Author: Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay
Publication: Frontline
Date: August 29-September 11, 2009
URL: http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20090911261810700.htm
Maoists continue to kill at will in Lalgarh
in spite of the presence of 50 companies of security forces in the area.
THE banned Communist Party of India (Maoist)
has underlined its presence in Lalgarh in West Bengal's West Medinipur district
through a spate of killings in spite of the 50 companies of security forces
that are stationed there. As of August 19, as many as 19 murders by the Maoists
had been reported since the deployment two months ago of Central forces, the
Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (Cobra), and the State police to flush
them out of the Jangalmahal (as the forested part of the region is locally
called) area in the district.
Forty-five people, mostly Communist Party
of India (Marxist) leaders and workers and a few members of the Jharkhand
Party (Naren), have been killed in the area by Maoists and activists of the
Maoist-backed People's Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA) since November
2008 after a failed attempt on Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's life
at Kalaichand near Lalgarh.
The continuing violence has prompted the State
government to concede that the Central forces' operation in Lalgarh has been
a failure. "Almost every day Maoists kill or abduct people. Our target
was to arrest the Maoists or flush them out of the area, but current incidents
show we have not been very successful," State Home Secretary Ardhendu
Sen said at a press conference on August 6.
There have been regular exchanges of fire
between the combined forces and Maoists ever since the police operations started
on June 18. The killings by Maoists stopped for a while initially. In fact,
by July 4, when the security forces recaptured Madhupur, the last Maoist bastion
in the region, it was widely believed that the Maoists were on the run and
that normalcy was about to return. A high-level task force consisting of senior
bureaucrats even visited the area to take stock of its developmental needs.
Fresh spate of killings
As it turned out, there was little cause for
celebration. In a sudden move, on July 10, Maoists killed two CPI(M) supporters,
Barendranath Mahato and Gurucharan Mahato, in separate incidents at Sirsi
village. They struck again on July 13, killing two farmers, Swapan Debsingha
and Tarini Debsingha, apparently for supporting the CPI(M), in Madhupur, just
a few kilometres away from the police camps at Khadibandh and Ramgarh.
Although Chhatradhar Mahato, the PCPA chief,
and other leaders went into hiding, the committee's activities continued under
the direction of the Maoists. Demonstrations and rallies, clashes with the
police and the ransacking of CPI(M) offices resumed, and threatening posters
reappeared.
For about eight months before the police operations
started, Maoists and the PCPA held sway in the area. They refused to allow
the State police to enter the area, in protest against the arrests that had
taken place following the attempt on the Chief Minister. Little seems to have
changed since. "The situation is still very serious. We are keeping a
close watch on the developments," Manoj Verma, Superintendent of Police,
West Medinipur, told Frontline. According to him, most of the killings were
taking place where the police presence was weak or absent.
On July 18, Jaladhar Mahato, a CPI(M) leader
in the Jhargram subdivision, and Ashok Ghosh, a party worker from Goaltore,
were killed in separate incidents. The same day, just before the killings
took place, Maoist posters were found on the walls of shops at Ramkrishna
Bazaar in Jhargram announcing: "CPI(M) leaders will be beheaded soon."
The posters named the area's CPI(M) leaders on the Maoists' hit list.
On July 22, Maoists gunned down Fagu Baske,
a CPI(M) leader, near the Jharkhand border, giving an indication of the reach
of their information network. Baske, a branch committee secretary in Madhupur
village, had been in hiding for a few months and had just returned to his
village to work on his field. According to police sources, that his killers
were waiting for him suggests that they had prior information of his whereabouts.
Baske was shot 14 times. The site of the killing - barely 500 metres from
the Jharkhand border - is also significant. On July 8, a high-level meeting
took place in Ranchi between the West Bengal Police and the Jharkhand Police
to chalk out a strategy for joint operations against the Maoists.
On the same day that Baske was killed, armed
Maoists herded several CPI(M) leaders and activists from different villages
and forced them to squat holding their ears and declare their disassociation
from the CPI(M). Many CPI(M) workers have resigned from the party in recent
weeks, either at gunpoint or in fear.
Trinamool leaders visit
On July 28, a team of Trinamool Congress leaders,
including Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Partha Chatterjee, Union
Minister of State for Shipping Mukul Roy, and Union Minister of State for
Rural Development Sisir Adhikari, visited Lalgarh.
Addressing separate gatherings in the region,
they demanded immediate withdrawal of the Central forces and came down heavily
on the police activities there. "The State police are committing atrocities
against innocent people in the name of flushing out Maoists. We will appeal
to the Centre to withdraw its forces immediately and start developmental programmes
here at the earliest," said Partha Chatterjee.
