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Terror unearthed
CPM's 34-year-old regime of terror stands exposed after the recovery of skeletons near a former ministers residence in West Midnapore
photo : mukunda de

the sunday indian 30 19 june 2011

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illustraion : shantanu mitra

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it a conspiracy of neo-imperialists. And I thank God-I really do though I dont regularly offer prayers-that Indian voters have always had the innate common sense not to be fooled by the dogma ridden double standards of the comrades. Frankly, I shudder to think what would have happened to India if the Marxists had realised their dream of ushering in a 'Paradise of the Proletariat'. I will remind you of three such paradises that were proudly crafted, created and nurtured by Marxists across the world. They were the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia-the nations where Comrades took their dreams and fantasies to their logical conclusion and limit. In Soviet Union, that Great leader Stalin sent to death no less than 30 million fellow countrymen to build his paradise. In China, that 'Great Helmsman', Mao
photos : sandipan kar

ShadeS of Red:
Marxism and Blood
sutanu guru on the blood thirsty legacy of the red Brigade in Bengal
residence of former minister and CPM leader Sushanta Ghosh just a few days back. Allegedly, they are the remains of people who were kidnapped and massacred in cold blood by CPM goons for their audacity in raising their voices against Marxist authoritarianism and thuggish behaviour (read detailed story after this column). I am not at all surprised at the discovery. And I am sure persistence and perseverance could lead us to more mass graves with many more bodies. Nor will I be surprised when the likes of Comrade Prakash Karat and Comrade Buddhadeb Bhattacharya display utter brazenness, deny the existence of such graves and call

f you hide skeletons in a cupboard, they have a nasty habit of tumbling out. Even if you try and bury them six feet under Mother Earth, they have the mystically unnerving power to haunt you later. That is what the Comrades in West Bengal are discovering after skeletons were unearthed from near the

was responsible in a lot of ways for more than 20 million deaths of Chinese citizens during the famine that swept China duringthe Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In Cambodia, the Paradise of the Proletariat reached its zenith and 30 per cent of the countrys population was exterminated to attain that paradise. And that extermination happened in just about five years. Imagine what would have happened to class enemies like you and me, our families, our friends and our well wishers if the Comrades were given a chance by Indian voters to do to India what they have done to West Bengal. Believe me, it is the stuff of nightmares. I know Indian democracy is deeply flawed and I know most of our politicians and parties are venal and corrupt. But lets face it. Would you prefer a ruling party that tries its best to ignore your protests and continues plundering or a party whose goons will rape your wife, sister and mother, kill your child and then dance on the dead enemies of class enemies ? Truly, the Marxists in Bengal were in a class by themselves. Even in the darkest days of the Emergency, you did not have Congress party goons systematically, ruthlessly, efficiently and chillSkeletons ingly slaughter opponents and found from protestors. That is exactly what a grave near happened with unfailing reguCPM exminister Su- larity in West Bengal for most santa Ghosh's parts of the last 34 years. And house; (Inset) dont for a moment believe that Residents dig this Red reign of terror unthe area leashed by the comrades is a relatively new phenomenon. It was during the heyday of the bhadralok regime led by late Jyoti Basu that more than 3000 Dalits were brutalised and 100 plus killed in police firing at Marichjhapi. The Red logic is simple: they know what is best for the people. And if people beg to disagree, well, terrorise and kill them till they accept your version as Gospel. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot of Cambodia did it successfully in their countries. Mercifully, the Indian Red Brigade had monopoly power only over West Bengal to play out its Faustian fantasies. Just one fact here: more than 20 Enquiry Commissions were set up during the Marxist regime in Bengal
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MaMata Banerjee faces the MonuMental challenge of rescuing Bengal froM the shaMBles
to find out details about unprovoked, unjustified and brutal police firings that killed hundreds and even thousands. Only one was able to submit its report, which must be languishing in some corner of Writers Building in Kolkata. Of course, I havent heard a single word of protest or revulsion from the likes of Arundhati Roy, who is perhaps the only person who has seceded from the Indian Republic even as she feasts on its tragedies and brilliantly uses the tools of globalisation to carp about the destructive and de-humanising effects of globalisation. For her and her ilk, comrades killing innocent and unarmed opponents in cold blood is something implicitly condoned by Class War. Nice to know that comrades have acquired the lexicon of collateral damage. But here is a sobering lesson for all of us even as Mamata Banerjee faces the monumental challenge of rescuing Bengal from the shambles created by bloodthirsty, arrogant and unrepentant Marxists. Let us as citizens condemn the rotten democracy that we have now where criminals commit crimes with impunity b cause they know the even more rotten judicial system is stacked in their favour. But let us as citizens and voters also remember this: Marxists and Fascists are two sides of the same coin. If you hand over power to the fascists, you are in trouble. And if you hand over power to the fascist version of the Marxists, you are in even bigger trouble. I end by remembering Rizwanur Rehman who committed the crime of falling in love with the daughter of an industrialist. His family now knows how deeply concerned the Marxists were about the welfare of Muslims. May his soul rest in peace.

