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West Bengal’s Left Front government presides over another
police massacre
By Kranti Kumara
12 February 2008

The Left Front government in the east Indian state of West
Bengal is defending police who opened fire, without warning, on
demonstrators Tuesday, February 5, killing five people and injuring
many more.

The shooting occurred when a crowd of 10-12,000, participating
in an All-India Forward Bloc (AIFB) “law violation”
protest in Dinhata—a town located about 730 kilometers north
of the state capital Kolkata (Calcutta)—broke through police
lines. The crowd had been angered by the refusal of local government
officials to accept a memorandum outlining their demands.

The AIFB is the second largest constituent of the Left Front—a
multi-party alliance led by the Stalinist Communist Party of India
(Marxist) or CPM—in West Bengal. But over the past year,
as West Bengal’s CPM-dominated government has ruthlessly
pressed forward with a pro-investor industrialization program,
the Forward Bloc leadership has found it politic to criticize
the state government, especially its suppression of the peasant
agitation against the seizure of agricultural land for Special
Economic Zones (SEZs).

The police and government are claiming that the 150 police
charged with protecting the Dinhata sub-divisional office on February
5 had no choice but to open fire, because the protest had spiraled
out of control. Protesters, they claim, had set two police cars
ablaze, thrown stones, and roughed up several policemen. The authorities
are also claiming that the demonstration had been infiltrated
by “antisocial” elements, a charge vigorously denied
by local Forward Bloc leaders.

The initial findings of an official police probe show, however,
that the police opened fire without warning, although police guidelines
stipulate that repeated warnings should be given before any recourse
to live ammunition.

That the police callously committed murder in Dinhata is further
demonstrated by where people were shot. Police are supposed to
fire at demonstrators’ legs, but all four who died on the
spot had been hit in the neck or head and other protestors received
bullets in the torso. Some were shot in the back, yet police guidelines
stipulate that police should cease firing as soon as a crowd starts
to disperse.

Those killed ranged in age from 25 to 65. All were Forward
Bloc activists.

On Friday, the state government announced that two police officers
have been transferred from Dinhata, but for their own safety,
not because they are being disciplined for the shooting.

“The police in Dinhata,” declared Bengal home secretary
and CPM leader Prasad Ranjan Ray, “feared an all-out attack
from the Bloc demonstrators and hence had to open fire in self-defence...
Moreover things went out of control after the protesters set two
police vehicles on fire.”

Ray’s statement is in line with the position taken by
the CPM leadership as a whole.

Maverick CPM Sports and Transport Minister Subhas Chakraboty
deplored the shooting, saying, “There was no justification
for the police firing at Dinhata on Tuesday. Mob violence could
have been contained by some other means.”

But the rest of the CPM leadership, beginning with Buddadeb
Bhattacharjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister and CPM Politburo
member who also heads the police ministry, have defended the actions
of the police.

The CPM issued a perfunctory statement following the shootings
that failed to express any remorse at the deaths and injuries,
let alone take the police to task or pledge a full inquiry into
their actions. Rather it called for “peace” and implored
that events in Dinhata not become grist for “reactionary
forces [that] are trying to disrupt the peaceful atmosphere in
West Bengal.”

Only under pressure from its Left Front allies did the CPM-leadership
agree, five days after the police shooting, that the state government
should order a judicial probe into the Dinhata deaths.

“I have come to know about the judicial probe from the
media,” said the Forward Bloc’s West Bengal state secretary,
Ashok Ghosh. “The Chief Minister didn’t call me up after
his return form Delhi.” (Bhattacharjee was visiting the national
capital when the police opened fire in Dinhata.)

Leaders of another Left Front component, the Revolutionary
Socialist Party (RSP), have expressed concern that the probe will
be used to cover up the crimes of the police. Said RSP State Secretary
Debabrata Bandopadhyay, “The government should set a deadline
for the commission to complete its task. Otherwise, the fate of
this probe would be the same as those by earlier commissions that
worked for years only to see their reports being dumped.”

In response to the February 5 massacre, the AIFB leadership
issued a call for a 12-hour, statewide bandh or general
strike on Wednesday, the 6th. The bandh, the first ever
initiated by a Left Front component against West Bengal’s
31 year-old Left Front government, crippled many government operations
and kept most buses and commercial traffic off the roads, but
air travel and the IT sector were reportedly unaffected. A spokesman
for the CPM-affiliated Confederation of Industrial Trade Unions
claimed the strike was “ineffective.”

The bandh was supported by the state’s principal
opposition party, the right-wing Trinamul Congress (TMC). Although
India’s previous Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government,
of which the Trinamul Congress was a member, pressed forward with
neo-liberal policies, the TMC is posing as an opponent of the
West Bengal government’s program of expropriating peasant-lands
for SEZs. Under the leadership of of the anti-communist demagogue
Mamata Bannerjee, the Trinamul Congress is also seeking to exploit
the growing divisions within the Left Front, calling on the AIFB
to join it in a grand anti-CPM electoral alliance.

The AIFB has spurned these appeals, but it has indicated that
it could stand candidates against the CPM in coming local (panchayat)
elections in West Bengal and has said it will contest the Tripura
state assembly election separately from the CPM.