The Trinamool Congress now finds itself in
an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the PCPA. It proclaimed its support to
the committee's cause in February, when Trinamool supremo Mamata Banerjee
shared the dais with Chhatradhar Mahato in Lalgarh. However, the party has
been trying to distance itself from the PCPA for the past two months. Mamata
Banerjee has maintained a stony silence on CPI (Maoist) polit bureau member
Koteswar Rao's exhortation to her to choose a side, particularly since the
Maoists had fought alongside the Trinamool against the CPI(M) in the bloody
turf battle in Nandigram in East Medinipur district and had supported the
Trinamool in its opposition to the proposed chemical hub at Nayachar in the
same district.
During their last visit to Lalgarh, the Trinamool
leaders did not even try to contact the PCPA leaders, although they alleged
police atrocities and demanded withdrawal of the Central forces. Soon after
the departure of the Trinamool leaders, PCPA supporters clashed with the police
- they organised a huge rally in defiance of prohibitory orders under Section
144 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
Policemen abducted
On July 30, just two days after the Trinamool
leaders' visit, the Maoists abducted Sagar Masanto, a CPI(M) leader from Goaltore.
His mutilated body was found the next day. The same day, two policemen on
patrol duty in the Lalgarh area, Kanchan Garai and Sabir Mollah, went missing.
The following day saw a heavy exchange of fire between the Maoists and the
security forces in the Jhitka forest as operations to trace the missing policemen
began. As of August 19, there was no information on their whereabouts.
11 murders in 11 days
On August 1, while the security forces and
the Maoists were locked in a gun battle that continued late into the night,
armed militants shot dead Kalipada Singh, a leader of the Ganapratirodh Committee
(GPC), a committee set up in December 2008 by the local people to resist the
Maoists, in his house at Chirgoda village in Belpahari in West Medinipur district.
That was the first time that the Maoists killed a GPC leader. The Maoists'
main target had been CPI(M) leaders and activists. The GPC, of course, has
the backing of the CPI(M) and the police, but Kalipada Singh was not a party
member.
On August 2, the Maoists murdered Nirmal Mahato,
secretary of the CPI(M)'s branch committee at Amdanga in the Lalgarh area,
outside his home. A statement sent to Frontline through an SMS by Maoist leader
Bikas read: "The PLGA [People's Liberation Guerilla Army] has meted out
the right punishment to Ganapratirodh Committee leader Kalipada. We tried
to kill Nirmal last year, but he survived. The verdict of the people turned
against him as he was helping the combined forces. The PLGA executed the verdict
of the people."
The same night, armed assailants killed Nagen
Singh Sardar, a former Maoist who joined the GPC, and the next afternoon,
killed Gurucharan Tudu, another GPC activist. In the early hours of August
5, Sankar Das Adhikari, a CPI(M) supporter from Chilgora village near Dharampur,
and Gunadhar Singh, yet another GPC member, were killed. On August 6, suspected
Maoists killed three local people who worked as night guards in a cold storage
plant in the Binpur block. All three were members of the Jharkhand Party (Naren),
and one of them, Budheswar Hansda, was a relative of Binpur MLA and Jharkhand
Party (Naren) leader Chunibala Hansda.
Even as the State government laboured to formulate
a strategy to combat Maoist terror in Lalgarh, killings, armed rallies, abductions
and threats continued to be the order of the day in and around the area. On
August 7, Bikas himself led a rally near Dharampur, at which he reportedly
denied a Maoist hand in the killing of the three Jharkhand Party (Naren) members
and in the disappearance of the two missing policemen. The following night,
however, another CPI(M) supporter and GPC leader, Manik Mondal, was killed,
and a Jharkhand Party (Naren) activist, Ramapada Mandal, was critically injured
by Maoists in Belpahari. On August 10, Bikash claimed to have killed Paritosh
Misra, a Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) leader from Dherua.
Chhatradhar resurfaces
After weeks of lying low, Chhatradhar Mahato
resurfaced on August 17 to hold an open meeting at Mongladanga, in violation
of Section 144 clamped in the area. The much-hyped public rally, which was
announced days earlier, was supposed to take place near a police outpost at
Gohomidanga. When the police arrived to prevent the rally, the organisers
managed to outwit them by simply shifting the venue to Mongladanga, a few
kilometres away. Mahato, who is a most wanted man and has innumerable criminal
cases against him, addressed a gathering of around 1,000 people in the televised
public meeting, once again reasserting the hold Maoists have in the area.
The same day, yet another CPI(M) activist was abducted and a Central Reserve
Police Force (CRPF) jawan was injured in a gun battle with the Maoists. The
PCPA also called for an indefinite bandh in Jangalmahal.
It appears, therefore, that the Maoists are
still asserting their presence in and around Lalgarh. When Union Home Minister
P. Chidambaram referred to the "killing fields" of West Bengal and
urged the State government to take immediate action so that the Central forces
could be withdrawn early, there was naturally a volley of protests from the
Left. Many political observers also read in it an implied threat to the State
government: the implication of a "breakdown of the constitutional machinery"
that might lead to the promulgation of President's Rule and early elections,
as Mamata Banerjee has long demanded. As the blame game continues, the hapless
village residents are caught in the crossfire.
