HVK Archives: Police appear helpless to curb violence in Bihar
Police appear helpless to curb violence in Bihar - The Times of India
Uttar Sengupta
()
23 April 1997
Title : Police appear helpless to curb violence in Bihar
Author : Uttar Sengupta
Publication : The Times of India
Date : April 23, 1997
Every day the special branch of the Bihar police prepares a report
on "Left and extremist violence". Every fortnight, a review of the
activities of these radical groups is prepared. The police seem to
have all the right intelligence, details of secret meetings, plans
and purchase of arms, movement of armed groups and of course the
incidence of violence. The names and villages of suspects also
figure in the reports.
Yet, the administration appears to be totally helpless in
containing such violence. An officer, on condition of anonymity,
said: "There are so-called liberated areas in the state where
district officials are forced to sit across the table with Naxalite
groups and do their bidding." The police, he added, had neither the
ability nor the motivation to deal with the situation.
The three major Naxalite groups, CPI(ML) Party Unity, CPI(ML)
Liberation and Maoist Communist Centre, have a fairly well-defined
area of operation spanning Gaya, Jehanabad, Aurangabad, Palamu,
Chatra, Hazaribagh, Rohtas and Bhojpur districts. However, they are
fiercely opposed by the three-year-old Ranvir Sena in some parts of
central Bihar. The conflict is now spilling over to other areas.
The Ranvir Sena is known to have been founded and patronised by
well-to-do landlords belonging to the powerful Bhumihar caste of
Bhojpur and old Gaya district. Intelligence sources say
influential Bhumihars belonging to practically all the mainstream
political parties support the Ranvir Sena.
Unlike the earlier caste armies such as the Bramharshi Sena of the
Bhumihars, the Bhoomi Sena of the Kurmis and the Lorik Sena of the
Yadavas, the Ranvir Sena extends help to all landlords,
irrespective of caste, to come together' to fight the "Left
menace". Besides making overtures to other dominant castes, the
Ranvir Sena cadre is said to be organised on the lines of the armed
squads belonging to the Naxalites.
Eyewitnesses say Ranvir Sena men wear police uniforms while
executing an operation like the armed squads of the Naxalites.
Similarly, the Ranvir Sena too meted out punishment to its men for
breach of discipline.
However, unlike the private armies of the eighties, the Ranvir Sena
is clearly flush -with both money and weapons.
With the emergence of the Ranvir Sena, the feud between the
landlords and the landless has intensified. Of late, the radical
left groups have increased pressure on landlords to raise wages.
They have resorted to punishing those refusing or resisting their
directive by forcibly harvesting the crop or putting a ban on the
people working in those fields. While the Naxalites claim to be
waging a war on the remnants of feudalism and demand that villagers
be treated with dignity, the landholding class accuses them of
lawlessness, wanton punishments, often a death sentence, by
so-called people's courts to justify its armed opposition, being
spearheaded by the Ranvir Sena.
So intense is their conflict, that every action by one group is
apparently retaliated by the other, causing a never-ending chain of
bloody reprisals.
This has resulted in widespread panic in the villages with a minor
exodus of able-bodied men from the area. They not only find
themselves sandwiched between the Ranvir Sena and the Naxalite
groups, hut have to bear the brunt of the police action following
each act of reprisal. If Dalits get killed, the police round up
upper caste men from neighbouring villages; when the upper caste
men happen to be the victims, they arrest the Dalits.
With neither side willing to give any quarter, peace appears to he
a distant dream.
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