Abhijit Majumdar
It was late afternoon on 2 May, 2021. TMC’s lead in the Assembly elections was widening. Ladies and gents from Bengal’s urban intellectual class, the refined bhadrolok and bhadromohila, were getting their smoky malts and tannic Bordeaux out early to celebrate the triumph of “secular, liberal values” over “uncouth Hindutva”.
In Sagrai village of East Bardhaman, however, Krishna Murmu – a 29-year-old woman from the Santal tribe – felt something dark was about to descend on their lives.
About 40 local TMC men had started pulling down and burning BJP flags. They then tore down the neighbourhood Ram Mandir and a 7-feet statue of Lord Ram. Her husband’s hard-earned shop was taken over and turned into a TMC office within minutes.
Next day, they came back with a DJ playing TMC’s signature ‘Khela Hobe’ (Let’s Play) song. A crude bomb explodes at the Murmu household’s doorstep. Goons enter the house, ransack it and leave.
Next day, Krishna’s husband is asked to come, fall on his knees, and apologise to every local TMC man. Or else, the desperately poor tribal family’s ration card would be snatched. He acquiesced, repeatedly going through the full humiliation.
On 17 May, he was summoned again.
“By 6 pm when he did not return, I was worried and terrified. I came outside the house and stood at the gate waiting for him,” Krishna Murmu said in her official complaint and in her account to the women representatives of the Group of Intellectuals and Academicians (GIA) fact-finding team.
“A few moments later, Shubendu Deb of TMC came there. He was drunk and he started abusing me: ‘Khanki maagi, beshya (whore, slut).’ Then he started physically assaulting me,” she narrated. “He pulled my sari, tore my sari and my blouse, and molested me brutally. I started shouting for help. Neighbours came to my rescue.”
As TMC completes one year of savage celebrations of its Assembly elections victory, what lingers like a rusty fish hook in the eye are the screams of women, Dalits, tribals, other backward castes, and the poorest in society.
Debolina Ghosh, 30, lost an eye trying to stop TMC goons from pulling her out by her clothes in Howrah. Her fault: her husband worked for the BJP.
The mother of Nabanita Nandy (name changed) was asked to produce her for 20-30 Muslim men with swords and rods in West Medinipur so they could rape her. Her sin: she is an ABVP member.
In Diamond Harbour, Mamata Banerjee’s powerful nephew Abhishek Banerjee’s Lok Sabha constituency, Dalit man Manomoy Naskar’s family, including his old mother, are beaten up with rods for taking Lord Ram’s name and having a saffron flag at home. The local imam, he complained, threatened to rape his 27-year-old sister.
Rita Mondal of Gosaba and Amrita Das of Domjur, scheduled caste women from two districts, TMC mobs allegedly assaulted them with the same threat: “We will have you stripped and raped by Muslims.”
Dalit from Nanoor Soma Meta (name changed), 26, was threatened with rape, her husband beaten to an inch of death, their house destroyed, small piece of land grabbed, and the last two goats robbed. Her fault: she was BJP’s polling agent.
The list goes on. Of the 11,782 cases of violence compiled by the BJP on 9 June, 2021, nearly half or 5,599 are Dalits, tribals and OBCs.
The Calcutta High Court has granted police protection to the 303 alleged victims whose cases it is hearing. It is an unprecedented number of ordinary citizens given cop cover for a single chain of violent events.
“[Of them] 47 were unable to go back to their workplaces, 92 had their houses demolished and 164 of them were forcibly evicted from their houses and were therefore unable to go back to their places of residence,” petitioner Priyanka Tibrewal had told the court this March.
According to GIA: “Women have been singled out for most horrific terror and intimidation. Our data reveals many incidents of grievous bodily harm, threat of rape, stripping and sexual violence. The streets were sites of dehumanisation of women of all ages. The horror is compounded by most of the victims being from marginal SC-ST communities or from Below Poverty Line and extremely fragile economic sections in West Bengal.”
A fact-finding committee named Call For Justice, after speaking to victims, observed that there was a mafia raj in many areas of the state, nurtured and protected by the ruling party. There are goons with dozens of rape, murder and arson cases pending against them.
“The police are fully aware but no one dares to touch these hardcore criminals because of blatant political patronage,” its report said. “The targeting of people from SC and ST, women, children and other vulnerable sections of society reflects the deep-rooted malaise in the system.”
The national commissions for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes have issued damning statements too, and said that when the victims had approached the police to file complaints, they were attacked and their houses robbed
Many Dalits and tribals ran away from their homes to Assam out of fear. Many from the Matua Scheduled Caste community found shelter at camps.
“We met one of the priests from Matua Mahasangha and heard the details of heartbreaking incidents,” the Call For Justice report states.
The onslaught on the most underprivileged in Bengal is relentless. From BJP worker from Purulia Trilochan Mahato being killed IS-style and hung from a tree to the murder of Pradeep Mondal and three other Dalits in Sandeshkhali, there is a pattern to the massacre.
Nobody is safe in Bengal’s swamp of blood, and as is the rule in jungles, the most vulnerable are the easiest prey.
In the last 365 days, none of Bengal’s ‘intellectually bent’ celebrities who wrote their priggish columns and made protest videos against the Citizenship Amendment Act uttered a word against the post-election massacre. They understand the consequences of taking on a marauding TMC and its Islamist packs. The Bengali bhadrolok and bhadromohila know what might put their life and limb in danger. Their cosy revolutions seldom cross that thick, red line.