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said, It needs serious introspection. As a former CPM ally, he knows what he is taking. By all reliable accounts, CPM leader Sushanta Ghosh, who was the then minister for development of the Jungle Mahal area, was regarded as strong arm artist and `controversial', but this was in the salad days of the CPM and not open to scrutiny until the party was swept out of power. The skeletons were suitably recovered from the underground of a bushy land at Malikdanga, close to the minister's residence. According to police sources, the remains of those seven skeletons belonged to Trinamool Congress whose activists who were dragged out of a home on September 22, 2002, and murdered in cold blood. But this was 2002, nearly a decade before the party which held sway over most parts of the Bengal, were swept out of office. Police sources now more independent than they have been since the last 34 years say their bodies were transported to Sushanta Ghoshs residence at Benachapra and dug there. Later, the corpses were `exhumed' and shifted to another spot at Malikpara, a little away from Ghoshs house and confined to their muddy graves. With CPM apparatchiks out of the way, the police did what they had not done so far: they lodged an FIR against Sushanta Ghosh and 39 others including the CPM district secretariat member Tarun Roy and district committee member Entaz Ali of Keshpur. Says a Trinamool leader, ``Assume that Sushanta Ghosh, the chief mentor of CPI (M) storm-troopers (or Harmads) in the new political dictionary in Jangal Mahal, especially in Paschim Medinipur district, and the erstwhile minister for Paschimanchal Unnayan (western regional development), is convicted and awarded life imprisonment along with 39 others against whom an FIR has been lodged. Will the CPI(M) general secretary and the politbureau recommend expulsion of Ghosh, AIKS leader Tarun Roy or the belligerent CPI(M) zonal committee secretary Entaz Ali''? Quite unlikely, actually. The killings could actually open up a pandora's box of the CPM's misdeeds during three decades of their rule and expose chapters of their suppression of all those who opposed them by hook or by

Sushanta Ghosh (inset) and his house

the killings could open up a pandora's Box of the cpM's Misdeeds during its three decades of Misrule
crook, more often than not by crook. But the CPM's record of defending its follies falls in a class of its own. Analysts, for instance, remember CPM's dogged and shameful defence of its 44 comrades, convicted of involvement in the murder of half-a- dozen landless agricultural labourers of Suchpur at Nanoor in Birbhum district. The CPM did not think fit to suspend the alleged murders and collaborators in this particular killing. Nearly the same thing happened when two important CPM leaders of Singur, ex-Zonal committee secretary Suhrid Dutta and his accomplice Debu Malik, were found guilty and awarded life term for rape and killing of teenager Tapasi Malik. The State Party leadership euphemistically termed these two as party wealth and vowed to move higher courts. That, however, never materialised. The critical question here is who will be Josef Stalin's Lavrenti Beria, the man who organised the Soviet leader's private and political killings and was the dreaded head of the secret police. Was it Sushanta Ghosh? Clearly, with the advent of new chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her avowedly anti-Left policies, more dirt, which had been so far pushed under the carpet, is likely to see the light of the day. Trinamool members, for instance, are keen to highlight the various little `genocides' that have occurred between 1977 and 2011. Nothing unnatural about that. They have demanded that probes be ordered into unexplained liquidations, beginning with the killings at Marichjhampi in Sunderbans in 1978. When the ghastly Sanibari killings took place in March 1970, CPI(M)s top peasant leader and number one comrade from the Burdwan district Harekrishna Konar said, addressing a mammoth gathering at

t is certain that had the CPM-led Left Front government not been vanquished in the state assembly elections, the truth about the corpses of West Midnapore would never have come to light. On June 4, Madan Santra, a CPM `harmad' or storm trooper and obviously a turncoat, informed anyone who was interested, about the digging of several bodies at the Malikdanga field nearby in the district. More significantly, the bodies were found buried and scattered near the residence of Sushanta Ghosh, a former CPM minister and a well known party strongman's residence. The new glasnost was the trigger for the villagers to re-dig the area of the bushy field and recover parts the bodies, which lay dismembered and mud soaked. While the pro-working class mask of CPI (M) had long been unmasked with Singur and Nandigram, what appeared apparent with these skeletons was the pseudo-democratic character of the socalled left party which stood exposed. While the Stalinist intent of the party which ruled West Bengal for a better part of post-Independence, stood exposed, it marked probably just the beginning of many such exposes to follow.

