An indelible and bloody anniversary by Sankar Ray
The 14th of March marks the first anniversary of a black day in West Bengal – also the bloodiest day in the three decades of Left Front government until November last year. At least 14 people were killed, three women raped, 162 injured and 27 missing, according to a judgment by a division bench of the High Court of Calcutta comprising the Chief Justice S S Nijjar and Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghosh .It was "wholly unconstitutional and cannot be justified under any provision of the law", the landmark verdict observed – a slap on not only the chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Left Front government but the LF chairman Biman Bose, Sitaram Yechury and Brinda Karat too , all CPI(M) polit bureau members.
But the pogrom of 14 March was overshadowed in cruelty and savagery between 5 and 20 November. This is comparable to the Gujarat riot of 2002 and its spill-over barbarism. Dr Debapriya Mullick, one of the key men in setting up the hospital out of people's initiative, told me, "Over 100 women were raped and we have records. This is more than rapes committed in 1942 by the colonial forces to suppress the Quit India Movement when the first independent government was formed there. This phase was more abominable than 14 March.
Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879. The revised version of New Testament was published on 14 March 1961. But incidents of calumny are not ignored by history. Nandigram belongs to that category like death sentence on Jack Ruby in 1964 for killing Lee Harvey Oswald who gunned down the US President John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963. But the irony of history was that Marx died too on this day in 1883
The biggies of CPI(M) whose erstwhile general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet boastfully said in an interview to the now-folded-up Sunday Observer in the mid-1990s "is the only revolutionary party in India, trampled their conscience in defence of the police action on thousands of non-armed people and denied incidents of rape, allegedly committed by goons with the passive support of the police – a portfolio under Bhattacharjee himself. To dish out lies, dictated by the Muzaffar Ahmed Bhavan, West Bengal CPI(M) headquarters, the second-in-command of AKG Bhavan, party's national headquarters, Yechury told press conference on that fateful day that the responsibility lay with armed agitators, terming them as "outsiders" . Remember what the colonial rulers did at the Jallianwala Bag in 1919 , let alone the blatant lie that the agitators were armed ( revealed in the judgment). CPI(M) honchos' ire was against the Bhumi Uchchhed Protirodh Committee ( a committee of resistance against grabbing) – the majority of whom were with the CPI(M) or CPI until the issuance of notification for acquisition of 27 mouzas covering nearly 20,000 acres – an illegal act, admitted by the LF government. The HC order wrote, "The State has violated Article 21 of the Constitution. People who were attacked are not terrorists. They are simple farmers who are living below the poverty line." Everything seemed to have been planned aping the sadistic secret police chief of Stalin era Lavrenti Beria
When about 20,000 people, half of whom were women gathered on the northern side of Bhangaberia Bridge, the border between Nandigram and Khejuri, the concerned inspector-general Arun Gupta, "declared on the microphone that assembly of persons on the northern side of Bhangaberia Bridge is illegal" . But at that stage, the 172-page verdict, after 22 hearings between15 March -18 July wrote "no orders had been issued under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code Act. The police personnel are stated to have used SLR and AK-47. The CPI(M) cadres who were working along with the police personnel also used fire arms and chapars. The intention was "to crush the demonstration rather than to control or disperse an unlawful assembly", the HC inferred.
The CPI(M) biggies were in no mood to accept the HC verdict. At a party rally in Birbhum , peasant leader and central committee member Benoy Konar said the HC decision would "inspire the forces of anarchy" and defended the police :"Do they expect the police to contain rowdies by spraying Gangajal and reading out the Gita to them?" Karat, a top leader of CPI(M)'s women's front, among those who are trying to disprove the opinion of judiciary which , on the contrary, observed, "Unless the bitter truth is unearthed, the rule of law would remain on paper".
The National Human Rights Commission chairperson Justice S Rajendra Babu compared the pogrom at with the Godhra riot and the commonality of 'ghastly dance of death'. "Nandigram and Godhra are assaults on the face of democracy. They are the worst scars on the face of the nation. It is shameless to see that human rights were violated in such a way," Justice Babu told newspersons on the sidelines of the fourth annual meeting in New Delhi on 19 November. This drew an instant reaction from not only CPI(M) Lok Sabha group leader Basudev Acharia and MPs like Yechury and Karat but the firebrand CPI leader Gurudas Dasgupta . In a letter to the NHRC chief they said "We apprehend that it will influence any report by the institution you head'. However, he did not budge an inch.
Emulating Goebbles and Stalin, the LF government skipped the word Nandigram in the inaugural speech of the budget session, delivered by the West Bengal Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi who in a press statement on that day of shame said "I am filled with cold horror." In an agonized emotion, he questioned the government whose constitutional head is Gandhi himself. Was this spilling of human blood not avoidable? What is the public purpose served by the use of force that we have witnessed today? '' The attempt to whitewash the 'fascistic' act by the police, CPI(M) comrades and mercenaries by spiking it in the parliamentary record looks not only ridiculous but foolish as well.
Bhattacharjee went to Nandigram in the first week of March to give pattas to select dwellers in presence of land reform minister and CPI(M) state committee member Abdur Rezzak Molla. A vernacular daily exposed the pseudo-poor nature of the media-hyped act. Among the recipients were the family of Sridam Das, leader of CPI(M)-led Krishak Sabha in the locality, who owns a private bus , Uttam Bera, an official of panchayat samiti and CPI(M) local committee secretary Shahidulla. Bhattacharjee did not seem to have glanced through the memorandum, submitted by Trinamul Congress MLA and a leader of protest movement at Nandigram Sisir Adhikary on 1 March: "No one knows what kind of survey was undertaken and why. "We want the state government to review the list of landless needy farmers. The list was prepared by CPM leaders in the party office. It has the names of only their supporters".
On the contrary, there is inexplicable dilly-dallying in compliance of payment of compensation the HC directed to the state government: Rs 5 lakhs to the next of kins of each of victims, Rs one lakh to every injured person and Rs two lakhs to every victim of rape.
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