Others who supported last week’s half-day, state-wide
general strike included the Revolutionary Socialist Party and
the Socialist Unity Center of India (SUCI), which split-off from
the Stalinist Communist Party of India in 1948. The Congress Party,
whose United Progressive Alliance national coalition government
is dependent on the parliamentary support of the Left Front to
remain in office, offered “moral support.”

Despite the killing of its own members and the government’s
justification of the police’s actions, the AIFB leadership
has made clear it has no intention of quitting the Left Front
government.

Rather it is seeking to use the Dinhata incident, as it has
the popular unrest in West Bengal over the government’s right-wing
policies, to press the CPM to give it and the other major Left
Front allies, the RSP and the Communist Party of India, a greater
voice in determining the government’s policies.

“The question of walking out of the Left government does
not arise,” declared AIFB state secretary Ashok Ghosh. “We
want to remain in power with the people’s support and not
with guns pointed to their heads.”

The AIFB was founded in 1939 by the Indian nationalist Subhas
Chandra Bose, after he was drummed out of the Congress by Mahatma
Gandhi for demanding that it adopt a more aggressive anti-British
posture. During World War II, Bose made an alliance with Japanese
imperialism, becoming the head of the Japanese-allied Indian National
Army. Bose died at the end of war, but the party was continued
by his brother, after a brief period during which he returned
to the Congress fold.

The West Bengal-based AIFB has been a major Left Front partner
since it first came to power in West Bengal in 1977.

Last week’s protest in Dinhata was part of a campaign
the Forward Bloc initiated in response to growing popular opposition
to the West Bengal government’s pursuit of pro-investor policies
aimed at making the state a cheap-labor haven. This opposition
has taken multiple forms, including a peasant revolt against land
expropriation in Nandigram and riots over corruption in the food
ration system.

Last week’s killings came eleven months after the massacre
of 14 villagers on March 14, 2007 in Nandigram. That carnage occurred
when the West-Bengal Stalinist Chief Minister Buddadeb Bhattacharjee
deployed 4,000 heavily-armed police to reassert government control
over Nandigram, whose population had resisted a government plan
to confiscate their agricultural land, their sole source of livelihood,
so as to establish an SEZ to be controlled by the Indonesian conglomerate,
the Salim Group. (See West Bengal Stalinist regime perpetrates
peasant massacre) The police were driven off, but in November,
CPM-goons staged a second assault, which left at least eight villagers
dead, scores of others injured, and 10,000 or more homeless.

The Stalinists’ savage repression of the Nandigram uprising
has caused a hemorrhaging of its popular support, including among
a section of the West Bengal intelligentsia long identified with
the party.

The Forward Bloc’s “law violation” or civil
disobedience campaign is ostensibly aimed at forcing the government
to call a halt to the establishment of further Special Economic
Zones, but the CPM, which by itself commands a majority of seats
in the West Bengal assembly, has repeatedly proclaimed SEZs the
core of its government program.

Other AIFB demands include forbidding the entry of giant transnational
retail corporations such as Wal-Mart into the state’s retail
trade and providing reservations—affirmative action programs—for
the state’s largely impoverished Muslim minority.

The most powerful sections of Indian capital have repeatedly
expressed their confidence in Bhattacharjee and the CPM leadership.
Tata, for example, has chosen to build its new ultra-low cost
car at an SEZ in Singur, near Kolkata. But the growing popular
unrest and the repeated and increasingly frequent instances of
government-instigated violence are causing anxiety and apprehension.

“Pulling the trigger gets more and more reckless as the
government suffers a jerk in the knee even in the face of a perfectly
democratic agitation,” declared The Statesman, a Kolkata
daily. “Palpable indeed is the urge to seek fatally quick-fix
solutions and an increasing tendency to seek desperate options.
This is illustrated by the summoning of the army first to restore
order over a four-km radius in Kolkata [a reference to the use
of the army in November to suppress a riot of Muslim fundamentalists]
and more recently to douse a fire, essentially the outcome of
municipal negligence. And when the army is not an agreeable or
viable option, the police are ordered to fire and kill, an action
carried out with a degree of malevolence that is as calculated
as it is political. Tuesday’s firing violated every rule
in the book... Which makes it plain that the firing, as in Nandigram
last March, was ordered to kill.”

The Telegraph, the other major English-language Kolkata
daily, for its part, expressed concern that the police violence
could fuel further unrest and adversely impact on the CPM’s
drive to make West Bengal a profit haven for domestic and international
capital. It declared, “As the events at Singur and Nandigram
last year showed, Mr. Bhattacharjee faces tough political challenges
to his economic agenda. The last thing he needs is violent, obstructionist
politics by partners of the Front. Wednesday’s bandh
cannot do his—or Bengal’s—image any good. But the
chief minister has other reasons to worry about the events at
Dinhata. The police firing suggests that the men in uniform are
increasingly incapable of tackling a mob without killing people.
Memories of the police firing at Nandigram are still fresh in
the people’s minds. The government cannot afford to give
them the impression that the police in Bengal are not accountable
for their actions. Despite the violence at Nandigram and Singur,
Bengal’s successes in attracting investments last year were
second only to Gujarat’s. But continued violence and administrative
bunglings can spoil the promise.”

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