West
Bengal's Stanilist Government
Mounts Terror Campaign
To Quash Peasant Unrest
By Kranti Kumara
15 November, 2007
WSWS.org
Through a murderous campaign
of terror, the stanilist government of West Bengal, India’s third
most populous state, has reasserted control over Nandigram, an area
160 kilometers southwest of Kolkata (Calcutta) that has been convulsed
by peasant protests for the past 10 months.
At least eight persons were
killed and scores more injured in a week of violence, beginning November
6, mounted by armed goons organized by the Communist Party of India
(Marxist). The CPM is the dominant partner in West Bengal’s Left
Front government.
At least 10,000 villagers—some
reports put the total closer to 18,000—have fled the Nandigram
area, finding refuge in relief camps or with relatives.
While the CPM goons initially
prevented their entry, the area is now being occupied by hundreds of
troops from the Central Reserve Police Force, which is answerable to
the Congress Party-led Union or federal government.
Last January, the peasantry
of Nandigram rose up to prevent the state government from expropriating
their land and transforming it into a special economic zone for the
Indonesian-based Salim Group. While some local leaders and members of
the CPM and its close ally the Communist Party of India (CPI) joined
the rebellion, many of those who did not subsequently fled or were chased
from the area. Nandigram then became off limits for government representatives,
with villagers digging up roads and burning down bridges to keep them
out.
On March 14, hundreds of
heavily armed CPM goons, acting with the foreknowledge and complicity
of the police, mounted an armed assault on Nandigram. The predictable
result was a massacre. Fourteen peasants were killed and many times
that number injured, but ultimately the attack was beaten off.
This time, the CPM goons,
who reportedly had been exhorted by senior party leaders to crush their
enemies, were even more ruthless. Eyewitnesses claim that they impeded
or outright prevented the injured from getting medical attention. The
East Midnapur Superintendent of Police has said that two teenage girls
have been admitted to hospital after allegedly being gang-raped by CPM
goons.
According to the right-wing
Indian Express, “In a move reminiscent of medieval warfares [sic],
the CPM organised a huge rally placing 500 captured BUPC members, all
tied up, on the forefront as human shields.”
The BUPC (Bhumi Ucched Pratirodh
or Resistance Against Land Eviction Committee) has been leading the
anti-government protest in Nandigram. It is led politically by the Trinumul
Congress, a right-wing Bengali nationalist split-off from the Congress
Party and the official opposition in the state parliament. But other
tendencies are also active in the BUPC, including the Socialist Unity
Center of India (SUCI) and CPM dissidents.
The brazen and bloody CPM
terror campaign in Nandigram has provoked a storm of opposition in West
Bengal and across India.
On Monday, daily business
in the state was largely paralyzed as the result of a bandh or general
strike called separately by the Trinumul Congress and the SUCI.
Large numbers of intellectuals,
many of them previously publicly known as government supporters, have
denounced the CPM-orchestrated violence.
On Sunday police used baton
charges and arrests to break up a peaceful protest against the Nandigram
violence mounted by artists and academics, many of them well known,
outside the 13th Kolkata Film Festival.
The protesters—who
included film directors Rituparna Ghosh and Anjan Dutta, poet Joy Goswami,
and the painters Sanatan Dinda and Samir Aich—demanded the “immediate
stoppage of mass killing by CPM cadres in Nandigram.”
Film director Aparna Sen
warned the Left Front regime its repression would fail: “The truth
can’t be suppressed. Questions are coming out and will continue
to flow. The government must answer.”
The CPM’s principal
Left Front allies, the Forward Bloc (FB), the Revolutionary Socialist
Party (RSP) and the CPI, are, for their part, desperately seeking to
distance themselves from the Nandigram atrocity.
State Public Works Department
Minister Kshiti Goswami has sought the permission of his party, the
RSP, to quit his cabinet post.
Commenting on the CPM offensive
in Nandigram, Goswami stated: “I don’t know if I would call
this genocide. But this is definitely an expedition of killing, plunder
and destruction.”
Goswami claimed that the
CPM had “deceived” its allies when it had claimed last week
to be seeking a peaceful resolution to the Nandigram crisis and announced
a relief package for the area. “One thing is being said, another
thing is being done.’’
Following an emergency meeting
of RSP, CPI and FB leaders Sunday, the CPI state secretary Manju Kumar
Majumdar told a press conference, “All the three Left Front allies
hold the CPI-M solely responsible for the present situation in Nandigram.
We do not support what has been going on there and unequivocally condemn
the barbarism and spiraling violence taking place in the area.”
West Bengal Chief Minister
and CPM Politburo member Buddadeb Bhattacharjee has arrogantly rejected
the criticism from within and without his government. On Tuesday, he
smugly declared that the “Opposition has been paid back in the
same coin” and on Wednesday he blamed the violence on the central
government’s failure to rapidly deploy the Central Reserve Police
Force to Nandigam.
Bhattacharjee and the CPM
leadership have claimed no delay could be brooked in reasserting the
government’s authority and “law and order” in the
area because Maoist insurgents or Naxhalites had begun to develop a
base in Nandigram.
In the name of “industrializing”
West Bengal, Bhattarcharjee has been spearheading a drive to woo Indian
and foreign capital to the state by pursuing “investor friendly”
policies, including establishing special economic zones and effectively
banning strikes in information technology and IT-enabled industries.
For this, he has been rewarded with an official invitation from the
Bush administration to visit the US and recently Henry Kissinger, the
eminence grise of US imperialist geopolitics, called on him.
There is no question that
the CPM leadership and the Left Front government bear political, if
not criminal, responsibility for the Nandigram bloodbath. Acting on
behalf of Indian and international capital, they have sought to coerce
peasants into ceding their land, their sole source of livelihood.
That said, India’s
workers, toilers and socialist-minded intellectuals must beware: the
Indian bourgeoisie intends to make use of the Stalinists’ crimes
to pressure them, and politics as a whole, still further right.
L.K. Adavni, the parliamentary
leader of the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party, is calling on
the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government to impose “president’s
rule” in West Bengal, that is for the central government to dismiss
the state government.
The UPA, which is dependent
on the Left Front for its parliamentary survival, is rather likely to
use the crisis in the CPM and the Left Front to pressure them to be
even more accommodating to its right-agenda, especially in respect to
operationalizing the Indo-US nuclear treaty.
Indeed, there already newspaper
reports claiming that there has been a breakthrough in the Left-UPA
logjam over the treaty. According to these reports, the Left Front may
now be ready to allow the government to proceed with the next stage
in operationalizing the treaty, that is, in seeking International Atomic
Energy Agency approval for giving India a unique status within the world
nuclear regulatory regime.
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