Violence back in Nandigram, West Bengal's ground zero

It is an uphill task for CPI(M) to re-establish itself here

April 17, 2011 02:04 am | Updated November 17, 2021 02:55 am IST - Nandigram:

Violence is back in West Bengal's Purba Medinipur district as the date of polling in the 16 Assembly constituencies here draws close: Communist Party of India (Marxist) cadres are returning, under police protection, to the villages from where they fled in the wake of the Trinamool Congress' stunning successes here in recent elections.

In West Bengal's ground zero, Nandigram — located in Purba Medinipur district — the problem is particularly acute. The ruling Left Front has used the announcement of the elections to get its cadres back into the villages and, simultaneously, the Election Commission has asked the government to arrest all those against whom cases are pending. In the process, many Trinamool activists against whom criminal cases were filed during the agitation in 2007, to prevent land in Nandigram being forcibly acquired for a chemical hub, are on the run.

The Trinamool has been controlling the district ever since it swept the panchayat polls here in 2008, then the party consolidated its hold by winning the Tamluk and Kanthi Lok Sabha seats in 2009, and topped it off by winning the Nandigram Assembly seat in a by-election that year. It is now “resisting” both the return of what they describe as the CPI(M)'s harmad vahini (armed goon squads) and an attempt to arrest its leaders.

When I drove into Nandigram on April 12, dusk had fallen over the village of Gorochokroberia, and a member of the Bhoomi Uched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC), the organisation that spearheaded the agitation against the Left Front government's attempt to acquire land here, was talking about the events of April 11: around noon, the local police arrived at the home of a former CPI(M) activist, Sheikh Sufiyan, now a leading light of the BUPC and the Trinamool Congress, in Nandigram, to arrest him for cases filed during the agitation. Not finding him at home, the police, he said, got rough and injured Sufiyan's wife, sister-in law and one of his daughters as well as Bonosree Khara, chairperson of the Nandigram-1 panchayat samiti.

The next morning, I visited Sheikh Sufiyan's home: his wife is in hospital, but I met his injured daughter and sister-in-law. The daughter is in pain, her arm in a sling, and there are bandages on his sister-in-law's arm and leg. As for Ms. Khara, nurses at the Tamluk District Hospital confirmed she had been brought in with injuries, but that her family members decided to shift her to Kolkata, to get better treatment.

But when I called on CPI(M) strongman and former Tamluk MP Lakshman Seth — who lost his seat in 2009 to the Trinamool — at the CPI(M) headquarters in Haldia, he insisted that Sheikh Sufiyan's family members were just “dramatising” the situation and that Ms. Khara had not received any injuries. Mr. Seth, who is also the chairman of the Haldia Development Authority, instead said that on April 11, the day the police went to arrest Sheikh Sufiyan, in Ranichak, another part of Nandigram, Trinamool activists attacked CPI(M) cadres returning to their villages. “Those who were evicted by the Trinamool from their homes in Nandigram and other areas in Purba Medinipur district, such as Khejuri, Mukhberia, Kanthi, Potashpur and Moyna are now returning,” he said, but added bitterly, “it has not been easy.”

It is clearly an uphill task for the CPI(M) to re-establish itself in Nandigram, and elsewhere in Purba Medinipur district, where the Left's machinery has all but collapsed. Ashok Guria, a CPI(M) district committee member and in charge of Nandigram, admits that of the 17 local party offices in this Assembly area, only five are running. He also says CPI(M) workers, trickling back into the area, are having to deal with a social boycott: “They can't take water from the tubewells, they can't go the weekly markets, and the police are offering no protection,” he complains.

To add to the CPI(M)'s woes, a Kolkata-based filmmaker, Shyamal Karmakar, is making a Bengali movie, Chokher Pani, based on a novel on the anti-land acquisition agitation in Nandigram, written by political activist Manik Mandal, who was arrested from Lalgarh on June 16, 2010, on charges of sedition, but is out on bail now. The film crew arrived in Nandigram in late March to shoot the film, but was forced to leave after violence broke out. Since then, the CPI(M) has written to the Election Commission, complaining that the film was an attempt to vitiate the situation in the run-up to the elections.

For the residents of Nandigram, the tension-filled days of 2007-08 appear to have returned. The Trinamool had called a bandh in the area for Saturday to protest against the police assault on Sheikh Sufiyan's family members. But the party called it off, sources in Nandigram told this correspondent, after local traders protested that their businesses had been harmed enough. Besides, it would be an inauspicious start to the new year — April 15 was Poila Boishak, the Bengali New Year.

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