SKeLeToNS
Says senior pradesh Congress Committee leader and All India Congress Committee (AICC) member Omprakash Mishra, This is just one incident of the utterly Stalinist CPM. This can just be judged as a tip of the iceberg. Since the late seventies, several such incidents have happened where missing people are yet to be traced. A through probe into those incidents can shake the nation.'' Concurs Debasish Dutta, secretariat member of CPIs West Bengal Committee and a Left Front constituent, ``Obviously those are gruesome incidents. Those who are responsible should be identified and then law should take its own course. Avers RSP national secretariat member and former MP Manoj Bhattacharjee
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in the red cupboard

photos : sandipan kar

With the CPM out of power after three turbulent decades, rotting corpses and huge cache of illegal arms show how Stalinist West Bengal had become, reports chandrasekhar bhattacharjee

(Below) Locals display skulls; (Right) A crowd at the site where skeletons were found

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the Brigade Parade Ground I feel proud of what happened at the Burdwan town on 17 March, 1970. Little wonder then that Konars younger brother threatened to strangle the peaceful protesters of Nandigram. We will surround Nandigram from four sides with cadres and make their life hell, he had boasted, without taking into account the public sentiments that have come to haunt the party over four decades later. The CPM's record is something that even the biggest Fascist - whom they abuse - would be proud of: some, 250 custodial deaths; 450 in jail and 800 in police lock-ups; innumerable political assassinations during the 34 years of the Left Front regime and several other acts of suppression, which they dubiously rant about in public. From all neutral accounts, the CPM's hit list does not start with this - neither does it end here. It includes Marichjhanpi in the Sundarbans in 1978 and the mass-burning of Anandamargis at Kolkata in 1982. There is a good chance that such skeletons would continue to tumble out, now that glasnost and perestroika has been irrevocably established at the Writers Building in Kolkata. And a number of them could be from Singur. Massacres at Singur and killings and gang rapes at Nandigram in 2007 moved the conscientious ex-governor of West Bengal Gopalkrishna Gandhi to describe the killing of 14 unarmed villagers at Nandigram on March 14, 2007 ironically the 124th death anniversary of Karl Marx as cold horror. Despite the sage governor's very nuanced criticism, chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, also incharge of the home department, played the role of a mere spectator, the question of tendering an apology wholly out of question. Just how deep did the CPM writ run? Clearly, the latest recoveries in West Midnapore are not the first. On May 18 this year another set of human corpses were recovered from a place close to the CPM party office at Kankabati village in Midnapore. Not surprisingly, this was the place where the CPI (M) vowed to vanquish the Maoists in 2008. Under extreme physical threat, the Maoists were forced to flee. The police is yet to establish the identity of the corpses of Kankabati and speculation abounds about their antecedents were they Maoists or the Trinamool

(Above) CPM Harmad's quarter in Jangal Mahal; (Right) Members of Harmad group Tapan and Sukur Ali; (Far right) Police look at arms found by people from CPM's hideouts in Jangal Mahal

photos : sandipan kar

Congress supporters? Only a police investigation, however, belated, could reveal. In the case of Malikdanga, a relative of a Trinamool Congress activist, has been identified. In an earlier incident, two bodies were recovered, of which one was a police officer and the other a NGO. Though Maoists have denied any role in the killings, the CPM and the state police have continued to blame the banned political outfit. A Maoist spokesman told TSI, The two were kidnapped by CPM and killed as they had some squabbles regarding police activities, but we were blamed. It would be worth recalling here that
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despite all the apologies and good will, the CPM was unable to get its act together when it came to deal with the administration adn the police. With the change in power, people are heaving a sigh of huge relief. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recovery of huge illegal arms from different CPMcontrolled hide-outs in and around Garbeta, Salboni, Keshpur, Midnapore, Kharagpur, (in West Medinipur), Dantan, Patashpur (In East Medinipur), Joipur and Kotulpur (in Bankura) and several places of Arambag region (in Hooghly). Topographically, Garbeta is situated at the centre of this circle.

