Across Bardhaman district, from the coalfields and industrial units of the Asansol-Ranigunj-Durgapur belt to the lush green paddy fields in the rural east, conversations at every Communist Party of India (Marxist) office centre round one subject: the Trinamool Congress is spreading sontrash (terror) through the area.
Indeed, not a day goes by without reports of bloody clashes between workers of the two parties. In February, the Left parties submitted a memorandum to the Election Commission, listing as many as eight of Bardhaman's 25 Assembly segments as likely to be disturbed during the poll. They have accused the Trinamool of destroying their party offices, assaulting and, in some cases, killing CPI(M) workers, and even forcing their cadres to vacate villages. District Magistrate Onkar Singh Meena has declared 1,206 of the district's 4,694 booths as “vulnerable;” he says that workers — leaving which party they belong to unsaid — who had left their villages are gradually being encouraged to return home.
Amal Haldar, general secretary of the CPI(M) district committee, says the results of the Lok Sabha election — when the Left Front won just 16 of the 42 seats in the State — “gave momentum to the Trinamool's efforts” to venture into Bardhaman.
Subhas Som, a political scientist, explains the Trinamool's methods: “If the Trinamool Congress had tried to build an organisation in Bardhaman, it would have taken years. Instead, it has been recruiting CPI(M) musclemen, expelled by that party, to resist the CPI(M) in this district, and with considerable success.” Locals say Madan Mitra, a Trinamool MLA from the 24 South Parganas district, “camped” in Bardhaman to organise this effort.
“What Mamata Banerjee has done is to use the CPI(M)'s instruments against it,” says Dr. Som. The Trinamool contests this. The party's candidate from Jhamuria Prabhat Chatterji says they are securing the people's support because of Mamata Banerjee's Ma, Maati, Manush campaign against the “atrocities and terror of the CPI(M).”
The death of his colleague — Trinamool worker Rabin Kazi, who was allegedly done in by Dinanath Bauri, a local coal mafiosi, who has since been arrested — has become an election issue here. The Trinamool claims that Mr. Bauri is a henchman of the local CPI(M) leader and that it was Mr. Chatterji's venturing into “red territory” that aroused Left ire. The Left's says the death was the result of a clash between two groups of coal mafia dons.
But it is the rural eastern end of the district that has been witnessing most of the violence, particularly in the Mongolkote, Raina and Ketugram Assembly constituencies. Duryodhan Shor, a CPI(M) functionary in Mongolkot says the local committee office in Ketugram was closed for a year and a half, as party workers fled after Trinamool workers “captured” the area. Now with the election approaching, the district administration has helped “check” the clashes and the office is functioning again. Villagers talk in fearful tones about the violence and tension, but say that it is now gradually receding.
If the 2009 Lok Sabha election emboldened the Trinamool to enter the Left's bastion, last year's court verdict in Birbhum district, has demoralised the CPI(M) in this area. Subrata Bhattacharya, a Trinamool functionary, says that after the Siuri district court gave 44 CPI(M) workers a life sentence for the murder of 11 Trinamool workers, way back in 2000 in Nanur, it sent a strong message across into Bardhaman.
