 How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer, for once, is not blowing in the wind. This bout of pessimism stems from a figure close to 300 – the number of political killings in West Bengal since parliamentary elections were held this year. The last cases reported were from Khanakul in Hoogly district and Sashan in North 24 Parganas.
In fresh clashes in Nanoor in Birbhum district on November 3, where armed cadres of CPI(M) clashed with villagers in their bid to seize lost political control, scores of houses have been torched and at least 22 persons grievously injured. On November 4, while this magazine was going to the press, there were reports of fresh violence from Arambagh area of Hoogly.
This culture of violence that has engulfed the state is unfortunately the contribution of the largest constituent of the Left Front state government, the CPI(M). Used to overarching hegemony for close to 32 years, during which the CPI(M) penetrated nearly every professional class and every sphere of people’s lives, the party simply can’t come to terms with the electoral reverses in this year’s polls. And like in the case of Singur and Nandigram, armed cadres are busy doling out retributive ‘justice’ to people who did not vote for the party. If the bullets of Nandigram had their effect on the Lok Sabha ballot boxes, the forecast for the 2011 Assembly elections is abundantly clear. The party, for the first time, is afraid of political disappearance from the state. The irony is that by sticking to desperate use of brute force, it is making a reappearance bid all the more difficult. The party satraps at AK Gopalan Bhavan may dabble in dialectics to substantiate the Marxist-Leninist character of the party but the cadres have taken to Mao. In the villages of West Bengal, CPI(M)’s ‘power comes from the barrel of the gun’.
For 32 years, the party had reaped benefits from politicising the state administrative apparatus down to the village level. But now, things have turned turtle. The administration is slipping wherever the party is losing ground. This has made the Maoists’ task easier. The CPI(M) party workers in Junglemahal (Bengal-Jharkhand-Orissa border) are today scared to carry out political activity. Resultantly, the administration has ceased to exist except in certain pockets.
Effectively, the region north of Siliguri town, i.e the Darjeeling Hills is not governed by the state government. The Gorkha Janamukti Morcha controls nearly all aspects of political
governance there.
The most dangerous moment of an arbitrary system arrives when it tries to reform itself. And when it even fails to acknowledge the need for reforms and, instead, forces itself upon people, it withers away. West Bengal is a classic example in point - the State-less state of the State of India. Karl Marx had laid down the philosophical principles for withering away of the state. Marxists in Bengal have realised it in practice.
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