Deep Dive | The long trail of political violence in West Bengal
Murderous physical attacks on political rivals or clashes between protesters and the police are as bad as it gets in West Bengal.
The political culture in West Bengal invariably plays out in the colours of confrontation. Every rally, from a street corner meeting to a mammoth march to any miniscule demonstration that snakes its way down the narrow lanes of the state's cities, towns or villages has the potential to explode in violence.
Murderous physical attacks on political rivals or clashes between protesters and the police are as bad as it gets. So much so, that a list of, say, the worst incidents of political violence becomes lost in a haze of plenty.
In West Bengal, the reasons for confrontation have always been strictly political; the clashes are not disguised caste or communal tensions. The reputation of the state as highly politically conscious has been earned in blood.
By the time in 1967, the Naxalbari movement became a 'Spring Thunder' in the description of the Chinese Communist Party and had adopted Mao Zedong's slogan that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, the culture of violence as a means of doing politics had embedded itself in West Bengal. Some events, some movements have made a deeper impact than the moments when they occurred.
The Tebhaga Movement
The Tebhaga Movement in 1946-48 was a peasant movement by sharecroppers demanding a two-thirds share of harvested crops. It started in undivided Dinajpur and spread across the state. The confrontation between the peasantry and land-owners, with the police stepping in to maintain law and order was bloody, and thousands were arrested. It was a faceoff between the land-owning class and landless tenant farmers, with the Congress on the one side and the opposition, including the Communist Party of India, on the other.
The Ek Paisa Andolan
A fare hike for tram services in Kolkata by one paisa sparked off riots in the city in 1953. The movement was iconic. Trams were set on fire, tracks uprooted, public property vandalised, bombs lobbed, bricks hurled: the police opened fire and several people were killed, besides the 4,000 who were arrested. Student participation in the riots was notable. The 'Ek Paisa Andolan' turned the streets into a war zone. It put the ruling Congress in the dock and helped the Communist movement entrench itself deeper into the political consciousness of the youth and the working population of Kolkata.
The Food Movement
A Martyrs' Column in Kolkata's Subodh Mallick Square put up in 1959 is a memorial to the people who died, or were arrested and imprisoned, and those injured in the clashes between the police and protesters over adequate and subsidised foodgrains through the public distribution system.
The Food Movement was a historic protest that continued over several years, highlighting the problems of West Bengal's and indeed the country's food insecurity. The regime in power, the Congress, was blamed by the Left, the Communist Party of India, which later split, giving birth to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and other parties for failing to provide people with sufficient, cheap grain.
These confrontations are historic. They define the opposition culture of violent resistance to government/ruling party policies and actions and its approval by political parties as part of the routines of protest.
The Naxalite Movement
In the heyday of the Naxalite Movement after 1967, beatings, bombings, killings of perceived class enemies were regular events as was the brutal, repressive response of the state, with the police carrying out raids and picking up hundreds of young students and holding them in custody, encounter killings, mass murders of alleged Naxalites.
The Baranagar, Cossipore (Kashipur), Barasat massacre, when around 100 young men were killed by the police, and some versions insist, aided by the Congress, which was the ruling party, is a moment in the larger narrative of the movement. The Lowland, a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, explores the landscape of the Naxalite Movement and the senseless murders that happened.
Recent Episodes of Violence
Cutting to more recent times, there is a long list and a short list.
The short list starts with the murder of Forward Bloc leader Hemanta Basu in 1971, who was contesting the elections against the CPI (M) and the ruling Congress. It was never clear who killed Basu because the Congress pointed a finger at the CPI (M) even before the details of the killing were investigated.
After Basu died, Ajit Kumar Biswas was nominated and also killed. It was the most sensational murder in the 1970s. The Left coalition led by the CPI (M), which hoped to win and take over power, failed. In the annals of political violence, this incident is unparalleled.
The savage assault on Mamata Banerjee in 1990 when members of the Democratic Youth Federation of India, the CPI (M)'s organisation, surrounded her and hit her with rods and sticks and broke her head is one of the worst incidents of violence in recent years. The CPI (M) struggled to explain what happened and failed because the incident catapulted Mamata to the front lines of the political battle against the ruling party in West Bengal.
It gave her star power and she then became the face of the Congress fight back against the Left. It also gave her the heft she needed to emerge as a gutsy leader, who then split from the Congress and formed her own, Trinamool Congress.
The July 21, 1996, march on Writers' Building by Mamata, leading the Youth Congress, ranks as one of the most violent days in West Bengal's long history of confrontation. To stop the march from progressing beyond the Section 144 line, the police first used teargas, then it used batons and finally it opened fire. Thirteen young people were killed in a matter of minutes.
Memories of Violence that Haunt
The series of violent confrontations between the CPI (M) and the Trinamool Congress over land acquisition for the Tata Motors Nano car factory in Singur and the aborted land acquisition proposal in Nandigram in Midnapore between 2006 to 2008 revived blurred memories of West Bengal's turbulent years and its clashes with industry in the 1970s.
There were a series of confrontations between the CPI (M) and the Trinamool Congress and the police in Nandigram over a proposal to acquire land by the West Bengal government. The number of people who were killed in the confrontation varies, depending on the course of the information. The Trinamool Congress has one estimate, the CPI (M) another and civil society organisations that were part of the resistance by locals have yet another. The area became a war zone. Trenches were dug, bombs and guns were amassed and skirmishes were routine.
The other area that turned into a war zone was Lalgarh in Jhargram district, adjacent to West Midnapore, in 2009, when the Maoist-backed People's Committee Against Police Atrocities led by Chatradhar Mahato (now a Trinamool Congress leader) launched a series of attacks against the CPI (M) and the police.
Reports estimate that 70 people were killed in a matter of months, the targets being often CPI (M) leaders, who were panchayat members or party organisers. The resurgence of the Maoists and the almost cult status that People's War Group leader Kishenji acquired in that period revived memories of the havoc that had unfolded across West Bengal during the Naxalite movement when there was a three-way political war between the Naxalites, the Congress and the CPI (M). The police tasked with maintaining law and order ended up using brutal violence, was responsible for custodial torture, custodial death, and encounter killings.
On a scale of one to 10, a stone lobbed at a convoy of travelling VIPs is a minor incident. The land-mine planted by the PWG that almost went off in 2009 when a convoy in which then West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Nirupam Sen and Ram Vilas Paswan were travelling could have been a major event, but it was not. The mine did not go off. The convoy reached Shalboni where the foundation stone for a new mint was laid.
Endemic as the violence is in West Bengal politics, it is a measure of the intensity of the tussle between rival camps, signalling that there is a growing political power that is challenging the ruling and entrenched dominant party. This is a recurrent pattern in West Bengal's tense and competitive politics.
(The writer is a Kolkata-based senior journalist)