The political bloodsport rocking West Bengal

On January 13, the West Bengal government will have to reply to the Calcutta high court’s questions following last week’s violence in Netai village in Lalgarh.

Seven people died and 20 were injured in an attack, allegedly by armed CPM cadres. Among other things, the court wants to know whether the Left Front government is thinking of a CBI probe into the killing and what it feels about demolishing armed camps in the area run by political parties.

Those of us horrified by the virulent bloodsport rocking Bengal would be very interested to know the answers.

In a mature democracy, people are not expected to seek justice through the barrel of the gun. And the bloody fight between the gun-toting cadres of the ruling CPM and the gun-toting cadres of the challenger Trinamool Congress represents an alarming failure of democratic governance.

Even more alarmingly, the fulcrum of the democratic process, the people’s vote, is being used, not to stop the bloodbath, but to fuel it.

Both the ruling party and the opposition have been using criminal violence to clear the path to state elections in May. The winner will be determined not by democratic choices but by who sinks or swims in this river of blood.

The Lalgarh killings have exposed again how politics in the once progressive Bengal is now ruled by organised violence.

Just before the bloodbath, the Maoists’ spokesman Bikram had officially revealed what was always suspected — that Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool has been an ally of the Naxalites for some time. The Maoists even thanked the union railways minister for her support in their struggle.

Immediately thereafter, the ruling Left Front was revealed to have armed cadres — often called the harmad bahini or armed militia — who were blamed for the killings in Lalgarh.

Chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee had recently objected strongly to Union home minister P Chidambaram’s use of the derogatory term harmad to describe his party cadres. But now, the CPM seems to be guilty as charged of arming rural thugs and raising a private army.

It does not matter whether the Netai incident was a massacre, as the Trinamool alleges, or a clash, as the CPM protests. Either way, well-trained gunmen of the ruling party seem to have used firearms on their opponents.

Did this criminal act, and the arming of the cadres, happen without the chief minister’s knowledge? If so, can we trust one so oblivious to what was happening within his own party to know and act for the needs of ordinary citizens?

This crisis of credibility is not limited to Bengal. Lack of development and failure of justice has spawned private armies around the country, institutionalised through generations in states like Bihar and Chhattisgarh.

Political parties use party workers and the police as their musclemen. Over decades, this criminal process of undermining democracy by power-hungry rulers has been perfected.

To counter bloodbaths like the low-grade civil war brewing in the Naxalite belt of Bengal, we don’t just need a change in government.

We need a commitment to governance and social justice from both the ruling and opposition parties. We need police reforms. We need a cleaner judiciary.

Till we make these changes, power will continue to flow from the barrel of the gun, as much for those seeking a revolution as for those seeking electoral victory.

The writer is editor, The Little Magazine