The supreme commander of CPI (M)s armed gang commonly known as Harmad Vahini widely recognised to be Susanto Ghosh as referred by P C Chidambaram in his letters to ex-CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, controlled the whole brigade from his den. The mastermind is also the main accused of ChhotoAngaria mass killings in 2002 where 11 Trinamool Congress activists were slaughtered at Baktar Mondals house. It comes as great shock to believe that despite all the wrong doings, none either in the local, national global press thought it fit to pursue these rather grave charges Now with a new government in place, those charges could be easily turned into criminal investigations should Mamata Banerjee think it fit to pursue According to insiders, Shukur Ali and ministers brother Tapan Ghosh led that attack. The CBI could not establish charg-

es against the duo as, predictably, all witnesses turned hostile under pressure. Now, after the recent arrest of Dil Mahammad, one of the main accused in Chhoto Angaria case and Baktar Mondals open statements, the CBI with a new government in tow has restarted the investigation. As is typical with such investigations, the agency will have to probe deep down to see who were actually involved. As can be expected, arriving at the scene of the crime several years after the incident has taken place, is a challenge that even the country's premier investigative agency has found difficult to unearth after decades of prevarication. Interestingly, it was the same Tapan Ghosh and Shukur Ali who were arrested on `public demand' while fleeing injured from Nandigram. According to Justice B P Banerjee, former judge of Calcutta high court, the

the stalinist ideal which the cpM cultivated over Many years, is now coMing apart at the seaMs
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CPM has met all criterion to be banned politically. The changed situation also compelled some unwilling associates of Sushanta Ghoshs brigade to admit to the truth and help the villagers, discretion being the better part of valour. Clearly, the Stalinist ideal which the CPM cultivated so carefully over many years, is now coming apart at the seams. Its actual impact is now, just about, beginning to be felt. In the days to come, it could well turn into a crescendo. Also, it would be interesting to see how the Left manages the show. The fact is that after their historic ouster from power, many of their cadres are frustrated and chances are high that in coming days they would take out their anger against the members of the ruling party. All eyes will be on West Bengal and the new government that has come to power after a historic win. Till now the new chief minister Mamata Banerjee has shown maturity in handling the explosive situation. Right now her government is concentrating in providing good governance. At the same time efforts are on to nail the people behind this crime.

photos : rana patra

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CPM excesses out in the open

othing is more illustrative of the manner in which democracy was throttled during the 34 years of CPM rule than the human skeletons found in Garbeta. Those without Communist leanings were victims of the anger of the CPM cadres not only in Garbeta but all across the state including Purulia, West Medinapur and Lal Garh. It is the law of the nature that when oppression breaches the limits of tolerance, those who have put up with it for long years begin to revolt. Had it not been for our democracy, the CPMs reign of terror would have continued for 34 more years. It's the beauty of democracy that it places the ultimate power in the hands of the common man. The electorate of West Bengal has made good use of its electoral rights and saved itself from future massacres by booting out the CPM. People have voted for a clean, transparent government and we will uphold their faith. Other political parties, including the Congress, have repeatedly complained about CPM excesses in the state but the Buddhadeb Bhattacharya led government paid no heed. The government tried to cover up the destroying of the temple of democracy by the party workers. The result was that CPM goons, brandishing ultra modern weapons, were secure in the folds of the district administration and police machinery.

Had the voters not booted out the Left government in West Bengal, it would have continued with its undemocratic ways and reign of terror

Manas Ranjan Bhuiyan

MLA and president WBPCC

When the state government did not pay heed to our complaints, we sent a written protest to the Centre. Along with Mamata Banerjee we met the Prime Minister and the Home Minister and demanded the Centre's intervention. While the Centre did step in, no real changes could be made for CPM hoodlums continued to enjoy the patronage of the district administration and the police. The government was committed to protecting its cadres while democracy was repeatedly assaulted. Parties which reposed faith in democracy were denied state protection. With the formation of the state government under Mamata Banerjee, we have taken the initiative to investigate the atrocities of the CPM cadres. When the human skeletons in Garbeta surfaced, the government ordered a fresh investigation into all such cases in the state. The chief minister has expressly ordered that transparency and impartiality be maintained in all such investigations. It is noteworthy that when CID reached Garbeta to investigate the case, the local police did not cooperate. But after the CMs stern warnings, the hopes of the affected families of Garbeta have revived that justice will be done. The Centre has also promised all possible help in the matter and has ordered DNA tests on the remains to begin with. Our priority is to bring the guilty to justice, no matter how highly placed or influential they are. In two important stock taking meetings, the chief minister reiterated her commitment to a transparent government pledged to the rule of law and the highest democratic ideals. The government will take all the steps to restore peoples belief in democracy. We know that this is a huge challenge. But we will try our best to fulfill all the promises that we had made to the voters during the highly charged assembly elections. People of West Bengal voted us as they were fed up with the misrule of the Communists. They have entrusted us a huge task to clean up the rotten system that was left by the Communists. Our pledge is that we will not let our voters down at any cost.
(As told to Pramod Kumar)

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