Rejoinder to Yogendra Yadav

[Letter to the editor of 'Indian Express' by B. Prasant]

In his haste to malign the Bengal unit of the CPI (M) in his column ('Party Games', IE, March 21), Yogendra Yadav has his facts off beam and his arguments wrong, and he would not allow the big picture to hinder his effete anti-Communist sniping.  A few pointers can be cited in defence of our position on some of the issues Yadav has chosen to focus on.

His delineation of Alipurduar, which is in Jalpaiguri district, as the 'headquarters of Coochbehar district' is as incorrect as his formulation and description of the 'Gandhian' movements that demand 'regional autonomy.'  A look at history would not harm Yadav's lack of knowledge about it.  Once the sweep of the land movements and struggles of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s leading to land concentrations of the landlords and the rich kisans (or jotdars) being redistributed among the rural poor had left the Congress in north Bengal as elsewhere, without a viable political base, the superior landed elements started to form various platforms that basically aimed at subverting the land movement and building up a violent opposition to the Bengal Left Front government that came to office in 1977.

The Hitasadhani, the UTJAS and their progenies, the Kamtapuri Liberation organisation (KLO) and the Kamtapuri People's Party (KPP), and the latest in line, the Greater Coochbehar movement (GCM), all of them talked in terms of not just regional autonomy but separatism.  In calling these outfits counter-democratic and separatist, the LF government was merely adhering to facts.

VIOLENCE

All three of the latter outfits would go on to indulge in great violence including killing of several dozens of CPI (M) leaders while having electoral and political tie-ups with the rightist Trinamul Congress and the Pradesh Congress.  Acts of commission of the separatist elements also include killing of two police officers including a woman officer, and these are the outfits that Yadav is bent on glorifying.  The rally of 'fifty thousands' that Yadav speaks about exists in his imagination for one has no evidence of any kind of any rally having taken place as claimed.

In spilling his ire about Nandigram, Yadav would shudder at the police firing but would not dare mention the rural people who were hacked to death and blown away by bomb blasts simply because they had refused to toe the anti-LF government line of the Trinamul Congress, the SUCI, religious fundamentalists of both persuasions, and the Naxalites there.  Yadav would not talk about the way more than 2000 families were forced to quit their hearth-and-home and make for relief camps, again by the right-left combination of the Trinamul Congress and the Naxalites aided and abetted by the Congress and the BJP.

Importantly, Yadav would not dare mention that following the spread of a malicious rumour of 'land acquisition,' the entire Nandigram area was cut off from the realm of administration at the behest of the armed cadres of the Trinamul Congress, the Naxalites, the SUCI, and the religious fundamentalists.: roads were dug up, bridges were smashed, and culverts were destroyed, leading to extreme hardship of the local people at least five of whom died when ambulances were not able to enter the locality.

POLITICAL IMPASSE: AT WHOSE BEHEST?

The aim of the right-left conglomerate was clearly to defy the LF government and refuse to let the writ of the land run at Nandigram.  This happened even after the chief minister of Bengal had declared that no industries centre would come up at Nandigram if the people there did not want it.  Yadav would also shy away from the fact that political imbroglio had been escalated by the fact that none of the opposition worthies would attend the all-party meetings called in succession in settlement of the Nandigram issue.

In shedding tears for the plight of the dalits in Bengal, Yadav is not aware of the fact that with the redistributive land reforms in place, Bengal under LF government has seen rural poor in control and ownership of 78% of the agricultural land, and dalits form an important component of the rural scenario.  The CPI (M) and the Left Front garner the overwhelming majority of the dalit votes during elections over the past three decades.  Moreover, Yadav would be critical of the CPI (M) for having demanded the implementation of the Sachar Committee report as if that was an act of commission.