POLITICS OF VIOLENCE: While CPI(M) posters decry the killing of Ajit Ghosh, a party worker in Midnapore, the suicide of Avijit Sinha, who was arrested on suspicion of Naxalite links, led to an uproar in Kolkata and left his family devastated

"The Trinamool cadre has tied up with the Telengana criminals." Dipak Sarkar, CPI(M) Midnapore district secretary

If there was an establishment that deserved to be called "Left", there would have been none more worthy in the past two decades than the CPI(M). Suddenly, however, there is a chorus of voice damning the CPI(M) for being rightist. And those leading the dissent-leaders and activists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People's War, PW in short-are being hounded by the West Bengal Police not only in their area of operation in the state's south-west forests, but also in their hideouts in and around Kolkata.

The official opposition party, Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress, was happily observing the the Red vs Red fight from the sidelines, till last week when it took up the cause of Avijit Sinha. The Customs officer apparently jumped into the path of a speeding train after being picked up by the police for suspected links with PW leaders. Opposition members of the Trinamool, Congress and the SUCI, staged a walk-out in the Assembly demanding a
judicial inquiry.

Caught on the backfoot, leaders of the CPI(M) admitted that the only "evidence" against Sinha was a vague entry in the diary of Parthasarathi Bannerjee, alias Manik, former PW West Bengal secretary, who is now in police custody. Sinha's relatives say that he was picked up by the police on July 9 and returned home the next morning after a night of physical and mental torture.

Prior to Sinha's singularly ill-conceived arrest, police officers of West Midnapore district, bordering Jharkhand and Orissa and most affected by the Naxalite menace, had picked up half a dozen PW leaders from Kolkata and its neighbourhood. The PW activists retaliated last week when they ambushed Ajit Ghosh, a CPI(M) worker at Goaltore, 50 km from Midnapore. Ghosh, a primary schoolteacher, was the eighth CPI(M) activist to be killed by the PW since last year's assembly elections. "The CPI(M) workers hold meetings during the day, but the Naxalites rule the roads at night," says a resident of Salboni, a town that witnessed three PW killings in recent months.

Inspector-General of Police (West) Jitram Bhagat, who heads the anti-Naxalite operations, says they have rounded up 300 PW men since last year. However, Naxal sympathisers in Kolkata say that those arrested from the city are "many layers removed" from the leaders and the "action squad".

The Kolkata raids took the Naxalites by surprise. Manik's arrest raised many eyebrows as he had recently resigned from the primary membership of the PW. His resignation letter, which has been circulating in the party and the pro-Naxalite circles, criticises the PW's Andhra Pradesh-based leadership for its refusal to give up the policy of individual killings and accept mass movements as an integral part of Marxist struggle.

Santosh Rana, a frontline Naxalite of the late 1960s who now heads the Provisional Central Committee, an extremist-turned-parliamentary group, says, "Manik had just started a bitter battle within the faith for reform in PW, the biggest Naxalite group, when the Left Front Government unleashed its hounds on him and his comrades. What message is Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya sending? Does he want to discourage Naxalites from giving up the path of terrorism?"

Manik's supporters caught in the dragnet include Kaushik Ganguly, a chemistry lecturer of Calcutta University with an MTech degree from IIT Kharagpur; Tinku Ghosh, reportedly a member of PW's Kolkata district committee; Sudip Chongdar, the Midnapore unit secretary; and Parashar Bhattacharya, a member from Uttarpara on Kolkata's outskirts. Barring Chongdar, all are educated urban youth, a class that has turned away from radical left philosophy since the movement's collapse in the 1970s.

The Manik group is opposed to the PW hierarchy in Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, headed by Ganapathy, the mysterious People's War Group general secretary. The ranks that are active in the poverty-stricken Midnapore and Bankura districts are led by someone code-named "Somen". While the mass movement supporters are trying to organise farm labourers and tribals to seek economic concessions from the state Government, the Andhra loyalists are spearheading annihilation squads in their fight against the establishment. "The two groups are at loggerheads," explains Rana, underlining the recent polarisation.

CPI(M) Midnapore District Secretary Dipak Sarkar brushes aside suggestions that his Government was targeting the wrong Naxalites. "All of them preach violence," he says, echoing the chief minister's view that the state would not tolerate "the politics of guns".

Sarkar, however, adds a new twist. He says the violence in the area is "the handiwork of Trinamool agents who have established ties with the Telengana criminals". In support of his charge, Sarkar produces a letter intercepted by the police, written by someone who signed his name as "D" to a Naxalite leader, seeking joint actions against the CPI(M). The "D", he believes, is Rajani Dolui, the Trinamool candidate for the Keshpur constituency in the 2001 assembly elections. PW correspondence reproduced in CPI(M) publications refers to a Naxalite team sent to meet Dolui.

This suspicion has posed a serious political problem for the CPI(M)-led Government. During the assembly elections, the party unleashed its cadre and the police to rid Midnapore of Trinamool supporters and 19 of the 21 constituencies there voted for the Left Front. The election was entirely one-sided, with a few hundred booths in the district recording less than 10 votes for the Opposition out of the 500-odd votes polled. The Trinamool was muscled out because it had no answer to CPI(M) terror tactics. A rapport with the PW could be a quantum leap in the Opposition's ability to match the CPI(M) activists-bullet for bullet in next year's panchayat elections, the building blocks of CPI(M) support base.

The CPI(M)'s infatuation with the idea of a draconian state-with Bhattacharya's advocacy of a POTA-type legislation in the state-could be the outcome of a fear that in the future the Opposition may have a lot more teeth than at present.