride and ignore parental authority, and percepts of traditional morality.
Worse, the Congress Party headed by Italian catholic Sonia, phony secularists and bogus intellectuals seem to be allies of those Janus faced Marxist forces who would override our spiritual and religious practices. This Marxist plan for the destruction of our culture is a very real threat to our nation, our cultural foundation and social fabric. Anti-Hindu forces from within and without our country continue to try to tell us that these cultural changes are in tune with social transformation around the world. They laugh at us for our traditional, all inclusive and open thought system. These naïve Marxists see a terrible beauty struggling to be born, a beauty that would sweep away our sacred civilization and bring us into a brave Communist world.
SECLECTIVE MARXIST ATTACK ON HINDUS
Marxists have no qualms when attacking Hindus, but they are very sensitive about attacking Islamic and Christian religious and social practices. We rarely hear any words from the Marxists to liberate Muslims and Christians from their rigid, fundamentalist and non-compromising dogmas. Can anyone think of one speech wherein Marxists have expressed a word against Talak, (divorce), polygamy, child marriage and Jihadi terrorism of Muslims as well as coercive religious conversion, and deceptive propaganda of Christians? Where is the outrage from the Marxists when Muslims and Christians want to retain special privileges and religious laws? In fact, Marxists have made an unholy alliance with Muslim and Christian organizations and marshalling their battalions with the help of Jihadi and missionary warriors against unorganized Hindus. The sheer extent to which the Marxists, Jihadis and Christian Missionaries have been responsible for proving funding and logistical support for subversive forces against Hindus makes for chilling reading. They collude in pursuit of their hidden agenda to destroy Hindu civilization. They undertake secretive and often open initiatives in order to organize psychological operations against Hindus. They provide funding, training, literature, logistical support to organize subversive groups in the name of self-help groups, human rights organizations, feminist movement, dalit support groups and anyone who has the “wrong” priorities and anti-Hindu agenda. Money looted from temples is funded for phony psychological research projects in order to assist Marxists, Muslims and Christians for reaching Hindu targets. They work together for slander campaigns against Hindu organizations like RSS, VHP and Bajarang Dal.
LOOKING FORWARD: THINGS WORTH FIGHTING FOR
Political leaders, religious leaders and social activists, along with vast majority of Hindus who believe in ideals of Hindu culture must understand that open war has been declared on Hindutva and the cultural roots of India. Only Hindu spiritual values hold the country together. It is time to stop pretending that all religions are the same. Hindus and Christians, Muslims and the Marxists who adhere to alien dogmas have divergent view of political power, morality of power and the use of power. They resort to force, violence and threats more quickly, and compared with Hindus favor policies of coercion and threats. The unholy alliance recruits “useful idiots’ to influence and indoctrinate gullible Hindus through subtle psychological operations.
Hindus in general are turning away from political power and moving into a self-contained world of introspection, self-blame, denial, avoidance and tolerance. Meanwhile the unholy nexus of Marxists, Christians and Muslims are mired in politics, exercising power, and use of wealth and might. And this state of affairs, long and deep is likely to continue. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, promoting self-interest, as well as fashioning and implementing self-protecting policies, Hindus are inept and fearful.
Among Hindus, there are different perspectives and they differ on problem solutions. It is time for Hindus to expose their insanities and inanities of Marxist extremism and hidden agendas for the deconstruction of Hindu society. If Hindus are outwitted by these dogmatists, they will opt for treachery, perfidy, denial and appeasement, our country will go to ruin in the end. This is a lesson taught by history.
A people strong in their culture and spiritual faith are sure to emerge victories. When people are united and confident of sure victory, they will not be afraid of any formidable enemy.
Hindus should realize that tolerance of the intolerant political dogmas and tolerance of “anything goes” attitude is a mark of degeneration. Our reawakening will start when we identify enemies of our survival and confront their ulterior schemes against our survival and return to our Dharma with strength and valor.
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