Bibhuti Bhushan Sarkar was born in Bankura in 1890. He organised a revolutionary secret centre in a forest area of Chendapathar village.
| "Publication: The Times Of India Kolkata; | Date: Feb 17, 2010; | Section: Times City; | Page: 3 |
Prairie fire in parched Jangalmahal
Red rebels tapped into years of neglect and deceit
Saugata Roy | TNN Kolkata: Ask someone to point out Jharkhand on India’s map, it’s easy. But ask where Jangalkhand is, one would be left searching an for answer. And that’s exactly the way it has been — neglected and ignored for decades, this tribal belt has now become Bengal’s most treacherous terrain where Maoists are locked in a war with security forces.
Large stretches of West Midnapore, Bankura, and Purulia — that constitute Jangalmahal — have a schizoid character. Towns like Jhargram, Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia show pockets of prosperity, but outside the towns, the densely forested countryside has provided ideal cover for guerrilla warfare since the British period.
Revolutionary Khudiram Bose had gone underground in these forests a century ago. A plaque at sleepy Chendapathar, a village in Bankura, bears testimony to those tumultuous days. In the Sixties, the Naxalbari movement spread to neighbouring Debra and Gopiballabhpur in West Midnapore. A stone’s throw away are Bankura’s Barikul and Belpahari, Bhulabheda, Lalgarh, Laljal in neighbouring West Midnapore bordering Jharkhand. This is the present theatre of the war between the Maoists and the state.
The Maoist attack on the EFR camp at Silda is just a fresh chapter in the saga of bloodshed being written in this belt since 2000. Maoist military strategist Koteswar Rao alias Kishanji calls it “Operation Peace Hunt” while CPM’s West Bengal state secretary Biman Bose sees it as “a war against democracy”.
The tribals, on the other hand, seem caught in the crossfire. For them, it is a story of chronic underdevelopment and lopsided priorities. Of neglect and deceit. Of misplaced culture and party hegemony that prompted the tribals to invite the Bon Party — the name by which locals call the Maoists — who came from Jharkhand and are now getting on their nerves.
The problem is that the ruling Marxists — largely alienated from the tribal Sabar, Lodha and Kheria families — mistook this brewing discontent as a simple law-and-order problem spread over eight to 10 police station areas. So much so that the CPM minister from West Midnapore Susanta Ghosh didn’t mind joining hands with the Maoists to fight the Trinamool-BJP brigade in Keshpur in 2000. They thought that they could easily crush the deeper shade of Red once they captured Keshpur.
That was a blunder for which hundreds of CPM activists had to pay with their lives in recent times. Since then, the CPM has been engaged in a gory power game with the Trinamool Congress in Keshpur, Garbeta, Chhoto Angaria, Suchpur, Nanoor and other areas spread over five districts in south Bengal — West Midnapore, Bankura, Purulia, Hooghly and Birbhum. West Bengal assembly proceedings bear testimony to this undeclared war between two mainstream parties, even if one leaves aside the Maoists.
Trinamool committed this same mistake to uproot the CPM. They pampered the Maoists in Jangalmahal and Nandigram, giving them the elbow room to expand and consolidate bases. Now the Maoist challenge has come closer home. The entire Midnapore town is under threat and Jhargram — once a tourist spot — is under siege, despite the presence of central forces.
With the joint operation against Maoists on the cards, and chief ministers of neighbouring Jharkhand and Bihar — Sibu Soren and Nitish Kumar — yet to break their studied silence on the Maoists, Kishanji has made this Jangalmahal in Bengal his prime target. Kishanji has also been putting pressure on railway minister Mamata Banerjee to stall the joint operations. For, the trees have shed their leaves in the forest belt and the hit-and-run strategy does not work in this season. Maoists, it seems, planned the Silda strike out of desperation, to send out signals to the state how deadly things could be in the days to come.
The question is how long would the tribals bear with the red rage? The truth is, state neglect has left deep scars on their minds. Till the “development” funds started flowing in recently, not a soul from the government had come to these farflung hamlets for years. The starvation death in Amlasole is recent history. CPM panchayat member Kailash Mura was the first to raise his voice over this. A tribal himself, Mura complained that a person from the Sabar community had died of starvation. CPM’s district satraps wasted no time in silencing him, as though hunger death in Left-ruled Bengal was a crime to admit. Later, when the babus reached out to the hamlets to put it on the development map, it was too late. The alienated tribals, had by then embraced the Bon Party. CPM leaders, including state secretariat member Dipak Sarkar, and party secretary Biman Bose can hardly recall when they last visited Amlasole after 2000.
Kishanji, who has been doing the rounds in the villages since 1996, as he claims, made full use of this political vacuum at the grassroots while the ruling CPM stayed happy with its huge margin in the 2001 assembly elections in Binpur in West Midnapore (47,132), Bandwan in Purulia (48,299) and Ranibandh in Bankura (54,186). He annihilated the CPM cadres in the areas systematically and slowly wiped out the local intelligence system that the police used during targeted operations. The police then set up new schools and engaged tribals as teachers to gather information about Maoists. It did not work for long. For the teacher-cuminformers faced the red wrath and gradually gave up their jobs or were killed, even as the village panchayats remained with the Jharkhand Party or CPM. Even the villages close by the state highway, seven kilometres from Midnapore town, where Maoists led the ambush on CM’s motorcade in 2009, had CPI pradhans uncontested for three decades since the Left Front came to power in 1977.
The Maoist sway in the forest villages has had a reverse impact on the residents of Silda, Kakon, Aguiboni, Nepurhat and Belatikri in West Midnapore. Here, the CPM has made dents among the relatively well-off, who sided with the government. CPM also relocated its organizers in these areas and was trying to make inroads in the tribal belt afresh. Maoists struck Salboni to hit the state and its rulers where it pains the most. Their plan is to set up a Red Corridor across Andhra, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Bengal — that is under threat because of the joint action being proposed by the Union home ministry."
This was the place where Khudiram took his lesson in revolutionary activities. When Khudiram was arrested in connection with the assassination of King's Ford and the police commissioner Tegart marched in the area, Bibhuti Bhushan was arrested and deported to Andaman.
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