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If ever there was any doubt that Naxalites, Maoists and the like were behind the snowballing of the Singur issue and later the Nandigram problem, it has been blown away by the murder of a local CPI(M) leader in West Midnapur district of West Bengal on Tuesday.

The point is simple. Whoever masterminded and executed the plan leading to the murder of the CPI(M) functionary at Belpahari in West Midnapur is well aware of the larger picture involving land-acquisition problems at Singur in Hooghly district and Nandigram and Sonachura in East Midnapur district. And the clear objective is to spread terror among the people and deliver one more slap in the face of the State administration, in fact killing perhaps four birds with one stone.

These are: proclaiming to the world at large that extremists are today a force to reckon with at the regional level, letting the security forces know that extremists can strike at will, showing up the former's limitations, impressing on the poor peasant and farmer in the rural areas the power the extremists wield, and providing encouragement to existing cadre through the implicit message that the current "struggle" will bear fruit at some time or the other.

In fact, the current phase of agitational politics by the extremists is unusually active, principally because of the bungling of the entire anti-land acquisition campaign by the Trinamul and the Congress in West Bengal. In short, what has been happening behind the scenes is that the extremists have taken recourse to the time-tested method of momentarily bursting on to the scene by riding piggy-back on some emotive agitation or the other engineered by mainstream political parties, and then getting into the hot-seat for a short span of time.

The Singur phase of the ongoing campaign against land-acquisition provided an opportunity for the extremists to resurface at the State-level in a big way, the objective all along being to take over the campaign at some point of time and give it their own stamp. The one bit of clear evidence that instructions had been issued to create the utmost confusion was provided by the isolated incident of the attack on a Tata Motors showroom in Kolkata which, curiously, was not replicated, probably because the perpetrators of the deed were caught red-handed on camera.

The planning for Nandigram had already begun, which is why, when Mr Lakhan Sett of the CPI(M) committed his faux pas, the place was transformed into a fortress in no time, with extraordinary defensive measures being taken to prevent the police from entering the area.

It will be no surprise if it ultimately transpires that the violence at nearby Sonachura was triggered by incidents behind which "outsiders" were involved. The huge arms cache discovered in the area is yet another bit of evidence that an extremely organised force is behind the recent incidents of violence in the region.

The big question is: what have the Intelligence people been doing all this while? Clearly, some heads will have to roll before the situation improves — and it has to if Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is to be given a fair chance to improve the lot of the people of West Bengal in the long run through his industrialisation drive.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

More Stories on : Politics | Infrastructure | West Bengal | View Point

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