Author: Saugar Sengupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 9, 2003
Lynching a "class enemy" is an old
Bangla communist way of "class annihilation". These are so frequent in
West Bengal that unless an incident is particularly macabre, it fails to
surprise. At any rate, human rights activists list the state on top of
the justice-by-lynching rate.
The latest instance belongs to such
a category. On Thursday morning, about 800 workers of the Dalgaon tea estate,
about 70 km from Jalpaiguri, attacked the house of the local CITU (the
CPI-M's trade union front) leader Tarakeshwar Lohar. It is likely that
the inmates of the house were expecting an attack, because someone fired
from inside at the approaching mob, injuring one in the process.
That the attackers had already made
up their minds to commit arson is evident from the fact that they had petrol
bombs ready, which they hurled at the house. Those who tried to escape
the ensuing blaze were brutally beaten, slashed with hand-held machettes,
and thrown back into the flames. The final death toll: 19.
Surprisingly, the object of their
ire, Lohar, got away. He must have had a hunch of what was coming because
while he packed his own house with his henchmen in anticipation of a strike,
he himself, with his wife, two sons and close relatives, surrendered at
the local police station. Most of those killed are believed to be Lohar's
close followers.
It seems Lohar had attracted ire
for preferring outsiders over locals in nominating candidates to fill up
some clerical vacancies in the estate. Jalpaiguri lies in the middle of
a typical West Bengal industrial wasteland. Facing dropping prices for
tea against competition from imports, tea garden owners of the state's
Dooars and Darjeeling belts are increasingly closing down. In the ocean
of unemployment, the pressure on Lohar can easily be imagined.Factionalism
in the CITU came to the fore when Lohar's detractors accused him of overlooking
the candidature of locals and "selling" the two posts to "outsiders."
The incident is wrapped in mystery.
The identity of the victims may offer some lead in the case. Curiously,
the state machinery has started legal action against Lohar and the "provocation"
for the lynching is currently getting more weightage than the tragedy itself.
Outsiders may be shocked at the
level of the post-massacre discourse. In Marxist West Bengal every political
murder is given a strange justification and the debate degenerates into
hair-splitting arguments over whether the victim deserved it or not. Norms
of civil society and human rights have never been Stalinist obsessions
in any case. West Bengal's lynch-raj attracted international notice in
April 1982 when 17 monks of the Anand Marg sect were burnt alive on a flyover
in south Kolkata in broad daylight, even as thousands watched. The involvement
of the CPI(M) was an open secret, but till date the findings of an inquiry
committee have neither been publicised nor implemented. Strangely, the
then Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu , tried to justify the crime saying the
locals suspected the Ananda Marg was involved in a kidnapping racket.
Basu made a similar insensitive
remark after suspected Marxist cadres set upon a group of UNICEF workers
in Bantola in the city's eastern suburbs in May 1990. The victims, all
women, were cornered while moving in a car, stripped naked and mercilessly
beaten. Two of them later succumbed to their injuries. The octogenarian's
initial remark was: "Why were they travelling in those parts after dark
?" Later, however, he denied the comment but, as usual, no apologies were
offered.
In Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere in
the Hindi heartland, lynchings take a casteist appearance. But in West
Bengal, people die for their political affiliation. The Sainbari incident
of 1969 is still a legend. Three brothers in a family of supposed Congress
activists in the Burdwan district village were lynched by Marxists, and,
as a coup de grace, their blood was reportedly splattered on their mothers.
The then United Front government
(in which Basu was the Home Minister) blamed the Naxalites for the crime,
but failed to convince. Within days, his government was dismissed by Indira
Gandhi.
The Jalpaiguri incident, if experience
is anything to go by, will be rendered just one more statistic in West
Bengal's long history of hate crimes. Curiously, the Marxists, who are
the loudest activists for human rights in Delhi, do nothing to set things
right in their own backyard.
