It is hard to decide
which is more unappetising — the spectacle of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee
declaring that the CPI(M) had paid those against the West Bengal’s
industrialisation programme in Nandigram “back in their own coin”, or
the BJP and the Congress condemning the violence there while ignoring
their own culpability for similar behaviour in Gujarat and Chhattisgarh
respectively. The use of vigilante groups or armed cadres, supported
and sanctioned by a pliant bureaucracy, to physically defeat an
opposing group, rather than relying on legal means and political
discussions, is evidently the latest fashion in governance. It is time,
we are told, to forget the old expectation that it is the police that
is meant to maintain law and order and not gangs of party members.
What happened in Nandigram at the behest of the West Bengal Chief
Minister is not very different from the Salwa Judum — ‘peace mission’ —
being run jointly by the Congress MLA of Dantewada, Mahendra Karma, and
the BJP government of Chhattisgarh. Here armed vigilantes, some of them
given official positions as special police officers (SPOs), burn
villages, kill people and rape women with impunity on the grounds that
they are wresting these areas back from the Naxalites. Officials take
orders from party goons. In Dantewada district, a letter from the Chief
Secretary carries less weight than the orders of a lumpen Salwa Judum
camp leader.
In both cases, the presence of Maoists is used to imply that anything
goes; that once an area is declared ‘Naxal affected’, all the normal
protections of the rule of law and fundamental rights cease to apply.
Government presence in these areas then depends solely on the power of
the gun, and the relative superiority of its police and vigilantes over
the ‘other side’ that include unarmed civilians.
Yet, the differences between Nandigram and Dantewada are also striking.
Even though the scale of Salwa Judum terror is far greater than that
being witnessed in Nandigram, it has gone almost entirely unreported.
According to the figures provided in a public interest litigation
before the Supreme Court, at least 540 persons have been killed by the
Salwa Judum and security forces since June 2005, including 33 children
and 45 women. This is a small fraction of the killings by the Salwa
Judum, most of which have gone unrecorded, and does not include the
approximately 550 civilians and police personnel that the Naxalites
have killed in escalating retaliatory action for Salwa Judum. At least
2,825 houses have been burnt by the Salwa Judum and at least 99 women
have been raped. Approximately, one lakh people — one-eighth the
district’s population — has been displaced. Half of them are in
government-controlled camps to which they were forcibly evacuated, and
the other half are refugees in neighbouring states.
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